5 things we learnt from #StartupIstanbul

If you didn’t catch the latest tech buzz around town then it’s time you get
briefed on all that happened on 5th October.
After a highly hyped campaign to market StartupIstanbul from early
this year everything culminated in Lufti Kirdar Congress hall.
Startupistanbul depicts itself as the leading meeting point for the
tech ecosystem in Eurasia. And what a better point than Istanbul, a
city at the heart of Europe and Asia. With keynote speakers from Silicon
Valley’s bedrock we ask did the event live up to the hype? Here are my 2 cents views on how everything went down:

1.Steve Blank fireside chat was real fiery

From tearing down all the hard held beliefs about the MBA course, to giving the ultimate definition of a startup. With Steve on the hot seat everybody else in the audience from CEOs, investors, young founders all turned to mere students as he dug deep into the building blocks of the LEAN Startup Movement. Steve Blank was exemplary in his tips,lessons and anecdotes.
Basically everything that dropped from his mouth was pure gold to
entrepreneurs. Here are my 5 most memorable quotes from him;

“A startup is a temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model”

“An MVP is not just code,it could be a power point,it could be a wire frame, or just data to get early customer feedback”

“If you are doing the same thing you would do in a large company you are going to go out of business”

“Customers never never behave as you expect. NEVER”

“A startup is a series of unknowns”

Its hard to recreate the aura and eagerness that gripped
everybody as Steve spoke but you can still catch all that he said
here.

2.Startup Istanbul is no longer a regional event…..It’s gone GLOBAL

When Prof. Erhan Erkut the evangelist on a disruptive entrepreneurship
course at MEF university announced that there weren’t any Turkish
startups among-st the finalists it caught everybody by surprise.
Visibly evident were gasps and mini-conversations about why an entrepreneurship event in Istanbul would lack Turkish startups in the finals. Doesn’t that beat the whole logic of supporting the local ecosystem ? Actually the answers to this are well, a little bit hidden in the details. This
time round startups from all over the world applied, 100 were selected
and judging them to the last 15 was no easy task for the 40+ mentors.
Their quality in pitching was extremely high as well their diversity!
How many times do you get an event with startups from Indonesia,
Kenya, Bulgaria, Croatia, Pakistan, Iran, Tunisia,USA e.t.c all in one
place. Matters got interesting when the jury consisting of Steve
Blank,Teruhide Sato & Andrea Barrica chose NIMS, a financialtech
startup as the ultimate winner! iGrow from INDONESIA and Taskulu
from Iran were runners up.

What a way to confirm Elmira Bayrasli’s words, “The next Steve Jobs is just as likely to come from Lagos, Lahore, Monterrey or Mumbai as from Silicon Valley”.

3.Investment in tech is not all a rosy affair

Dave McClure didn’t disappoint on stage, as usual he poured lessons
learned from 500 startups. His address more directed to the investors
in the house. “Investing in tech is not like real estate. You don’t
get your returns often and if you do it’s in 5–6 years. If running a
startup is hard then running an accelerator is 5 times harder.” How
about that for some enriching and depressing knowledge in one talk!

It wasn’t Dave alone though, Morten Lund thinks the same. Telling the
story of investing a small amount in the early days of Skype whose
returns turned huge, he noted that ‘a facebook comes once in a
decade’. Simply put, startups don’t complain that you aren’t getting
funded,HUSTLE HARDER! Investors hustle hard too to get their dollars
back.

4.Mentorship is gold to startup founders

What many people who attended Monday’s event could have missed is that
the startups pitches they saw on stage weren’t all that smooth and of
quality 4 days before. Most pitches were sharpened after days of
mentorship at MICROSOFT HQs. 100 startups divided into several rooms
all got a chance to stand before 40+ mentors and practice their
presentations. In got blunt, excess slides with unclear projections
presented by extremely quick or slow, talking founders. 3 days later out got sharp,more direct, more clear presenters. As one Molawa Adesuyi, founder of mytoddlr from Nigeria noted “I changed almost 75% of my presentation after attending the mentorship program”
The fact that mytoddlr emerged amongst the top 15 finalists proves
that yeah the mentorship worked!

5. + So much more………

Andrea Barrica crashed the panel. True to her popular article on crashing an all-anything panel, when Dave McClure succumbed to jetlag exhaustion, she joined the jury for the finals with Steve Blank and Teruhide Sato.

17 year old Babar Khan, the white hat hacker and founder of Security Wall got applauds from everyone. He proved that entrepreneurship has no age limits.

Steli Efti was electric in his super-animated speech! He captured my attention and I would honestly say that’s the best motivational speaker I have listened to in a while.He just got a new convert.I will be a true disciple to his podcasts’ gospel.

Outside the halls and startup booths some founders got really creative marketing their startups. The guys from Waveit, a tinder-like app for content sharing had killer tactics. They offered chocolate with a smile as they made you download their app. Their business cards even greeted your face all the way to the washrooms. Now that’s an OhMyGod marketing hack.

So much happened at #startupIstanbul. I’d love to hear your side of the story!

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