Seedcamp: Euro Version of Y Combinator
Europe's burgeoning startup culture just got another boost, with the launch of Seedcamp - a project to support Europe's young entrepreneurs, by giving them funding and contacts. It's very similar to Silicon Valley's Y Combinator, the Paul Graham-led investment fund that specializes in early stage startups. We profiled Graham and Y Combinator in December last year.
Seedcamp was created by Saul Klein from Index Ventures and Reshma Sohoni from 3i. The project is being run out of London. To participate in Seedcamp, entrepreneurs have until August 5 to submit an application through the Seedcamp website. The top 20 teams will then be selected and invited to London for "a week of intensive mentoring and networking" with industry experts in fields like HR, law, marketing, product development, etc. At the end of that week (Sept 3-7), the top 5 teams will be announced and they’ll receive $50,000 euros in funding and an additional 3 months of mentorship.
As Saul wrote in a post on the Seedcamp blog, "we have no more excuses in Europe not to create big, world-beating businesses". I also liked Sumon Sadhu's comment in another post that "geographic separation leads to original insight, lack of group-think and an international outlook." I couldn't agree more :-) So if you're in Europe and have an idea for The Next Big Thing in web technology, go check out Seedcamp.
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It's a great moment for European startups. Finally something is happening, as we are doing many efforts to nurture a blogosphere that can support such big changes in the European entrepreneurial world. There are many creative people in Europe and I am sure that events such as Seedcamp will be of great help.
If there's anyone out there who wants to enter this with me, please get in touch asap!
Ok. I hereby need to start promoting OutCubator.
We incubate in a slightly different way. Let's say you got the seed funding from SeedCamp or YCombinator.... what you need next is reliable, growable resources for your startup, and a good v1.0. That's when you can come to OutCubator and use our resources to get your product built for a negotiated amount of equity + fees. It's not oursourcing, as you don't lose control in our model, it's not offshoring, as there are no borders anymore. We are all one big wide world :) We're in Silicon Valley and Europe.
Intruders.tv has posted the video of the original Seedcamp announcement
Richard, great to point out that quote about how geographic separation can lead to original insight. Me-too-ism definitely runs rampant in the Valley, and insider thinking often gets in the way of understanding real markets -- as in this quote we heard at Web 2.0 Expo, which I love, by VC Josh Koppelman: "We are not a market." (Referring, of course, to tech insiders.)
And that's not even to speak of other problems in the Valley -- shortages of developers and engineers (and the common result of that: musical chairs), the humongous cost of living and the traffic, blah blah blah. All things that can and do give other geographies real advantages. (I know: many big Valley firms are actively recruiting here in Minnesota, but few will give up the lifestyle here.)
Nonetheless, all that seems to go out the window when the vaunted Valley "infrastructure" is brought up, and the vast majority of startup funding continually gets invested there. Maybe new initiatives like Seed Camp, and others that have recently been launched, such as Techstars in Colorado, will start to show that infrastructure can and does indeed exist in locales that aren't within an hour's drive of the Bay Bridge.