Building the World’s Most Interconnected Startup Community
TL;DR: We have ridden the wave of change over the last year, and our global startup community is all the better for it. But we’re only getting started!
Follow me on twitter for more stories and announcements as we build.
At Startup Grind we love founders and we love helping people who want to create new value in the world.
We have been trying to do this at scale for ~10 years at Startup Grind, which is why our core has always been our global community…even from the early days.
By March last year, we were running an average of ~240 events per month across the world. However, our community was still faced with one major limitation when it came to creating a truly globally-connected community: all our value was delivered in-person and face-to-face.
Connecting our Global Community
It didn’t force a pivot per se, but it forced us to expedite something that was already in our plans: to add a large virtual element to the global community we have been building over the last 10 years, which now extends across 120 countries. Who wouldn’t love the idea (and challenge) of making the world’s largest startup community now also the world’s most interconnected?
By April 2020, our ridiculously impressive Community Team went from having run 1 virtual community event EVER (in January, in Wuhan of all places) to a casual 242* within just one month…! *S/o to all SG Directors who made this happen too, we love you.
Being a virtual community also opened up two exciting new opportunities:
- We could start running co-hosted events (e.g. the Tel Aviv+London Chapter collaboration hosted one of the founding engineers from WhatsApp, which enabled significant cross-country networking post-event)
- The physical and geographical barrier no longer existed for attendees. In fact, I spoke to one person from Lisbon who had attended a number of events at SG’s Islamabad Chapter! Unsurprisingly, our most popular globally-promoted event was when SG Fort Lauderdale’s Chapter hosted Brad Feld.
When recognizing the vast potential of these new opportunities, we also loved the idea of helping all the incredible startups from across our global community to grow together.
Grow your startup, together
By May 2020 we had launched our Startup Membership: an application-based virtual community designed to provide the best startups from across the world the education, opportunities, and access they need to build, grow, and scale.
We started by launching programs for our investors, mentors, partners, and startups to form valuable connections with each other. These programs, although in their relative infancy, already produce hundreds of double opt-in introductions every month! We also ran virtual private member events with experienced operators and investors like Dylan Field, Sarah Cannon, and Niko Bonatsos.
Over the subsequent months, we focused on creating virtual experiences that replicate and even improve upon our renowned in-person events. Some of the most recent examples are:
- We took our Startup Summit online — on Monday, we did this by running our annual event for selected pre-seed, seed & Series A startups on our sister company’s platform, bevy. We hosted incredible speakers like Geoff Ralston, Vlad Magdalin, Rebecca Kaden for firesides and keynotes, as well another 25 renowned industry experts for workshops & roundtables - all virtually. The outcome? It worked! Startups seemed to enjoy it, with a survey response so far of 8.9/10. More to come on what we’ve learned and how we can continue to do better but for now, we’ll call it a success!
- We gave our Startup Members pitch opportunities at our virtual Global Conference — over the past 3 days, 78 top startups from our Membership got the chance to do a quickfire pitch online to the 6k attendees of our Global Conference. This was a complicated undertaking…and inevitably, as with anything done for the first time, we did have some technical issues at first, but with a stellar tech team like ours — we still got through it and were met with wide applause in the end!
- We ran our first-ever Startup Grind Demo Day — Yesterday I hosted our first-ever Demo Day, an exclusive, invite-only pitch competition for the 10 most exciting startups taking part in our 2021 Startup Summit and members of our Investor Program.
Our Inaugural Demo Day
The event saw these 10 seed, pre-A & Series A startups from the USA, South Korea, UK, France & Portugal battle it out to win the crown of ‘Startup of the Year’.
Judging was done by Tim Jackson, Allison Pickens and Stacey Bishop based on the clarity of each startup’s pitch about their product, its value and the opportunity, as well as the quality of their responses to the judges' questions.
At the bottom* is a list of the top startups that took part (they are all raising now/soon, so if you’d like an intro, email me at agf@startupgrind.com).
As far as first-times go, I was pretty pleased with our first ever Demo Day. 175 investors from our Program registered, our startups pitched and the judges chose a winner, which, by the way, was MYTHIC MARKETS!
