MAY 2017 | growtechmag.com | Published by TRENDSgrowtechmag.com/pdf/GrowWithTechI.pdf · current...

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OverflowDEVELOPER TALENT POOL AND

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Where is the innovation?

GREAT COMPANIES [WILL] COME FROM CENTRAL

EASTERN EUROPE DETAILS INSIDE →

The future of star tups from an investor ’s

perspec tiveHOW TO BE THE CHAMPION EVERYONE

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Startup Communi ties

in EuropeLET US SHOW YOU HOW WE DO IT

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M A Y 2 0 1 7 | g r o w t e c h m a g . c o m | P u b l i s h e d b y

Founders Knowledge Bay THE FUTURE OF ACCELERATORS,

MESSAGE FOR DEEP-TECH STARTUPS AND GUIDE FOR FOUNDERS

Startup Business Cards WATCH OUT – HERE ARE YOUR

UNICORNS-TO-BE

Coworking spaces COME TO THE OFFICE AND SHARE

THE ENERGY OF COWORKING

1

Startups are the next big thing

The hype surrounding startups is not going away anytime soon. In fact, considering the attention from public bodies, enterprises and government strategy over the next several years, it is stronger than ever. It would seem there are no longer com-panies, only startups, or scale-ups if you want to dif-ferentiate. Latitude or longitude no longer matters, competition is higher, regulation is stronger, and demand is outstripping supply. There is even a totally whole new lexicon, with pitch decks, incubation, acceleration, bootstrapping and other terms, under-standable only to the insiders of the startup world.

Technology is king

There is no escaping the growth of technology in recent years, even if you wanted to. Each and every industry makes use of it and ICT solutions are all around. And this is a good thing. Technology makes life easier, safer, and more convenient. However, whatever our views on the ubiquity of technology in our modern world, we need to bear in mind the simple rule that people and environment should not be hurt. This also means that we should be mindful of the generations to come over the next millennia, those who will be directly affected by our present actions today.

Agnieszka Mellereditor-in-chief

EDITOR’S FOREWORD

Take note of Central-Eastern Europe

For all the discussion about valleys and alleys, it seems that there is increasingly little space, ei-ther literally or metaphorically, for those to strike out on their own, or even to feel the need to forge new paths. But Central-Eastern Europe is not on a hiding to nothing. From a business point of view, we are a David, striving to keep up with the Go-liaths. This may be tough, time-consuming, and challenging, but CEE startups, in particular, given their tenacity and invention, might very well have the last word.

There is nothing permanent except change

Heraclitus’ maxim about progress is doubly true for our technological times, and it is our aim in these pages to explore this theme. We want to show you current trends in some of hottest industries, to inspire and suggest new areas of business explo-ration. We also want to give an overview of the IT market, whether you are working on your own pro-ject or merely want to join the global IT community, or transfer within it. Additionally, to add a more business focus, we have included a few words of wisdom from those holding the money that will make your ideas a future reality. To encourage you to find a second way, we want to show you different European startup ecosystems, where you can work on your project. And last but not least, when it comes to startups, there can never be enough knowledge, especially when it comes to avoiding mistakes or learning from the successes of others.

Hope you grow from it!

The hype surrounding startups is not going away

anytime soon.

i n t h i s i s s u eMAY 2017

EDITOR-IN-CHIEFAgnieszka [email protected]

MANAGING EDITOREwa [email protected]

CONTRIBUTORSAgata Bona (Capful Polska), Dagmara Nickel (YouNick Mint), Artur Kurasiński (MUSE), Magnus Melander (THINGS), Magdalena Nowaczyk (Transparent Data), Arkadiusz Hajduk (Transparent Data), Guillaume Fournier (Credo Ventures), Marcin Szeląg (Innovation Nest), Pavel Bogdanov (Almaz Capital), Ewa A. Treitz (Black Pearls VC), Tuomas Kosonen (Inventure), Kristjan Laanemaa (Karma Ventures), Marketa Havlova (CzechInvest, czechstartups.org), Katerina Kynclova (CzechInvest, czechstartups.org), Agata Kowalczyk (Startup Poland), Tomasz Nadolny (Openity.pl), Weronika Szarafin (O4), Tristan William Lawrence Guy (Accelerator Assembly, Startup Olé), Hampus Jacobsson (Angel Investor), Maciej Laskus (Startup Safary), Heather Wilde (ROCeteer Inc), Stack Overflow, Marcin Pokojski (infoShare Academy), Grzegorz Borowski (Fundacja infoShare), Andrzej Kiesz (Fundacja infoShare)

PUBLISHER Fundacja infoShareOlivia CONNECTOlivia Sixal. Grunwaldzka 472D80-309 GdańskPoland

MAGAZINE LAYOUTENGRAM | www.studioengram.pl

[email protected]: +48 501 85 82 83

PRINTED BY ZAJDER.pl

18 I N V E S T O R ' S P E R S P E C T I V E

Raising early stage funding in CEE Marcin Szeląg, Innovation Nest


Searching for a champion Pawel Bogdanov, Almaz Capital


Great companies [will] come from Central Eastern Europe Ewa A. Treitz, Black Pearls VC


VCs can’t afford to be local players Interview with Tuomas Kosonen,

Inventure


Advanced technology innovation plus strong business competence make a tech success story Interview with Kristjan Laanemaa,

