The Startup Hunter Diary — A Month Long Trip Around Europe — Episode 24

Together

“One more time”

Third day in Stockholm, and we’d had a really good time so far. We managed to meet with key people.

This morning we were meeting with Aurore Belfrage, whom we got introduced to by Oskar. Aurore is part of EQT ventures, the recent venture arm of EQT, a large private equity firm, and head of Together, the start-up/angel matchmaking platform of EQT.

She has an incredible background so I’ll let you go read her bio. Among all the thing, she used to be a start-up humorist in the Middle East, to a point where she was considered a princess in the region.

Talking with her was just great and we may be able to create some opportunities together, plus she will be meeting with Stephanie already, as she will be visiting Paris next week.

She invited us to join the Together community. Their objective is to have the best reflection of the European startup ecosystem. With this new project they very much share our own vision of creating a more unified Europe to create European champions that can challenges the US. And that we like a lot.

// Coffee break (cause it’s Stockholm, therefore it’s cold)

// Lunch break

Early on the afternoon we had a meeting with 2 start-ups: Glue Home and Norbloc. We got introduced to Luisa Orre, CFO of Glue Home, by one of the entrepreneurs we work with at OneRagtime. And knowing our interest for Norbloc, Luisa invited Astyanax and Sam, founders of Norbloc, to our meeting. That’s what I call a powerful community. 💪🏽😎

Both are really cool companies, Glue Home is working on disrupting the access with their smart key solution, and Norbloc is disrupting bank payments with their KYC solutions based on the blockchain. We hope to be able to help those 2 exciting projects.

Unfortunately we couldn’t stay with these great folks any longer, because we had another very exciting meeting to go to.

Remember when I told you that every damn time we tried to meet with the school incubator programmes nobody was there? Well, not a problem anymore. Thanks to Oskar, we got to meet with Marwan Ayache. Marwan works with the Stockholm School of Entrepreneurship (SSES), and he is in charge of overseeing all the incubation programs among the different universities in Stockholm. So for us, it was kind of a one-stop shop to get to talk with all the school at once. Very efficient.

It was also another confirmation that the Swedes are being super effective with their school system to foster entrepreneurship.

Marwan is one of this figures you want to know when you discover a new start-up ecosystem. Before being the one over-looking the entrepreneurship programs of the 5 top Stockholm universities, he was working with STHLM Tech Meetup, the event we went to on Monday, biggest meetup for entrepreneurs in Sweden, and also one of the biggest I went to.

That’s all folks!

It’s already the last night of this incredible trip. Lucky us, Wednesday night in Sweden is called little Saturday. It’s time for some celebration then, which we started with having diner with our new friend Oskar.

Skol! 🍻

I hope you enjoyed following us, it was a pleasure to share our adventures with you. This trip might be over, but this is just the beginning of the most amazing journey. We had so much fun connecting with all the new people we met and discovering new cities and start-up ecosystems. This wasn’t a one-time thing… We will be back!

And stay tuned, the OneRagtime Snapchat pitch competition is just around the corner!

To participate: oneragtime.com/snapchatpitch

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