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Interview: The Invaluable Network of Seedcamp Advisers and Investors
Seedcamp, the commercial incubator program for ambitious start-up entrepreneurs has announced its European Program for 2010. In 2010 Seedcamp will organize mentor programs, Mini Seedcamps, in Zagreb, Prague, Barcelona, Paris, Tel Aviv, Copenhagen and Berlin, culminating into the final Seedcamp Week in London.
Entrepreneurs in the program are able to obtain first class advice from legal, strategy and marketing mentors and connections with investors, while the top teams will receive seed funding. Successful Seedcamp companies are Basekit, Zemanta, MyBuilder and Ubervu.
Seedcamp is a commercial fund with a social mind and a for profit purpose, however, it mainly relies on its 1000 unpaid advisors who provide the mentoring for free. Nonetheless, the model works extremely well.
Katy Turner, Eden Ventures
Investors in Seedfund are Nesta and Eden Ventures. The NextWomen spoke with Katy Turner, associate at Eden Ventures, ‘European Technology Forum’s ‘Early Stage Investor of the Year 2007 ‘about the benefit of Seedcamp, female founders and investment criteria.
What is the benefit for entrepreneurs of the Seedcamp Program?
That’s very clear: the access to the network of advisers and investors.
The money aspect is the least important aspect for an entrepreneur. The most value comes from the Seedcamp week itself and from the ongoing relationships that you build there.
Also, Seedcamp is a great PR platform for entrepreneurs to market one’s start-up company and product, and lastly, for entrepreneurs it’s invaluable that you get together with other entrepreneurs who all go through the same challenges.
What is the benefit for the investors involved in the Seedcamp program?
We appreciate very much that we are able to cultivate a great network with all those incredible advisers through Seedcamp. Also, the visibility that we get by investing through Seedcamp is invaluable. We invested in Basekit (alongside Nesta) and Ubervu, directly as a consequence of the deal flow coming through Seedcamp. It’s really a great source to identify investor ready companies.
We are also involved in the judging process of all the companies submitting to Seedcamp and realistically we wouldn’t have known about a lot of these companies, hadn’t it be for Seedcamp.
Of course there is the top 20 finalists in Seedcamp, but a lot of the companies who don’t make it to the top 20 are still very interesting to keep track off and we look to them for direct investments.
What are the characteristics of a Seedcamp company?
These are technology driven and minded companies. They have strong ideas about technology and that aspect drives the business and the business model. Most of the time the entrepreneurs of Seedcamp companies are also pretty savvy commercially. However, the realisation about how to market the business and to gain customers comes often later.
The value of the Seedcamp circle is the focus on the marketing, sales and business development. Many advisors know how to take the product to market and to drive traction. Solving of a problem is one thing but reaching customers is the ultimate goal, whether it is B2B or B2C.
The seed funding of the program is really meant to get the product of the ground and to get the team ready and to technically figure it out. Once that is done, most companies need some sort of series A funding of around 250K, which we, as Eden Ventures, prefer to be involved in as well.
And if Seedcamp gives a stamp of approval to a company by an initial investment, then it’s easier to secure a follow up investment.
Any female founders Eden has invested in or came across? Read more
Female Ambassador, Her Majesty Queen Rania Al Abdullah Speaks at LeWeb 2009
This week saw LeWeb 2009, in which men and women from across the web addressed almost 2000 attendees in Paris.
One of the first keynotes came from Her Majesty Queen Rania Al Abdulla who ‘through social media has found a way to champion education and the right of every child around the world to go to school’. Introduced as the World’s most tech-savvy Queen, the enigmatic Queen Rania started her speech by promising the remainder would be in ‘140 character sound bites or less’. Her talk broached social media, its impact on people’s lives and the world as a whole, touching on the future following of inanimate objects on Twitter – think your local airport or train station, although Queen Rania was also very interested in knowing when her fridge had run out of chocolate. Her thoughts on the internet are incredibly visionary and yet intensely personal. As a Queen the internet, and in particular Social Media, has opened up her life, helping to demystify the myths of what she does.
Here, you can see the full address in which she states: ’souls will get an IP address’ and ponders the ability of the realtime web to bring about real world change.