Karma Ventures

04 T R E N D S

What is the future of healthcare? Agata Bona, Capful Polska

06 T R E N D S

The cure for a lack of innovation Dagmara Nickel, YouNick Mint VC

08 T R E N D S

VR myths Artur Kurasiński, MUSE

10 T R E N D S

The two biggest challenges in IoT Magnus Melander, THINGS

11 T R E N D S

Can API be your spirit animal? Magdalena Nowaczyk, Arkadiusz

Hajduk, Transparent Data

14 T R E N D S

What are the 7 trends for the startup ecosystem in 2017? Tristan William Lawrence Guy, Accelerator Assembly


Why VCs are obsessed with size Guillaume Fournier, Credo Ventures

i n t h i s i s s u eMAY 2017

44 K N O W L E D G E B AY

Decision fatigue Heather Wilde, ROCeteer


Innovators & distributors Maciej Laskus, Startup Safary


Radical innovation and uncertainty: a guide for founders Hampus Jacobsson, Angel Investor

49 T E C H W O R L D

Central & Eastern Europe Developer Landscape Stack Overflow

62 T E C H W O R L D

Career on a new track – sector change to IT Marcin Pokojski, infoShare Academy

65 S TA R T U P B U S I N E S S C A R D S

Startup business cards

28 E U R O P E & S TA R T U P S

The Czech Republic startup ecosystem Marketa Havlova, Katerina Kynclova,

CzechInvest, www.czechstartups.org


The Spanish startup ecosystem Tristan William Lawrence Guy,

Startup Olé


Startups – the most innovative sector of the Polish economy Agata Kowalczyk, Startup Poland


Tricity startup ecosystem Tomasz Nadolny, Openity.pl


The future of working is coworking Weronika Szarafin, O4


Why deep-tech startups shouldn’t monetize. And what they should do instead Hampus Jacobsson, Angel Investor

4

Monday, 27th of March, 2022, Warsaw. Wika wakes up at 6:59 a.m., just before the alarm clock goes off. At last, she finds herself calm and thinking positively. It’s certainly a side-effect of the new anxiety and motiva-tion VR therapy from drCharisma she has been using for over the past two weeks to deal with her worries and a number of philosophical questions regarding her reaching her 40s and having the unstable work-life of a freelancer.

“I wonder what grade my health data would get from drCarbonX today?” she thinks. She has been able to reduce greatly her anxiety levels, cortisol release and boost her endorphins. The only thing she needs to do to complete her grading is her morning checkup. She hates putting on all those biometers, one for her heart rate, another for blood saturation, a spirometer, and the body temperature and muscle tension readers. She has been planning to invest in biometric tattoos or those new biometric clothes – so much more user-friendly. But that’ll be after she gets into the third clinical trial from Avive and gets a nice stream of healthcoins for shopping. And probably also a Wiera, Warsaw Pol-ytechnic’s personal robot for the elderly to help care for her mum.

She has been wanting to check up on her mum but has had difficulty connecting to her official health account on Google, probably because that persistent health broker from Bulgaria made her switch her health network again. Hopefully, she hasn’t lost the data from the past month; a second data discontinuity would be disastrous for her Oscar health insurance rates. It was she that recommended the Oscar insurance to her mother, as they were the first ones to introduce Insur-ance from Certain Knowledge, just after the genome sequencing dropped in price down to 20 USD. But they were so strict. They gave extra discounts for an undis-rupted data flow, but increased the rates instantly if any data was missing from the key risk indicators in

her genome. In the case of Wika’s mother, that would be her triglycerides and cholesterol levels.

“Remember to check your breakfast with your new Samsung Food Spectrometer. Be careful you don’t eat any allergens that get your inflammatory processes up.” She dictated the message that would appear on the TV screen just as her mother sits down to breakfast in front of her favourite reality show on Celebrity E-docs. Today is about drCharisma, top-rated on Facebook for its holistic approach.

Wika went for a morning walk, happy that everything is under control, apart from her 29-year-old dopamine junkie brother that is. There is nothing she can do to persuade him to stop his relentless pursuit of pleasure. Rehab would be really unpleasant once the endorphins and dopamine get to his level, but then maybe he likes rehab. Even though, she worried about his mental stability and his recent depressive incidents. Luckily, tomorrow, she has an e-visit on The Best World Doc-tors platform with a Japanese neuropsychologist to get a 4th opinion on the most recommended digital Psych-assistant for her prodigal brother. At any rate, it’s good to be in the loop. “It might be that my next level will be a food and health coach,” she thought, after getting back from her walk. She gets ready for today’s visits at the new program in the Mokotow Municipal Health Community as a health coach, as only face-to-face, organic work is a solution to the obesity epidemic.

“Well, no wonder,” she thinks. “Change is hard.” She reminds herself that, in her work as a health data sci-entist at an academic clinic, she knows how reluctant doctors have been to all take on board the new tech and data, and more reluctant yet to relinquish their God-like status.

Is this a picture of healthcare and health-tech in 5 years? No one can predict the future, but we can try to imagine it and prepare for it. Having only one official vision of future risks, threats and opportu-

What is the future of healthcare?

