SoGal Berlin Goes to the Global Pitch Competition 2020!
Hello all and welcome to the relaunch of SoGal Berlin! We hope that you are all safe during the pandemic, and we’re excited to catch up with all of you at our next event. You may remember the regional round of our global pitch competition 2019, and might be wondering what happened since October! In March 2020 Alexis from our Berlin Chapter went with Maria and Ramakrishna from Phantasma Labs and Letitia from Nifty Learning to compete on the global stage in San Fransisco and take part in an amazing start-up boot camp.
I arrived the day before the founders and had the privilege of getting to know chapter leads from all over the world and having a brilliant Q&A with the SoGal team, with topics discussed such as sponsorship, inclusion and our personal journeys with SoGal. It was also the first time that I had met the SoGal leadership team and was immediately inspired by their confidence and drive. My head was swimming with ideas and excitement about the next few days.
DAY 1:
The first day of the global summit was filled with thought-provoking panels and networking time for founders from all over the world! Some of the brilliant panels we enjoyed were how to build without burnout, hiring your first few employees and building a strong culture from the beginning. In addition, there were workshops to enable founders to start thinking about what they want the future of their business to look like. My favourite was the culture-building workshop where we learnt how to build a mission, vision and value-led company from Ethan Austin, Techstars!
DAY 2:
Day 2 was the big day! We took busses to a large event space in the heart of San Fransisco where the pitch competition was being conducted. Founders pitched from countries such as China, the US, Japan, the UK, Germany, and so many more! Of course, I was blown away once again by Phantasma Labs and Nifty Learning, even if we might be slightly biased towards them. They were joined by a brilliant group of founders in industries such as healthcare, deathcare, eco-tech, and education. More than 10 founders won prizes such as funding, extra boot camps and accelerator programmes! A final personal highlight of mine was Pocket Sun’s keynote speech about the gap in venture capital, the face of power (spoiler alert, it’s still mainly white men), leading with emotion and the dismantling of taught assumptions.
DAY 3:
The last day continued to be inspiring, powerful and emotional. It began with some yoga to relax from the previous day of pitching and discourage burnout. Founders had sessions in which they shared their goals, tips on expanding into new markets, the importance of appreciating each other and how they could support each other. A topic of conversation that I personally felt very strongly about was the existence of gendered language in business and propagation of the use of less gendered or gender-neutral language. A prominent theme was the goal of encouraging more women and underrepresented people in tech! We ended the day with a celebration and created a Slack group to enable us all to continue supporting each other in our journeys.
On the brink of the COVID-19 outbreak, we safely made it back from San Fransisco. Our events and participation have been challenged since then, but we are glad the last pre-Coronavirus event we attended was the SoGal Global Pitch Competition!
Thanks very much to the SoGal leadership team, all of the other SoGal chapter leads, and Draper University for hosting us! Are you interested in joining next year’s pitch competition and global summit? SoGal Berlin is going to be hosting the 2020 Regional Pitch Competition later this year, and the winners will be able once again to pitch on the global stage. SoGal is an amazing network, and we would love to have you on board! Add us on Facebook and don’t forget to introduce yourself!
We hope to see you at our upcoming events:
July 14th- Corona Horror Stories
August- Panel Discussion
September- Business Showers
October- Pitch Workshop
November- Regional Round of the Global Pitch Competition
December- Secret Santa
We will be announcing more details very soon, see you there!