Keynotes from other female figure heads included: Read more
Female Entrepreneurs Join Ladies Who Lunch at the British Library
This is a guest post by Mardi Latch, a pre-startup entrepreneur of an online ecommerce site Coax London and member of TheNextWomen.
On Women’s Enterprise Day of Global Entrepreneurship Week, November 18th 2009, Ladies Who Lunch held a networking event for female entrepreneurs at the British Library. Stepping in last minute and a budding entrepreneur herself, Mardi Latch – founder of Coax London – attended hoping to compare this with other free and paid for business events aimed directly at women.
Entrepreneurs at the ‘Thinking’ Stage Read more
There are 100 Sexy Roles a Woman Can Take in Tech: No. 8 Catherine Doran of NetworkRail
CIO Catherine Doran
The NextWomen are running a series of stories on women in tech, explaining what inspired them to work in the industry. The baton has been passed to Catherine Doran, CIO of NetworkRail.
1. What inspired you to get into Tech?
Actually it was purely by chance – I had graduated from University with a degree in maths & Geography. I was enrolled to do a teacher training conversion course when I saw an advertisement in the national press for trainee Programmers. I applied on a whim, sat the aptitude test and passed.
I love puzzles and the prospect of problem solving as a way of living really appealed.
I have thanked my lucky stars many times over for the way the cards fell for me with my career choice.
2. How were you educated in Tech?
The company I joined was a UK software house that established an office in Ireland specifically to target the Irish Graduate market. We were classroom trained in programming and program design for 6 months. We were then placed on customer site (in the UK) at reduced day rates to gain practical experience. My first 18 months in ‘real’ work, I mean post training, was in ICI Organics in Manchester.
Working for a software house meant changing jobs every 12 – 18 months, moving from client to client. Great way to get a good range of experience in a relatively short time.
3. How has your experience been in the world of TECH?
I stayed working at a pretty technical level for quite a number of years – loved designing, building and implementing systems. I haven’t done technical work for a long time now, but having worked in the industry for 30 years, I have a good nose for what is going well and what is going badly. Read more
Women & Technology Inspiration Interviews
The debate on Women & Technology seems to be ongoing. In 1986 at the European Conference on Women, Natural Sciences & Technology, a series of books was produced based on the topic of ‘Women Challenge Technology’. And still in 2009, the debate continues, no less inflammatory and still as provoking.
In order to change the debate from one of “yes, we can” and “no, you can’t”- into a “yes, we do”, The NextWomen is running a series of stories and interviews featuring women in tech and the inspiration that led to pursue careers in the industry.
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| There are 100 Sexy Roles a Woman Can Take in Tech No 8: Catherine Doran of NetworkRail |
| Actually it was purely by chance (that I got into Tech) – I had graduated from University with a degree in maths & Geography. I was enrolled to do a teacher training conversion course when I saw an advertisement in the national press for trainee Programmers. I applied on a whim, sat the aptitude test and passed.. Read more… | |
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| There are 100 Sexy Roles a Woman Can Take in Tech No 7: Jane Sales, CTO of Ambient & Flook |
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If there was any one person, it was probably my father. He was (and is) the kind of person who recited Keats while changing the engine in a 1960s mini, and was the kind of photographer who thought you were some kind of idiot if you didn’t understand your apertures and your f-stops – he showed me that you could be technical *and* arty. Read more… |
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| There are 100 Sexy Roles a Woman Can Take in Tech No 6: Nilofer Merchant, CEO of Rubicon |
| Tech is a high-change, high growth market so if you like to thrive, reinvent and grow, tech lends itself to that. Because of this rate of change, they are also one of the least hierarchical types of business because they need to move fast to win. That gave me huge opportunities to raise my hand, take on new challenges and contribute without putting in years and years before my ideas would have merit. Read more… |  |
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| There are 100 Sexy Roles a Woman Can Take in Tech No 5: Claire Boonstra, Co-founder of SPRXMobile |
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I went to work for KPN in the i-mode team (i-mode was one of the earliest forms of Internet access on mobile phones pioneered by the Japanese mobile operator NTT DoCoMo) because they had a very good training program. That’s really where I got my education as a junior marketeer and mobile service developer. Read more... |
