The Coliving Club at the Startup Battle or the story of two losers

On the 21st of September the Coliving Club team went to Kyiv to participate in Startup Battle Pre-ICO🤓, held by Startup Network with the support of SC Citadele bank. This is a business format event that unites players of the venture investment market: entrepreneurs, experts, investors.💼💰💰Each event takes place in a different city and this was the 91st edition.

The purpose of the event is to identify breakthrough and investment-attractive projects.

And the Coliving Club team got into the top three. 🏆I can not say that we were upset, it was rather a rehearsal for more serious events. Plus, it was still an adventure, believe me!😅

The application for participation didn’t take long, so we immediately started preparing. You can not imagine how surprised I was when I saw that, despite the close deadlines and the large volume of work, the team managed to do everything smoothly without panicking at all.… Ah .. I love them ;))))♥️

Day before the event

By this point, we have almost finished preparing for the trip. One of the cofounders Yaroslav has already landed in Kiev — he flew from Silicon Valley to represent us in the battle, Kirill finished the White Paper, Daria made a beautiful presentation, the SMM department spotlighted everything in the social networks — in general, we were almost done with the pre-battle fuss.

We even managed to prepare special T-shirts and business cards. Naturally, all this had to be done “for yesterday”, but the guys from the printing office were super quick and made everything on time.

In the meantime, I was making a research to know more about the judges and participants, when suddenly I saw the familiar name on the list of judges — the bitcoin-millionaire Jeremy Gardner! I wrote about him a few weeks ago and would definitely want to meet him in person. Try to imagine my emotions, I understood, this was my chance. Having told everyone about this, I began preparing for the interview with him, which he had not even suspected yet. Check our next story!

The Event Day

Being a fan of the lists I, of course, prepared mine beforehand, so as not to forget anything. At 10 am, Maxim and I stopped at the car wash (vain efforts, actually, in 5 hours on the road, the car returned to its original look 😀), after this we took two Americano to go and started our journey.

The closer we got to Kiev, the better our mood became, there was no fatigue from the trip. We stopped at gas stations several times. I was especially happy when we stopped by at Socar, coffee there is not that bad (no, it’s not advertising). Everything went surprisingly calm and relaxed but it didn’t last long.

After 5 hours of the trip, we drove to the outskirts of Kiev and thinking there was a lot of time till the event we relaxed a bit. Max and I went into the mall to buy some snacks and walked a little. We phoned Yaroslav to find out if he was on his way and he told us there was some bad traffic in the center.

We immediately began looking for the way to the needed place through Google Maps. And you know what? I guess that Google really wants people to travel more, because the route we traveled was over-saturated — sleeping areas, parks, factories. Everything, except what we needed!

Somehow we got to the downtown and as expected got stuck in the traffic jam for an hour! Having reached the right place 30 minutes before the start, we had a quick lunch and put on our cool T-shirts…

The Startup Battle

The event was held in two blocks:

Panel discussion. Investors and Venture Capital experts shared their experience with young colleagues; talked about the trends of the world of investment, gave valuable advice and answered questions from participants and guests of the event.

Startups Presentations. Entrepreneurs presented their projects to owners and top managers of leading Ukrainian companies, private investors, representatives of venture and seed funds and leaders of incubation and acceleration programs. The presentation of each project lasted 6 minutes, 3 of which were dedicated directly to the presentation and another 3–5 minutes — to the questions of the jury members and guests of the event.

As Max said “it’s boring, like at all geeks get-togethers” 😂

After the judges had announced that we got the 3rd place, I went looking for my bitcoin-star. And what a surprise it was when he saw me, he canceled all his celebrity routine of beind in everybody’s picture and we started the interview.

Jeremy was very easy to communicate, I didn’t expect he could be so open. While we were talking and joking for about an hour many people stopped by to listen. I really liked it!

At the end of the day we felt tired, so we decided to spend the night in Kiev and since no one was driving,

“We can have beer with Pringles” © Max.

Without thinking twice, we found the nearest 24-hour store, but (“And what do you know about the failures”)don’t sell you alcohol in Kyiv at night and it was 5 minutes past the curfew. Feeling upset, we got into the car, and in a minute….Tadaaam…we were in a puddle .. literally knee-deep. It did not work out in any way and we realized that without help, we were stuck.

The car slowly began to drown. Fortunately, a man came up to help us and in half an hour, we got to the land. In the end, we have a torn rope, spoiled sneakers and a drenched car.

“What could be worse” — I thought.

Ok, not as bad as there 👆😵.

Checking the amount of water in the car, Max found bag with Apple gadgets on the bottom of the front seat, which was in the water for about 30 minutes (“What do you know about the failures” 2x).

Honestly, it was one of the most nervous nights in a long time. Another hour we spent cleaning the water with sponges, and only after we went to the hotel.

You will not believe , but despite the terrible mood, Maxim could laugh off:

“Well .. I think we deserve Pringles”

The Next Day

No, we, of course, assumed that the moisture in the car will leave naturally on the road, but everything turned out to be much worse. Every 15 minutes we had to open the windows and air the salon.

😱Every minute at the gas station with the coffee seemed wonderful.😑

But the story of the losers does not end there! A very strong thunderstorm began midway. Literally in 10 minutes the sky darkened, the rain intensified. There were times when visibility was simply zero, because windscreen wipers could not cope. Once, a flash hit the place 20 meters away from the car. It was really scary.

After 6 hours of the trip, I finally saw the road sign that we were in our hometown. And when I went home, I just fell on the bed without taking my clothes off. Home, sweet home… Or whatever it is supposed to be said.

My impressions??? Try to guess =)