Standouts from White Bull Summit 2014

This week I spent Monday and Tuesday in sunny Barcelona at the White Bull Summit 2014. White Bull is a start-up conference aiming at being “the European Oscars” for tech startups, arranged by the absolutely lovely Farley Duvall & Elizabeth Perry. Probably stemming from the strong values of these founders, many of the other attendees at their Summits are great people to do business with and hang with also. I can usually combine the White Bull event with a board meeting at our Spanish portfolio-company Zentyal (from Zaragoza), so I am lucky to have many good reasons to go down to Spain in October.

The following things stood out from this years Summit (or at least the Mon/Tue part of it):

- Diamonds in the rough. Some of the start-ups we saw present may actually have something better to offer the world than what was visible on the surface. It took a bit of faith and some digging to uncover the true opportunities in these companies. The 3- and 6 minute pitch formatwas at times quite effective in concealing the exciting stuff ☺

- 30 Unicorns from Europe. GP Bullhound’s Per Lindtorp gave a nice prez and shared research showing that Europe has created 30 tech companies worth a billion dollars or more in the last 10 years. Great news, gives hope for European venture capital returns also.

- Sell or Die! A fabulous presentation by veteran entrepreneur & sales coach Ken Morse. This Bostonian will teach you sales strategy and plenty of practical tricks of the trade. Trust me, you indeed do need great sales (& sales teams) to win in the marketplace, even if you are a modern self-serve-, marketing driven-, SaaS-, something-company!

- New ways of connecting. JP Rangaswami, Salesforce.com’s Chief Scientist gave an inspiring talk about how humans have changed in the way we connect with people, since the time when everyone used to know everyone in their village. It is still about creating and having trusted relationships, both in private and business, but now we don’t necessarily do it face-to-face all the time. It seems Salesforce is practicing what it is preaching, constantly evolving their products per their customer requirements enabling more and more trusted connections.