Strategy consultant for over 7 years creating innovative business

models for startups, SMEs and large companies. An entrepreneur and marketeer with over 10 years of practice,

mostly in international pharmaceutical

corporations (GSK, Novartis).

Agata Bona, Capful Polska

4 t r e n d s

t r e n d s

5

nities is no longer sufficient. The business environment is becoming increasingly unpredictable. The speed of change and the scale of interconnection is increasing as the world becomes more complex and turbulent. In addition, the character and business models of most industries are changing, as competitors, suppliers, cli-ents and other stakeholders undergo rapid transformation. Complexity challenges organisations to anticipate and to adapt quickly to unprecedented levels of change. As uncertainties raise investment risks, management becomes more complex and several opportunities may be left uncapital-ised. This uncertainty has become the new normal (Schwartz and Kelly 2012). Thus, scenario planning is becoming more com-mon. Scenarios are short, plausible stories about how the future might turn out in 5-10 years. Multiple, alternative scenarios of the future enable companies to better anticipate inevitable surprises, and benefit from emerging business opportunities.

The key to crafting scenarios is to under-stand the difference between trends and uncertainties. Trends are continuities and certainties that develop quite foreseeably in a certain direction. Trends that have been strong for a longer period of time are called megatrends. Some of the current megatrends are globalisation, digitalisa-tion, environmental change, urbanisation, demographic change, connected living and the East-ward shift of political power. Un-certainties are discontinuities with fewer indications of the probability of occurrence. Uncertainties are driving forces that have both a high uncertainty and a high impact on a company. To paraphrase Frank Knight (1921), uncertainty is quite different from risk, as we can never be certain about un-certainty.

So, what are the key uncertainties in the future of healthcare and health-tech over the next 10 years? The story at the begin-ning focuses mostly on the topic of data and tech trends but there are a number of uncertainties such as, what the avail-ability of medical data will be, whether

there will be enough learnable data for AI healthcare startups, and what the social acceptance of sharing personal data in the era of threat and insecurity would be. No one can accurately predict how the right shift in politics will impact the process of redesigning the healthcare system, who will enter the healthcare sector would be the competitive landscape in 5 years’ time or what would be reimbursed within the formal healthcare sector. How fast coun-tries will introduce a model of fee-for-per-formance rather than fee-for-service, and how medical insurance system will evolve, has yet to be determined.

We cannot know the answers to these questions, but if we think, not only in cer-tainties, but also in uncertainties, craft-ing alternative scenarios based on key uncertainties can lead to understanding what could happen in the future. This can help with understanding the surround-ing macro and business level trends and discontinuities. For example, changes in technological, economic, legislative and customer or value-based factors may have a dramatic effect on the success of startups. Scenarios are useful in developing insights into a startup’s future macro and business level development. For example, Hi-Tech companies can utilise scenarios to build up a holistic picture of future trends and discontinuities with regard to technolog-ical development, consumer needs, and the competitive environment. In addition to testing and creating strategy, vision and business plans, spin-offs can utilise scenarios to identify upcoming business opportunities on the macro and business level. Spin-offs normally focus on identi-fying different kinds of business models, emerging technologies and technological discontinuities, consumer behavior trends and discontinuities, and societal trends and changes in the area of values, regu-lation and legislation. Scenarios can help a company to understand the rapid chang-es in the complex and uncertain operating environment in which startups normally operate.

5G r o w w i t h T e c h — M A Y 2 0 1 7

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In the early nineties, a doctor was carrying out re-search for Pfizer, the pharmaceutical giant, in Mer-thyr Tydfil, a small town in Wales. This postindus-trial area, once a thriving centre of mining and iron ore smelting, had become a centre of hopelessness, unemployment, and poor health following the in-dustry’s decline. The average male life expectancy on one of the local estates wasn’t even 59, the worst across the UK.

The drug the local doctor tested for Pfizer was supposed to be a coronary heart disease treatment. The drug, then known as UK-92480, didn’t meet the scientists’ expectations. Various tests indicat-ed that it had little effect on the condition, far less than other existing drugs. And then something unexpected happened.

Patients started to approach the doctor asking for some more pills. In some cases, wives came to see him instead of their husbands. The surprised doctor started a careful investigation into this startling turn of events.

It turned out that, although UK-92480 didn’t cure coronary heart disease, it had a curious side effect. What the drug brought to the gloomy, tired, and depressing everyday life of this British province was an unusual revival, a happiness and joy for life. UK-92480 made the unemployed and embittered Welshmen feel they were real men again.

Pfizer capitalized on this unique effect of UK-92480 and dubbed the new drug Viagra.

Very expensive failures

The history of medicine is filled with discoveries and innovations made by accident. X-rays were the result one such coincidence, while, thanks to Alexander Fleming’s messy lab, today we have penicillin and antibiotics.

On the face of it, the Viagra story suggests we might have expected some great medical discoveries at the turn of the 20th century brought about by pure coincidence. Nothing could be further from the truth. Such coincidences happen only with long, painstaking, expensive research.

New drugs must go through a pre-clinical testing process, which takes on average 3.5 years. Human trials can only commence after that. According to US research, only 5 out of 5000 drugs make it to that stage. Further clinical trials involve more and more patients. During the final stage, this may number several thousand people. However, even this is not the end. Once trials are finished, the drug must receive marketing authorisation. In the US alone, the required documentation might be 100 thousand pages long. The entire process lasts about 12 years and costs over one billion dollars, according to phar-maceutical companies.