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| There are 100 Sexy Roles a Woman Can Take in Tech No 4: Wendy White, Marketing Director at Microsoft in Seattle |
| I’m fortunate to have had great exposure to – and access to – technology early in life. When I was very young, my mother was an executive at Control Data. I remember being excited to go to work with her on a Saturday morning and seeing –and hearing –computers that took up most of a room.. Read more… |  |
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| There are 100 Sexy Roles a Woman Can Take in Tech No 3: Liz Benison, COO Cap Gemini. |
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I would urge people to look beyond the Geek image of the sector and understand the wide range of jobs and career paths available to technologists and business people who understand technology. Read more… |
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| There are 100 Sexy Roles a Woman Can Take in Tech No 2: Ciara Byrne – software business polymath |
| Ciara Byrne has worked on every aspect of software: defining technical standards, creating new product concepts, developing the software and explaining it to customers. Currently she is a Director of DRM Standards at SafeNet, and in her spare time writes for The NextWomen and TechCrunch. Read more… |  |
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| There are 100 Sexy Roles a Woman Can Take in Tech No 1: Founder, CEO and serial entrepreneur Wendy Tan White of Moonfruit.com and Gandi.net. |
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My mum has worked in IT for 30 yrs. She still does at 64. I got a glimpse of how exciting the industry can be and supportive of women’s careers even those with kids. My grandfather wouldn’t send my mother to university, there was limited money and only her brothers were sent. Read more… |
BBC adds CIO to List of Female CIO’s in the UK
Tiffany Hall has made the CIO List
Tiffany Hall is the new Chief Information Officer of the BBC at the Future Media & Technology division. She will be responsible for the strategic planning of the corporation’s IT infrastructure, Information Security systems and support for BBC business systems and professional services teams which include HR, Marketing Communications & Audiences, Finance and Property.
She will also support the corporation’s business systems and professional services teams which include HR, Marketing Communications & Audiences, Finance and Property. Communication of the BBC’s technology strategy to third-party tech suppliersi will also be within her responsibility.
Female CIO’s
Medio 2009 Silicon.com reported in the CIO50 2009 that 8 of the top 50 UK CIOs in their list were women, such as number 1 on the list Catherine Doran, director of information management at Network Rail, Tania Howarth, CIO at Birds Eye Iglo, Ailsa Beaton, director of information services at the Metropolitan Police Service and Yasmin Jetha, CIO at the Financial Times.
Nonetheless, at middle and lower management, figures from the UK’s tech industry skills body e-skills UK revealed that less than 16 per cent of tech workers are women, while earlier it was reported by Cranfield University’s School of Management that a quarter of FTSE100 boards have no women at all and just 16 per cent of FTSE100 senior executive committees have women on them.
The appointment of Tiffany Hall is however making the figure on C-level better.
Source: Silicon Reporter and @WomeninTech: “always good to see females in senior IT positions!”
30 Very Successful Female Internet Entrepreneurs
We missed it 2 weeks ago, but we are publishing it nonetheless, because its right in our core mantra: Female Internet Heroes!
IncomeDiary has published the unscientific but interesting ‘Top 30 Female Internet Entrepreneurs’ list (in alphabetical order) and the post of these great women in technology was reposted in its full glory at our friends of The NextWeb.
Here is the original post + comments.
| Name | Company | Founded | Why She Matters |
Amanda Marcotte |
Pandagon | 26-Nov-01 | Amanda runs one of the most talked about feminism and politics blogs. Marcotte shot to fame when John Edwards asked her to run the presedential blog. |
Ariana Huffington |
Huffington Post | 09-May-05 |
Is perhaps one of the most successful female Internet entrepreneurs ever and is the founder of the top blog in the world according to Technorati!
|
Ashley Qualls |
What Ever Life | 2004 | Attracting millions of monthly visitors earning the 18 year old 7 figures a year. |
Barbara Feldman |
Surfnetkids.com | 29-Jun-05 |
Founder of Surfnetkids, the website attracts more than 600,000 visitors a month, her newsletter lists are over 80,000 strong, and her self-published e-books are sold on dozens of sites.
|
Carrie Wilkerson |
The Bare foot Executive | 2007 |
In 2 years Carrie has gone from in debt to 7 figure Internet entrepreneur with over 100,000 followers!
