Out with the Old, In With New: SSW 2014 Tour
Dear 2014,
it’s been fantastic. But we have to let you go. You gave us an amazing ride, but we’re moving to bigger, and better things.We need to leave the past in the past, let bygones be bygones, and strap in for 2015.
You started off well with the first Seedstars World Final Event. We brought 20 entrepreneurs from all over the world to Geneva. It was like a Startup United Nations- only that Seedstars would be giving USD 500 K to the ones who argued best. Seoul’s Simon Lee took home the title with his startup Flitto, a crowd sourced translation platform.
Then it was goodbye Switzerland and hello every where else. We were on the road for 9 months. April to December we moved between countries with the deadliest food. Countries whose entire animal population wants to kill you.Countries known for narco traffic and terrorism To be fair though, we usually headed straight to nearest co-working space or accelerator, where you were out of the reach of drug cartels and monster snakes.
Our passports took abuse: We saw 36 new cities, with several stops requiring visas. That was torture: 1)embassy websites are the worst, with most using ancient html coding and too bright colors. 2) The bureaucratic process took forever and could be expensive. Either because they just are or come with a handy bribe add-on. 3)If it didn’t work and you needed to get a visa on arrival, you would be wise to pack in a book. (Maybe start the Hobbit. It’s only 300 pages long but every 100 of them got a movie.)
Apart from the paper trail, visiting each country was an eye opening experience. There are no borders when it comes to entrepreneurship and innovation.
You can slow progress down, but you can’t stop it.
Society, as if it were a natural phenomenon, must move forward. Otherwise, it will die or dwindle into such insignificance that there’s not much difference. Startups innovated payment and Fintech, SaaS, Recruitment and Education, and basically any industry you can think of. 2014 showed us that ideas have no borders, and their spark can ignite an entire ecosystem.
In more than 100 hours of pitching, we witnessed businesses come to life. Not everyone was born a show man, but there was one thing everyone had:
All entrepreneurs exhibited both a confidence and an enthusiasm that you won’t find in that concentration anywhere else.
It’s infecting. The most poignant example was when Julien and I headed to the MEST graduation ceremony. Based in Ghana, the Meltwater Entrepreneurial School of Technology took promising African students and pushed them through an intense 2 year program that taught coding, business, and the art of pitching. Despite the support, it still isn’t easy launching a global startup from Accra. And yet, each entrepreneur in training had such an unshakable faith, an undoubted optimism, and unquenchable drive that you had to root for them.
And then, there were the 60 or so flights we took. 2014, you were fun, but you weren’t easy. We had to work hard and grind for every part of the tour.
It’s wasn’t that around the world trip you always wanted to do in college. It was work, and work well worth it.
If you want something, you need to execute. You need to write that email. You need to call those leads. You need to to leave each day with the satisfaction of having been productive, but an insatiable hunger to do more. Still, work smart, not necessarily hard.
2014, you taught me a lot. That rice and chicken are good at anytime of the day. That K-Pop is a lucrative export. That getting hit by a car will fund your startup.
But now it’s time to move on. We want 50+ cities. We want to hand out our next 500 K. We want people to invest in the best from around the world. It’s not always gonna be a smooth ride, but it will a helluva one.
See you when we build a tesseract and can time travel,
Nellie
Dear 2015,
Let’s do this.
XOXO,
N to the Izzle.