These are the research and testing costs of a sin-gle drug that makes its way to the market. Forbes magazine has calculated the total price to include the costs of failures. Its journalists divided the to-

The cure for a lack of innovation

Serial entrepreneur, CEO of Nickel Development – leading real-estate developer; Founder of

NTPP – the first private Technology Park in Poland.

Spiritus movens/Creator and CEO of YouNick

– operational Venture Capital fund focused on

investments in Life Science, MedTech, IoT and ICT

projects.

The last time an innovative drug, fully developed in Poland, appeared on the market,

we didn’t even have colour TV. Is it that we don’t want to, don’t know how to, or simply

can’t compete with the West?

Dagmara Nickel, Founder/CEO YouNick Mint

Venture Capital

6 t r e n d s

7

tal research and development expenses of pharmaceutical companies from 1997-2012 by the number of drugs which eventually received marketing authorisation. Here is where the numbers really start to be im-pressive. Amgen spent $3.7bn, Eli Lilly paid $4.5bn to launch their drug on the market, while AstraZeneca spent the exorbitant amount of $12bn.

Painful diagnosis

We simply don’t have that kind of money in Poland. The total money spent on bio-technology research and development in Poland in 2015 was PLN 850 million. Lit-tle wonder then that the last time Polish scientists brought a new pharmaceutical drug to the world market, according to sci-ence historian Prof. Iwona Arabas, was in 1970, when $180k was enough to develop and commercialise a product. The drug’s name was Bicordin, and in some sense, you could say it was Viagra's predecessor, as it was used in coronary heart disease treat-ment for many years. The drug’s inventor, Prof. Stanisław Biniecki was educated in Poznań before World War II and also in-vented Binazin, a now discontinued orig-inal antihypertensive drug. It’s somewhat embarrassing to admit that we haven’t had anything to be proud of since then.

Neither Polish pharmaceutical compa-nies, nor the state budget alone can provide financing for such expensive processes, par-ticularly for phase II and III of clinical trials.

Another issue is legal regulation, which today does not favour investment in sci-entist research. On the one hand, the industry needs incentives, relief and tax exemptions to encourage companies to

spend more on R&D. On the other hand, a research institution must be guaranteed some profits from the successful commer-cialisation.

A recipe for limitations

Are we doomed to failure? Of course, not. Instead of complaining, we must take on ambitious tasks adjusted to our Polish re-ality. We can, for example, invest in evo-lutionary pharma projects and focus on new forms of drug supply or personalised

Neither Polish pharmaceutical companies, nor

the state budget alone can provide

financing for such expensive

processes, particularly for

phase II and III of clinical trials.

drugs. Instead of complaining about lim-ited funding, Poland needs to look for solutions based on market demands and a good idea. This is exactly what Smart Pharma, a YouNick Mint investment, did. The innovation of Innofer, a device for the precise administration of elemental iron to infants, didn’t require expensive research. The idea behind it was to allow a simple child-weight based dose calcu-lation. The fund only invested several thousand Polish złoty into the project. Today, Innofer has already gained a 15% market share.

You can also try and f ind the right partner who could help researchers reach a new level. We can look at some of the research carried out by scientists at the University of Warsaw, who dis-covered a universal method for mRNA gene stablilisation and productivity increase to allow for the development of vaccines against cancer growth. The scientists contacted BioNTech, a Ger-man company, which, in 2015, signed sub-licensing agreements for the Polish invention worth $300m. A well-prepared agreement guarantees that the Universi-ty will profit from sub-license sales, and eventually, the sales of pharmaceutical drugs and treatments developed.

“I would prefer to see such inventions developed entirely in Poland. However, this is not possible,” Prof. Jacek Jemielity, Head Researcher of the mRNA project told the INNPoland.pl.

We’ve had problems with biotechnolo-gy and medical innovation in Poland for many years, and these are not going to disappear overnight. However, we can develop the ways to play with the best.


8

VR myths

With so many tech innovations around, why should we bother with VR, anyway? In the era of drones, flying cameras, bitcoins and artificial intelligence, do we really need to put on a pair of enormous glass-es, separating us from the outside world?

In this article, I am going to deal with the most common VR and VR-related myths.

People will not accept VR, just as they didn’t accept 3D movies.

As humans, we are very much dependent on our sense of sight. Our eyes and our brains enable us to make sense of the world around us and if needed, prompt us to escape. Sight is the most important of all human senses, enabling us to notice light from a distance of 22 kilometers.

However, manipulation can be used to cheat our eyes and so send false signals to our brains. That’s what happens during VR zombie fights or roller-coaster rides. In the first case, you can really feel threatened by the enemy. In the second, your inner ear reacts as if you were sitting in a speeding roller coaster car.

People who have worn a VR headset know that virtual reality has nothing in common with 3D TV or cinema. These technologies simply cannot be compared. A three-dimensional film you watch in a cinema gives you only an illusion of 3D, an illu-sion that is gone as soon as you move your glasses to the side.

In contrast, VR enables true interaction and lets you freely navigate and experience it. Unlike with a 3D film, in virtual reality, you are in the middle of the scene with images surrounding you.