|
Caterina Fake |
Flickr | 26-Jun-05 |
Caterina co-founded Flickr with Stewart Butterfield which was later acquired by Yahoo! for a high 8 figure deal.
|
Catherine Cook |
MyYearBook.com | 27-Jun-05 |
Start 4 years ago when she was 15, MyYearBook has grown to 3 million members worldwide and rakes in annual sales in the seven figures!
|
Cyan Ta’eed |
Eden Creative | 2006 | Ta’eed is the co-founder of Eden Creative Communities which attracts over 10 million visitors to their blog network every month earning her 7 figures a year. |
Eileen Gittins |
Blurb | 26-Jun-05 |
Elieen is the co-founder and CEO of Blurb, a print on demand publishing service. The company’s revenue grew from $1 million to $30 million in two years.
|
Elaine Wherry |
Meebo | 01-Sep-05 | Elaine co-founded Meebo, a instant messaging service you use in your browser. Meebo attracts 40,000,000 monthly users. |
Erin Jansen |
NetLingo.com | 21-Jun-05 |
Founder of an Award-Winning Web Site since 1994, Erin is a Internet entrepreneur veteran.
|
Gina Bianchini |
Ning | 01-Oct-05 |
Gina is the Co-founder and CEO of Ning. There are 1,000,000 social networks on the Ning Platform, growing at a rate of almost 4,000 new social networks each day.
|
Gina Trapani |
Lifehacker | 01-Jan-05 | Gina Trapani is a technology blogger, book author, and programmer. The founding editor of Lifehacker.com, a daily weblog on software and personal productivity, Gina authored a book based on the web site which is in its second edition: Upgrade Your Life: The Lifehacker Guide to Working Smarter, Faster, Better! |
Heather Armstrong |
Dooce | 01-Feb-01 |
One of the biggest mommy blogger’s out there attracting millions of readers to her blog and has recently passed 500,000 Twitter followers.
|
Juliette Brindak |
Miss O and Friends | 22-Jun-05 |
Juliette came up with the idea for Miss O and Friends at just 10 years old, now 19 her business is worth over $15 Million and is visited by millions of girls every month.
|
Justine Ezarik |
iJustine | 27-Jun-05 |
It all started with a 300 page iPhone bill, now she is a social media rock star with millions of YouTube views and over 500,000 twitter followers!
|
Kim Polese |
SpikeSource | 25-Jun-05 | Kim Karin Polese is CEO of SpikeSource, and was one of the most prominent Silicon Valley executives during the dot-com era. In 1997, she made Time Magazine’s list of “The 25 Most Influential Americans”. |
Lisa Stone |
Blog Her | 01-Feb-05 |
Lisa is the founder of BlogHer which reaches more than 14 million women monthly through its conferences, Internet site and publishing networks.
|
Lisa Sugar |
Pop Sugar | April 2006 | Lisa’s blog network is funded by Sequoia – the guys who funded Google and Youtube. Now one of the biggest celeb blogs on the net, Lisa sure is a top female blogger! |
Louise Wannier |
MyShape | 26-Jun-05 |
Louise runs an online women’s apparel retailer that finds clothing for women based on their physical measurements and style and fit preferences
|
Maria Andros |
Social Media Traffic Blueprint |
Maria helps people create a buzz with social media. Recently she took 100 people into her mentoring program for $2500 each.
|
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Meg Frost |
Cute Overload | 2005 | Although she hasn’t got a pet herself, attracts 100,000s of visitors daily to her cute animal blog. |
Meg Hourihan |
Blogger.com | 21-Jun-05 |
Meg Hourihan is the cofounder of Pyra Labs, the company that launched the Blogger personal blogging software that was acquired by Google for for a 8 figure deal.
|
Mena Trott |
Six Apart | 23-Jun-05 |
Mena is a co-founder of Six Apart, creator of Movable Type and TypePad.
|
Michelle Malkin |
Michelle Malkin | June 2004 | Michelle blogs about news and politics which attracts nearly 200,000 visitors a day to her site. |
Penelope Trunk |
Brazen Careerist | March 2006 | With multiple start-ups and over 30,000 RSS readers on her personal blog, Penelope is one female to follow. |
Nancy J Price |
she knows | 1999 |
Nancy co-founded SheKnows which attracts 7.5 Million Monthly Unique Visitors and 76 Million Monthly Page Views!
