A who’s who of European technology entrepreneurs will be providing guidance and mentoring to a new generation of start-ups at this year’s Seedcamp. Founded by Saul Klein of Index Ventures and run by Reshma Sohoni, formerly of 3i and Softbank Capital, Seedcamp aims to build and support a community of European tech entrepreneurs, culminating in its main event in London this September.
The best-known entrepreneurs on this year’s advisor list are Niklas Zennstrom, founder of Skype, the internet telephony service, and more recently Joost, a web video provider; and Brent Hoberman of travel site Lastminute.com and, latterly, Mydeco, an online furniture retailer.
The rest of the advisors are all big names on the European start-up scene too, as founders of many of Europe’s largest recent tech exits. They are: Michael Birch of social networking site Bebo and Kevin Cornils of online marketing provider Buy.at, both bought by AOL earlier this year; Martin Stiksel of Last.fm, an online community of music fans for which CBS paid $280m in May 2007; Marten Mickos, chief executive of open-source database provider MySQL, sold to Sun Microsystems for around $1bn in January; and Jyri Engestrom of Jaiku and Tommy Ahlers of Zyb, mobile application firms acquired by Google and Vodafone respectively.
Alongside UK entrepreneurs who have yet to flip their companies for millions of dollars, and representatives from the big US tech companies who’ve been writing the cheques, this group will bring contacts, business advice and generally help start-ups at the week-long conference to “think big and aim high”.
Since May, Ms Sohoni has travelled led mini-Seedcamp events in Paris, Berlin and Kiev. But in spite of increasing numbers of new tech companies springing up in eastern Europe, she says London remains the main event. “We see the UK and London as a critical hub for start-up activities,” she says, especially for European companies with global ambitions.
Common technological themes among the entrepreneurs presenting across Europe so far include online and mobile gaming, personal finance applications, open source and variations on the “semantic web” – “the idea of using natural language to bring intelligence out of the information that’s out there”, according to Ms Sohoni.
But for those teams still applying to one of the 20 places at Seedcamp, she notes a preference of investors for business models based on transactional payments rather than advertising. “Everybody likes to put [advertising] up on their slide as a business model,” she said. “We were careful about that last year but are even more so now.”
Ms Sohoni also warns that almost half of last year’s applications came from social networking sites – none of which received investment.
“We are looking for globally applicable businesses that can grow beyond their local languages,” she says.
Seedcamp Week runs from September 15 to 19. The deadline for entries is August 10. The Financial Times is a media partner at the event.