This is really a huge difference as it evokes a deep sense of immersion and triggers brand new kinds of emotions and sensations. 3D films are simply a version of standard films. VR is a step that can be compared to the progress the human race made from the era of rock art to the era of social media.

There are too few VR devices available. Be-sides, people don’t know how to use them.

As a matter of fact, this is the best time and place for virtual reality, as well as for augmented and mixed reality (AR and MR) because our technological de-velopment is advanced enough to create a market for it. It is possible because practically everyone owns a smartphone nowadays. This was not the case in 2007 before the first iPhone was launched. Back then, there were no smartphones, so there was no target audience, either.

Talking about the iPhone, 12 months after its launch 6,129,000 were sold. During a similar same period, Samsung sold 5,000,000 of their Gear VR. If you take into consideration other producers, you reach an impressive number. However, you have to remember one thing, if you want to somehow define the development stage of VR today, you can compare it to days long ago when Netscape was the

Members of the press and people from the tech industry have already stopped mocking ‘the year of

Linux’ and ‘the year of mobile’. Now, they are looking forward to ‘the year of VR’ and soon they will be

mocking that too. And we will soon realise that this trend has been present in our lives long before its

advent was officially announced.

An entrepreneur focused on investing in tech projects. Mentor,

blogger and active trade commentator. Co-creator of Aula Polska meetings

and Aulery awards. Believes in VR, AR and MR and that

video content devours the world.

Artur Kurasiński, Creator of MUSE

and GhostVR

8 t r e n d s

9

only available browser and everything was still about to kick off.

The VR/AR/MR market is huge and growing. Millennials and Generation Z are the dream target audience for these tech-nologies. There is the hackneyed phrase that they were born with smartphones in their hands. As a matter of fact, using dig-ital devices is an obvious and very natural thing for these generations. In addition to that, millions of social media users are now able to publish and watch 360-degree vide-os on Facebook, Twitter and Vimeo. Other platforms, like Snapchat, will follow soon.

I don’t need a helmet to talk to peo-ple. I can use Skype or Messenger.

VR is called the ’ultimate empathy ma-chine’ and there is no exaggeration in the claim. VR seemingly separates and isolates you from other people, however, due to the fact that it triggers completely different emotions, VR lets its users develop a new type of bonds.

We don’t need yet another tech-nology to watch videos.

According to Cisco, by 2019, 80% of data on the World Wide Web will be video files.

This means the ‘visual web’ is growing. This is a new type of user interface, dif-ferent from the one you may know from the 90s. By the way, do you remember the first operating system interfaces, such as Windows 3.11?

Drone operators, as well as those in charge of IoT devices and autonomous car passengers, are all VR (or AR/MR) users. Rapid technological development has in-duced change away from the 90s interface paradigms.

Video and VR impose a brand new type of operation and interaction in the space around us; this demands a brand new type of design, UX and communication. If we also consider virtual assistant services like Cortana or Siri we will finally reach a stage of human development where people use image and speech instead of machine lan-guage to communicate with machines.

So, VR is our new language of inter-action with the world of robots and ad-vanced technology. And paradoxically, this language will also soon improve human communication.

VR is niche. It won’t bring in any money, so no one reasonable enough is interested in it or is going to invest in it.


At first glance, this is what it may look like. However, if you take into consideration the fact that such players as Facebook, Samsung, HTC, Sony, Google, Microsoft and even Apple, who is rumored to be launching their own AR solution soon, have invested millions in VR, it becomes clear that VR solutions are not one-off niche ventures.

Aside from the major players, there are plenty of smaller ones, all playing their part in developing the ecosystem in their own way. Let me repeat, if we compare our current situation to the early development of the Internet and the launch of Netscape, how could we, now in 2017, be quite so certain about what is going to happen in ten or twenty years’ time?

VR is not a temporary trend, but a nat-ural, tech-based stage in the development of our world. Just as the changes the mar-ket is undergoing are rapid, the adoption of VR will be rapid, with the majority of players launching mobile headsets, such as Samsung Gear and Google Daydream.

It took a decade for the smartphone to beat PC in terms of sales figures. I do not dare to think of the changes that are going to take place on the VR market in the next five or ten years.

1 0

This is the naive era and it will come to an end soon. Your personal data is yours and you should only give it away if you think it is a good idea. And that typically means that they promise to keep it for themselves and you get something reasonable back. Data is the new gold and we should protect it carefully and companies should pay for it according-ly. Identity theft is just one of the issues that have increased with our digital lifestyle and if you talk to anyone who has lost control of their identity, you will hear that potential financial losses and a lot of work are only the start of the problem. Not knowing what the thieves have done in your name is hard to live with, and many organisations are equally naive today. Critical data has to be kept safe: web services for IPR management might not be a good idea, for example. At least not unless you know where the servers and their backups are.

The only architecture I know of today which can support future requirements on privacy is where users own their data and opt in to share it. Here is one example: I’m working with Springworks in the automotive industry today. In our company, enabling mobile operators to connect cars, the owners of the cars own the data generated in the car and they opt in to services from insurance companies, roadside assistance companies, parking companies, etc, giv-ing them access to some of their data to get a great service back. The mobile operators play the critical role of trusted partner. Car manufacturers typically argue that they own the data generated in the car.