|
Natalie Massenet |
Net-A-Porter | 22-Jun-05 |
Eight years ago she’d never even been on the internet. This year Natalie Massenet turned over £37 million with Net-a-Porter, the fashion website that has become a global phenomenon.
|
Rachna Kingston |
Entheos | 30-May-08 |
Is a pregnant work at home mum who runs a web design resource website that attracts over a million visitors a month!
|
Xeni Jardin |
Boing Boing | 22-Jun-05 | Xeni is the editor of one of the top 5 blogs in the world, Boing Boing. |
Female Friday at The Next Web Conference?
The Next Web Conference in Amsterdam is coming up in 2 weeks, and The NextWomen are organizing Female Friday, an Open Coffee Friday April 17th, 9.00-11.00. We asked Boris Veldhuyzen van Zanten, organizer of the conference his views:
“There are lots of great women in technology and we are proud to know quite a few of them. Unfortunately we don’t always see them getting the same attention as men in technology seem to get. We are partly responsible for that of course as bloggers and conference organizers. But we try…
One of the things we did was lend a hand during the launch of The Next Women, and have Simone Brummelhuis blogging at The Next Web blog regularly about women in technology. I am happy that, similarly as the Women on The Next Web meeting at last years conference, there will be a The NextWomen Open Coffee at this years conference.
And we want to do more. We all know events and conversations are more interesting, and productive, if women participate. So how can we attract more women to our events? One way would be to get more women on stage. We did very poorly on that end this year with only one female speaker, Hermione Way, so that is something to look at for next year.
For this year we decided to actively start positively discriminating and offer all women a 20% discount. Yes that is correct; being a female gets you 25% off the normal price if you use this link to order your ticket.
We hope this incentive will attract more female visitors who in turn will attract more female speakers. Here are a few female speakers we would be very interested in hearing from:
Arianna Huffington, Catherine Fake, Esther Dyson, Gina Bianchini, Anne Wojciki, Kim Polese, Marissa Mayer, Meg Whitman, Carol Bartz.
Don’t know some of those names? Why not? They are some of the most important people in the technology industry!
Who would you like to see on stage at The Next Web Conference 2010?”
Thanks, Boris.
So join The NextWomen on Open Coffee Friday 17th, 2009 in Amsterdam.
Caterina Fake
Caterina Fake is co-founder of FLICKR – a favourite destination of bloggers and technologists from across the globe to share their photos. After numerous years of success, Flickr was in 2005 acquired by Yahoo for almost $30 million. With all the billions of pounds quoted now-a-days this seems like a bargain, and best of all it rewarded her with a position on the list of the World’s 100 Most Influential People.
Catherina Fake
As Creative and Art Director at many companies, Caterina appears to think out-of-the box, as she deals with communities and social software. Interestingly she is also a do-er with her hands: making sculptures and installation works, and writing fiction and poetry. It is no doubt through her love of art that Flickr works with both the Tate and Blurb.
Caterina also publishes a weblog, Caterina.net, although with no regularity as highlighted when towards the end of 2005 it seemed to end. Since announcing her resignation, however, from Yahoo early 2009 – where her main activities concerned new products, organisational innovation and process innovation – look what happens: she has started to update her weblog again.
We are curious what her next step will be, and especially where she will monetise on her long time passions and experience.
deals: Women exits (via M&A, IPO or otherwise)
Recently, TheNextWomen was asked to assist in compiling a list of women who led or founded companies that went through an exit. An exit can be the sale of a company or the company going public (an Initial Public Offering or IPO).
We have a large data base of Female Internet Heroes, women who are either CxOs, investors or founders of internet companies, but now we will also make a list of women exits.
Here’s start:
- The sale of clothing company LK Bennett to Phoenix Equity in 2008. Linda Bennet, who founded the company, made a deal worth 100 million pounds.
- The $125 million dollar acquisition of online women’s magazine Daily Candy by Comcast in 2008. Its founder is Dany Levy, who is also its Chairman, and Editor-in-Chief. Catherine Levene is its COO. Read more
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