As a fellow Londoner I felt compelled to poke around the site a bit.
* It's officially related to TechStars in some way
* They're accepting 10 teams, 4 times per year, in different cities
* It's a 3 month, on-site program, with office space
* 4k euros per founder for 8% equity
It seems like the "first in europe" positioning is based entirely against Seedcamp while ignoring others like HackFwd and Springboard (and all those outside the UK), but that may not be entirely unreasonable given their relative visibility.
I think they've got a good mentor list put together, with a lot of practicing entrepreneurs. My biggest concern is that the first month is dedicated to "shaping" where you spend 2-4 hours a day meeting with and listening to mentors. I would find that highly distracting compared to YCs once-a-week plus meetings as needed. Unless all the companies are at exactly the same stage of development, it's only useful to a subset and damages the rest.
I find it interesting that out of all these mentors I only recognised one and his company (Tim Yang, MYC4). I am no hard-core follower of European startups (even though I live and run a startup here) but if I only recognise one company out of more than a hundred listed, I think that says a lot about the EU startup climate.
Not to brag about the program or disqualify your view European startup climate but I have to disagree strongly with this statement. Among the mentors you have people like Arican Wegter, founder of LOVEFiLM who just sold 58% of his company to Amazon for 312 million euros, Tanveer Sharif, founder of succesful VOiP solutions company Vopium, or Tommy Ahlers, CEO of Podio. Plus, in the upcoming weeks we will be announcing the mentors from the Spanish Chapter. Stay tuned for more updates regarding SBC
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As a fellow Londoner I felt compelled to poke around the site a bit.
It seems like the "first in europe" positioning is based entirely against Seedcamp while ignoring others like HackFwd and Springboard (and all those outside the UK), but that may not be entirely unreasonable given their relative visibility.I think they've got a good mentor list put together, with a lot of practicing entrepreneurs. My biggest concern is that the first month is dedicated to "shaping" where you spend 2-4 hours a day meeting with and listening to mentors. I would find that highly distracting compared to YCs once-a-week plus meetings as needed. Unless all the companies are at exactly the same stage of development, it's only useful to a subset and damages the rest.
I find it interesting that out of all these mentors I only recognised one and his company (Tim Yang, MYC4). I am no hard-core follower of European startups (even though I live and run a startup here) but if I only recognise one company out of more than a hundred listed, I think that says a lot about the EU startup climate.
Not to brag about the program or disqualify your view European startup climate but I have to disagree strongly with this statement. Among the mentors you have people like Arican Wegter, founder of LOVEFiLM who just sold 58% of his company to Amazon for 312 million euros, Tanveer Sharif, founder of succesful VOiP solutions company Vopium, or Tommy Ahlers, CEO of Podio. Plus, in the upcoming weeks we will be announcing the mentors from the Spanish Chapter. Stay tuned for more updates regarding SBC
I still didn't recognize any of them, but it probably says more about me than the programme or the entrepreneurs. Good luck!