A good example of what will drive new require-ments on privacy is the report from Democratic Media (December 2016) on how wearables are used to collect and sell health data. Is this something we want? I think not. Consumers and enterprises will raise new requirements, and governments will fol-low with legislation. Proper architectures for privacy and trusted partners will be kings.

Magnus Melander, Co-founder of

THINGS

Ref:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/14/ya-hoo-hack-security-of-one-billion-accounts-breached

https://www.democraticmedia.org/CDD-Wearable-Devic-es-Big-Data-Report

The two biggest challenges in IoT

Security problems can be fixed and, since we nor-mally accept apologies and tend to forget quickly, companies seem to get away with it. In a recently disclosed attack on Yahoo, according to The Guardian (14/12/2016), 2013 hackers compromised over 1 bil-lion user accounts. But not even the biggest attack in history, as far as we know, caused much excitement. If I recall correctly, the acquisition price came down somewhat when Verizon acquired Yahoo, but that’s about it. Privacy issues are different since this is about trust, and when you have lost control of your data, you never get it back. Without a proper archi-tecture and trusted partners involved, no service can cope with the future requirements on privacy.

Most people respond along the lines of "I have nothing to hide" or "that's how people are these days

– nobody really cares", but people living in countries where they don't trust the government typically have a completely different point of view. And as we experience the power of data analytics, we and our governments will most likely change our views. In most western countries, we have robust policies about what you can ask people in interviews for em-ployment. In some cases, even age is a no-no. But given the data available to employers today, provided from users by signature or even Facebook, combined with data analytics, they already know much more than you can imagine, and don't need to ask. Face-book, we all know, owns our data but who owns the data in your training and health apps? And have you even allowed them to sell the data?

An entrepreneur and ICT professional devoted to

IoT. He is Sales Director at Springworks, owns Wbird, co-founded THINGS and

founded the SMSE alliance. He frequently speaks

at international industry events and writes his IoT

blog connectcompute.com.

1 0 t r e n d s

I never miss an opportunity to make the point that Security and Privacy are the

two biggest challenges for IoT and people normally agree immediately. But when I add

that privacy is the bigger of the two, we immediately end up in discussions.

1 1

Spot the gorilla

Since 2000, when the first web API was launched by Salesforce, the power of API’s influence has spread widely all over the world. We see thousands of APIs used as a way to expand products’ functionalities and we can easily see how opening up data changes society and helps to build smart cities, with fast, free access to information. Nowadays, with appli-cations dealing with air pollution, the spread of disease, traffic jams, etc, we don’t need to wait for the evening television news to learn what is hap-pening around us. This is something we owe to the power of API.

The hardest thing to do is see what is right in front of your eyes

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

This quotation from the famous German poet and novelist is most apt in the case of APIs. Oppor-tunities multiply if you just let yourself spot the gorilla. There is a lot of open data which you can use to identify new sources of revenue. Visit, for example, kapeli.com/dash where you can find 150+ AP offline documentation sets, zapier.com with 750+ apps working together using APIs, or check out the activity of the Open Data Institute (ODI), founded by the inventor of the web Sir Tim Berners-Lee and AI expert Sir Nigel Shadbolt. At the latest ODI Summit 2016, you may have been inspired by such projects as London’s pigeon air patrol – an initiative from Plume Labs, which uses live pigeons to collect data on air pollution.

If your first thought is ‘yeah, great! But I don’t see money here!’ you would be wrong. There are many grants available from open data incubators. Meet, for example, ODINE, a programme that supports European startup innovation of open data. In the

Can API be your spirit animal?

Master of Cognitive Science (UAM) and a self-styled psychologist of accurate intuitions. Coming from fashion industry marketing, she aims to convince

techies that clear and effective code should be also pretty and seductive.

Magdalena Nowaczyk, Marketing & PR Specialist at Transparent Data

Entrepreneurial practitioner with international experience in ventures of all sizes and at various

development stages. In 2014, recognized as one of the Top 50 Creative People in Polish Business by

BRIEF Magazine.

Arkadiusz Hajduk, Founder and CEO of Transparent Data

It is believed that the globalized economy and new technologies have made Application Program Interface the most wanted in town. API drives innovation, enriches applications with data and allows for the automation of

business processes. In the year of Post-Truth, which demands higher and higher

transparency not only from brands, but also from governments, opening up data with API is

not only a prospective business model, but also the way to retain trust.

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first ODINE batch there were, among oth-ers, an app for parents tracking infectious illnesses in schools, a global search engine for the Internet of Things that indexes dozens of public open data assets, and millions of connected devices, from tem-perature sensors and air quality monitors to Sharks, a service which offers market in-telligence to help entrepreneurs and local councils assess the business potential in empty commercial properties in deprived urban centres, or a B2B e-marketplace that aims to make one company’s bio-waste another company’s raw material. As you can already see, the API sharing economy smoothly integrates with future global trends.

Future global trends

It wouldn’t be wrong to describe the fu-ture global trends macro drivers for devel-opment, impacting not only businesses and societies but also culture and personal styles. And while some of them, like the

globalized economy and new technologies, are already well recognized, you can easily use them in your company’s strategy, new products and services.