What’s next for the world’s largest (and most inter-connected) startup community?
We believe we are really onto something here with the virtual Startup Membership community…and the feedback from our startups tells us so. Just check this email out that I received today:
“You are making a difference in my life, in my company and I am sure that you make a difference in many other people and companies.”
The best bit? We’re only getting started!
Watch this space for more information on what we’re cooking up for our members.
Interested in applying to be a member? Click here
Interested in keeping up to date with stories and announcements on our journey from here? Follow me on twitter
*The 10 Startups that pitched at our Demo Day
Caveat: Of course there are thousands of other fantastic companies on our Program (check out a selection of them here).
QueryPie
United States/South Korea | SaaS | Founded by: Peter Shin, Brant Wang
QueryPie is a compliance-ready database management solution that runs on a web browser. It is similar to Mode but with advanced data masking and access control ideal for PCI-DSS, CCPA, and GDPR.
Outmind
France | Artificial Intelligence| Founded by: Grace Mehrabe, Arthur Caillaud
Outmind is a SaaS knowledge tool allowing to make text searches within all your tools, to find internal information or the right colleague that can help you.
Lendwise
UK | Financial Services| Founded by: Rishi Zaderi, Kypros Mouzouros, Ioannis Georgiou
Lendwise is an innovative P2P fintech platform dedicated to higher education finance. They enable individuals to pursue their educational and professional aspirations through an affordable and flexible financial solution. They facilitate this by matching individuals with investors who participate in a fixed income investment with a social purpose and impact.
Weavr.io
UK | Financial Services| Founded by: Alex Mifsud, Adrian Mizzi
Weavr provides an open publicly-accessible cloud-based platform that connects payment networks and financial providers, and tools for innovators to define, deploy and consume digital payment flows.
Monadd
UK | Industry | Founded by: Jessica Mendoza
Monadd enables individuals to update their address across their service providers when they move. Monadd identifies all the service providers associated with the individual’s household and allows them to choose which ones they want to notify. This usually is a time-consuming, unproductive task for both the user and the marketing, data, and customer support personnel at the receiving business. Monadd are doing it in less than 5 minutes.
Didimo
Portugal | AR/VR| Founded by: Veronica Orvalho
Until now, the creation of high-quality 3D characters was the exclusive domain of Hollywood and AAA games, that is, large production teams of artists, engineers requiring expensive hardware and software. Today, with a single smartphone photo or scan, Didimo can create a ready-to-animate avatar, shortening the production process from hundreds of hours to less than 60 seconds.
8base
USA | SaaS | Founded by: Albert Santalo
8base is an affordable, low-code development platform for building digital products. The 8base team specialises in helping companies realise their product vision quickly and affordably with their application design and development services, so that you can innovate as fast as you can ideate.
CEEK VR
USA | AR/VR + Blockchain | Founded by: Mary Spio
CEEK VR is an award-winning streaming service for virtual events and experiences featuring the biggest names in entertainment. CEEK’s platform records content usage on the blockchain and automatic rights owner payments via smart contracts. CEEK features exclusive Virtual Reality and livestreams from megastars like Bon Jovi, U2, Lady Gaga and more.
RealKey
USA | Financial Services| Founded by: Christopher Hussain, William Hanson
RealKey is an innovative provider of digital mortgage technologies that enable bank and non-bank mortgage loan originators (MLOs) to streamline the mortgage processing experience for borrowers. Disrupting the status-quo in the mortgage industry, the RealKey Digital Mortgage Platform makes the mortgage process more efficient and empowers MLOs to close more loans, faster, with less effort.
Mythic Markets
USA/South Korea| Financial Services| Founded by: Debra Lin, Joe Mahavuthivanij, David Phruksukarn
Mythic Markets is an investing platform to buy, sell and trade fractional shares in rare pop culture collectibles. It allows anybody to buy, sell, and trade fractional shares in alternative assets with massive fandoms. Starting with pop culture collectibles, they’re securitizing vintage comic books and collectible cards, allowing fans to invest in the things they love.
