Open Coffee- A unique startup event

The StartupLab teams had the pleasure to attend the Open Coffee event at Benaki Museum on April 5. ‘Open Coffee’ is a startup pitching and networking event that ‘aims to be the single point of reference for greek startups’. The idea behind it is to bring together the greek startup and entrepreneurship community and everyone who is interested in it, through monthly meetings in a casual and relaxed setting that encourages networking and chatting.In other words,it is a chance to interact with the greek startup ecosystem and learn from it while drinking your coffee.

But which was our experience at the event?

First of all, we were presented to 3 greek startups , all different,but equally interesting and innovative.

The first startup was ‘BibeCoffee’ , presented by mr Vasilis Apostolopoulos and mr Panos Vrettos. ‘BibeCoffee’ is a company that created an IoT real time monitoring solution for every professional coffee machine that ensures zero Revenue Loss and Brand Image. In short , it is a device that provides all crucial information that coffee producers, distributors and retailers need to know in real time. Besides the presentation of the company, the two speakers talked about the difficulties they faced during their attempt to create such a new and different smart device and answered the public’s follow up questions.

The next speaker was mr Nikos Papanotas ,the founder of the well know startup called Geekbot. ‘Geekbot’ is an app that enables people to run asynchronous standup meetings in Slack and it is used daily by thousands of employees around the world in companies ,with Github,Shopify and Zapier being among them. Mr Papanotas also shared the lessons he learnt on his startup journey which was, as he admitted, full of difficulties and hard moments. Some of them include finding a good team, learning to be patient, trying to solve a problem of yours which might evolve into a startup idea and understanding that in the end,it’s all about the product itself.

The third and final startup presentation was made by Mr Thanos Papaggelis, founder of ‘Epignosis’ ,a company with 3 different products with TalentLMS being the main one and the one, that according to its founder , made the company take off. Today, the company counts 50,000 active users and 1500 paid companies.But what Epignosis is though? It is a company that builds software products that help other companies train their people more efficiently.Mr Papaggelis talked about the effort and the persistance it took for the company to reach the success point in which it is at the moment , recently receiving one of the biggest fundings ever happened in Greece by Insight Venture Partners.

After the ending of the presentations , the attendants enjoyed some drinks at the cafe of the museum with some of the Startuplab members experiencing the meaning and the value of networking for the first time!All in all, it was a very interesting ,constructive and fun evening for sure!

Professor : Betty Tsakarestou

Team(The Revenants) : Tonia Molvali, Athena Styllou, elena kouki, Olympia Georgakopoulou, Anastasia Koutsothodorou