Some quick facts:• The sharing economy and the five main

sharing sectors (peer-to-peer finance, peer-to-peer accommodation, car shar-ing, online stuffing and music video streaming) are considered to have the potential to increase global revenues from a current $15 billion to $335 billion by 2025

• The Subscription Economy Index is al-ready growing 9 times faster than S&P 500 (15.1% vs 1.7%)

• The world economy is going digital and has 4 main triggers: digital data – to bet-ter predict and facilitate decision-mak-ing processes, automation – to create systems to work autonomously and or-ganise themselves, IoT – sensors bridge the digital and our real lives, and digital customer access – direct, transparent and demanding access

Does all this fit with an API?

Successful startups built on APIs

If you are still in doubt whether APIs might get you where you’re going, here are couple startups which built their success on API as a core product offering:• Stripe – hundreds of thousands of cus-

tomers from 25 countries in 2016, val-ued at more than $9B

• Twilio – 28,000+ customers in 2017, went public in 2016 (NYSE), market cap around $3B as of Feb 2017

• SendGrid – 40,000+ customers in 2016, has raised $78M from firms including Bain Capital and Bessemer Venture Partners

• Keen IO – 50,000+ developers and 3,500+ customers in 2016, has raised $29.22M from investors including Se-quoia Capital and Pelion Venture Part-ners

• Algolia – 2,300+ customers in 2017, has raised $21.22M from investors including Accel Partners and Storm Ventures

The word product in the context of API wasn’t used here accidentally. It is believed that even though, for many startups and companies, an

API is a feature expanding the core service, you should think about an

API in terms of a product, a product that needs its own outstanding

package, user-friendly customer service and seductive slogans.

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What accounts for their success? Of course coming up with innovative ideas, working harder than others, having the courage and keeping the faith when most needed. But they also learned fast that what the market needs is often not a sin-gular customer need. They collected data and found a way to solve diverse business problems with a one-engine solution.

The word product in the context of API wasn’t used here accidentally. It is believed that even though, for many startups and companies, an API is a feature expanding the core service, you should think about an API in terms of a product, a product that needs its own outstanding package, us-er-friendly customer service and seductive slogans. Developers understand well what an API is, but making an API your core product means making it marketable and understandable to non-technical people as well. CEOs who make final decisions, man-agers of different departments that will use the data your API delivers every day, assistants who often do the first search for those higher up – in most cases, these are who you need to convince. And you won’t do this with your technical mumbo jumbo jargon.

The majority of people are visualizers, focussed on what they want to see –

a solution to a problem, and not reams of API documentation. They want to see what API gives them and how it benefits

them. There are two easy ways to do this well: a demo and a metaphor.

Where to start: the magic of com-munication

The majority of people are visualizers, fo-cussed on what they want to see – a solu-tion to a problem, and not reams of API documentation. They want to see what API gives them and how it benefits them. There are two easy ways to do this well: a demo and a metaphor.

The API demos are a must have – you need to showcase an API in action and present its power. Your potential custom-ers need to understand what’s in store for them. There is a reason the food and cosmetics industries promote their new products with free samples – it’s the most effective way to convince people that you have something they’re going to like more than the stuff they already pay for right now.

The metaphor is also a necessity – how else would you otherwise communicate a new concept and the new meaning of your innovative API? If it’s innovative, it means that no one had this idea before or was unable to realize the idea. Either way, the market is neither conscious of the pros of the API, nor is it ready to accept life

without it. Just like with smartphones. If you know someone who has just switched to a smartphone, you will see that, dur-ing the first few days, they are not fully convinced and use only a fraction of the smartphone’s functionality. But let them play with it for a week and they would rather die than let you take it off them. Think about finding a unique metaphor for your API that will make your target customers feel just like that person, un-willing to live without their smartphone.

If a picture is worth 1000 words, then a metaphor is worth 1000 pictures

Thomas J. Shell

A metaphor is understanding and ex-periencing one thing in terms of anoth-er. One of best examples is time is mon-ey; something abstract explained with something very real and concrete. You just need to explain your intangible API as something your customers care about and understand.


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What are the 7 trends for the

startup ecosystem in 2017?

The world is full of infinite possibilities. Organizations strive to react in time to new technology and innovation before they get disrupted. Customers are the key factor, with user experience strategies winning over the market. The technological revolu-tion offers new solutions for a wide range of problems: sanitary solutions, the industrial world and security, customer support, In-ternet of Things, etc.

There are several trends that will mark 2017 in the world of entrepreneurship. We have highlighted 7 trends, starting with technology and business models, and mov-ing on to sectors and global trends:• Mixed reality

Combining the most innovative tech-nologies of the last year is already a fact. Virtual reality, augmented reality or 360º video are becoming commonly available and make it possible for the world we see through our screens to become increas-ingly realistic. We have seen countless applications and uses of this technolo-gy in entertainment, but will see more in the world of education, marketing or advertising.

• AI: Customization and develop-ment of integrated technologies between machine learning and human factors Researchers and developers need to tap into the unique strengths associated with people and technology. People have the creativity, empathy and the spark that form the basis of emotional intel-ligence. In contrast, machines have effi-ciency, rapid access to knowledge, cus-tomization capabilities and high-speed data analysis. A key trend in 2017 will be the exploration of 'cyborg learning'

– how to couple emotional intelligence with the great computational ability of Artificial Intelligence. Deep Learning is also a fun trend to follow.As you can see from these first two trends, the importance is on the combination of new technology to create even greater value. Despite the rapid growth of the digital economy in Europe and increasing growth and investment opportunities,

Tristan’s focus at Startup Olé is on building a more connected entrepreneur ecosystem, providing open collaboration opportunities

and the standardisation of agreements between stakeholders to create added value within the European startup community.

