STHLM Tech Meetup with Index Ventures
THE Sthlm Tech Meetup is meeting up again, and more than four hundred million people are here on this cozy Tuesday evening at the Hilton in Slussen, Stockholm. Ben Holmes from Index Ventures is our guest tonight. Index Ventures are a Europe & US-based VC firm who invest mostly in IT and life sciences companies, like Facebook, iZettle, King, Mysql, Nastygal, Playfish, Rebtel, Secret, Skype, Sonos, Soundcloud, Squarespace, Stack Exchange, Stardoll, and Supercell….to name but a few. It’s no wonder they’re so interested in Stockholm. The full list of companies is on their site.
There are so many events we should host an event just to announce all the events. An event event.
Events, events, events. There are so many events we should host an event just to announce all the events. An event event. There’s a diversity-driven “50/50″ hackathon by Spotify, the Uppstart meeting in Uppsala by Jason Dainter, a WebOS hackathon for TVs by LG Electronics, a hackathon by Nordea/IBM, the Stockholm Startup Weekend powered by Mei Wen and Google for Entrepreneurs, and some random guy stands up to announce that his startup is hiring; startup guerilla HR tactics at their best.
Tyler announces a co-host! How awesome. It’s Tuva Palm, Head of Project Management at Klarna. She’s got over 15 years experience in the IT industry, and so far she has one day of experience being a TechMeetup host. Looking forward to hearing Tuva’s insights into the world of startups, also it’s great that we finally have someone to interrupt Tyler on our behalf. Yay.
It’s great that we finally have someone to interrupt Tyler on our behalf.
Tyler recaps the news, in true town-crier fashion. And wow is there a lot going on. My top three favorites include, Videoplaza’s amazing 500 milion kronor exit to Telstra subsidiary Ooyala, Codarica’s stint at the Disney Accelerator and their app Codequest’s mention on NBC news, and Instabridge’s magnificent trending on reddit.com’s /r/android subreddit. It’s not their first time trending on reddit either. As a rule of thumb, your life is meaningless until whatever it is you’re doing is trending on reddit.
It’s pitching time! Tyler dons his invisible boxing gloves as SecureMailbox takes a minute to set their laptop up for the pitch. It’s a straightforward secure mailbox thing. The video is dated and the pitch doesn’t do it justice, but the product has great potential. It’s got some neat features. Not sure if it’s easily appendable to other email platforms, not sure about the revenue model, not sure if I would recommend this to political activists or people in political hotspots where governments don’t care much about any laws and regulations. Not sure. Definitely one to keep an eye on though.
SecureMailbox gets a crash course in pitching from Tyler, who is very generous with his advice this evening. Folks, pro-tip: if we don’t see the product within 60 seconds, you’ve already lost us. If you don’t show us the problem you’re solving and how you’re solving it within 60 seconds, you’ve already lost us. Just show us the thing and shut us up and take our money! It’s a simple formula: 1. problem 2. solution 3. your product. Do it.
It’s a simple formula: 1. problem 2. solution 3. your product. Do it.
Leeluu out of Helsinki up next with their little fluffly squishy toys that vaccinates your kids’ bedrooms against monsters. For children ages 3-12. Leeluu lights up when you squeeze it, and that’s a good thing, because it looks very very squeezable. Caress the Leeluu softly and its light will dim; so pacific and soothing and fluffy. Squeeze it twice and other Leeluus in the room will turn on too. Nobody saw that coming. Neat! It’s got LED lights, wireless charging, and presumably talks to other Leeluus via LE bluetooth? Or magic at this point nobody cares we’re all totally going to buy one.
Last up is Degoo, a distributed storage solution using your own HDD to store other peoples’ stuff. The pitcher throws a prop laptop up in the air, it sails overhead and smashes to the ground near the front row seats. The audience is listening. People drop laptops. That’s the problem. Solution? Degoo. Basically, your fragile data is at the mercy of your clumsy fingers, and Degoo, a distributed storage solution using everyone’s HDD space and some peoples’ CPU power, will solve that. It’s like cloud storage, but they have a 100,000 users and a total storage space of 5.9 million gigabytes. I’m impressed with Degoo, and even more impressed with peoples’ willingness to use it.
The final vote went to a run-off between Leeluu and Degoo, with both the judges and the people’s vote going to Leeluu, who won a bottle of sweet sweet glory and couple dozen crates of die hard fans.
The evening wraps up, and with drink tickets in hand courtesy of Tyler (thanks Tyler!), everyone shuffles out to swarm the bar and mingle the night away.
10/10 would meetup again.
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