When startup Founders meet, magic happens

Founders Summit in Slovakia

Great things happen when people decide to co-operate. In this case, 4 CEE Venture firms (Neulogy Ventures — Slovakia, SpeedInvest — Austria, DayOne Capital — Hungary, Credo Ventures — Czech Republic) decided to join forces and bring their portfolio companies’ founders together to network, talk and share their experiences.

Founders Summit organizers

I live in a place where it’s considered weird to be an entrepreneur. I constantly feel that I’m that odd person trying to go against the usual way of working. This conference proved that this assumption is wrong. There are a lot of other people rowing in the same boat and it was a wonderful feeling being among such people. I finally felt normal. Knowing that you’re not alone with your struggles and that miracles (or luck) are real is very refreshing.

I also realised that, although there are best practices and similar challenges, your journey is unique to you.

The main organizer started off the conference by saying “If there’s even 1 useful tip you hear in the next 2 days, the event is a success”. I went on to write down not one, but at least 2 dozen useful tips during the course of the conference. Let me share some of them with you. Most of the tips comes from Daniel Dines— founder of UiPath, Vitaly M. Golomb from HP Tech Ventures, whose knowledge and stories inspired me.

Interesting slide presented by Vitaly

Here are the top 8 things I learnt:

1. Hire for smart, not for just experience. Hire people you like to be with.
2. As your company grows, scales up, put new people in control. Your company is “dying” at every stage and it changes. However, you can retain the ethos. This leads us to the next point.
3. Those who build the company from scratch (aka Founders), are very likely not to be the ones running it after it reaches a certain size. As it grows you have to release yourself emotionally from the company and try not to take things too personally.
4. With every round of financing, you have to improve your team and ask yourself the question: “What am I good at?” “What can I bring to the table for this company?” Self-awareness and emotional maturity of the Founders are important.
5. Hire sales people and build a sales team, only when you figured out the sales process, what exactly you sell and to whom.
6. One of the startup killers: premature scaling. You have to have a reason to scale.
7. One of the hardest but most exciting aspect of being an entrepreneur is that you are building something no one has ever before.
8. Don’t try to be innovative if you don’t need to be! Focus your efforts on the product. Innovate only where it brings benefits to your product.

I was impressed by the Founders’ commitment to their ventures and was convinced again, that at some point scientist will discover the entrepreneurial gene. Creating something from nothing, enduring the hardships can’t be done without an inner drive, and that drive has to come from somewhere, right?

Can a startup event happen without colorful beanbags?

I am proud to be an entrepreneur, one of the co-founders of Samebug and belong to a great group of people around the world. People who set out to work hard every day with only one thing in mind: to change the world.