Tristan William Lawrence Guy, Coordinator of Accelerator Assembly & Startup Europe

Universities Network

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many European entrepreneurs still do not have access to adequate resources and support to combine technologies. It is difficult for entrepreneurs to develop their ideas due to a lack of connections with other actors who can collaborate in the process of creating and developing new business ideas.

• Controlling the sharing economyIn 2016, platforms like Uber, Blablacar or Airbnb have been the centre of attention for policy makers. Contrasting interests, theoretically altruistic initiatives that do not turn out to be so, or resistance to change from the more traditional sectors have led to the concept of the sharing economy in Europe being viewed with some skepticism. And yet, the phenom-enon is unstoppable. Identifying the key areas where this business model should be employed is important for the future of European innovation.

• Fintech sector transformation2016 was extremely interesting for the

Fintech sector. In 2017, we are likely to see greater regulation of the sector, establishing better rules of the game, a greater incorporation of the insurance sector into Fintech and the definitive digital transformation of banking. Block-chain, the technology used by Bitcoin, is starting to be accepted in the financial sector. As a technology that stores and records transactions in the network, it does not need trusted third parties to validate them. This will allow a reduction in costs and the acceleration of electronic transactions. Banks will be more con-cerned about updating data in real time and finding added value in transparency. For this reason, one of the future projec-tions for banking is centered on change in information availability and privacy, as well as in real time transactions.

• PersonalizationIt is not just about doing, but also about how to personalize and humanize servic-es and products. Reinventing branding or

offering a more personalized customer service are some of the most important goals of many startups. Personalized re-ferrers, or intelligent personal assistants based on Big Data, will become more and more common in our daily lives. On the other hand, advertising will be less arti-ficial and will go hand in hand with au-thentic testimonials and User Generated Content. Overall, those who understand their customers better, will be able to cater better to their needs.

• More corporate investment and co-ownershipIncreasingly, large corporations see start-ups as not only a form of corporate social responsibility, but also as an opportunity to invest in what could become their fu-ture suppliers: disruptive companies in sectors where it is easier to innovate by being small and making brave decisions for high rewards. Corporates are starting to embrace the fact that they need to work with innovation, otherwise they will lose their market little by little.In 2017, we will see how this tendency is accentuated, turning big companies from being patrons to partners, co-creators and allies with smaller startups.

• More accelerators and incubatorsLastly, the terms incubator and accel-erator are now common in the world of startups. Over and over, they move more money and invest in more companies, and this trend is not going to stop in 2017. Along with the sixth trend, we are seeing a huge increase in corporate accelerators or accelerators with substantial spon-sorship from large corporates. As the in-vestment in innovation increases, there is more demand for established accelera-tion programs to expand, often looking to bring their expertise to verticalized programs or address specific challenges in the market.

The world is full of infinite possibilities. Organizations strive to react in time to new technology

and innovation before they get disrupted. Customers are the

key factor, with user experience strategies winning over the market.

“

”


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Most companies have a traditional busi-ness model: they have developed a prod-uct or a service, which they sell for more than it costs them. They make a margin, generate a profit, reinvest this into the next product or service (or distribute it to the owners of the business), rinse repeat. However, these are not the businesses that VCs invest in. Or should I say, this is not enough for a VC to base its investment on.

VCs invest in hyper growth and scal-ability.

The reason almost every VC backed busi-ness is tech-enabled (read: most reliant on software in one form or another) is not

because they have a weird fascination for innovation, although having a weird fas-cination for innovation is probably a trait found in most VCs. It is because software is infinitely scalable. Once you have paid for the cost of development, there is vir-tually no additional cost, other than the marginal costs of maintenance and cus-tomer support, whether you sell one ‘unit’ or thousands. This, in turn, enables hyper growth, once the miraculous ‘product mar-ket fit’ has been found.

However, what this doesn’t mention is how risky investing in this type of busi-ness is. Most businesses will run out of

money before they find that market prod-uct fit. You can look at it in two ways.

Number one: barriers to entry in trying to create a software product are really low. Many will try, competition will be fierce, and the likelihood that you are the only one with that genius idea is almost zero. Think of it as many candidates entering the funnel.

Number two: it is really hard to convince someone to give you money for something. People will only fork out cash for some-thing that satisfies one of their Maslow pyramid needs. Even then, many of the web 2.0 economy consumers have become used to receiving services for free. Think of it as few making it out of the funnel.

So with that in mind, one has to real-ize that many VC investments FAIL. Zip, nada, the money is gone. But a VC has its own ‘customers’, the LPs who lent money as an investment, typically over a period of 5+5 years, and who expect a return on the money they’ve been investing. And therefore, to succeed, the VC needs those investments which succeed, to succeed in a big way. To any normal investor, a project

Why VCs are obsessed with size

↗ He first started his career with an internship at Goldman

Sachs in the US, and then worked as a strategy

consultant in Kaiser Associates' London office. Prior

to obtaining his MBA from INSEAD, he spent a year as

an associate in Athene Capital.

Associate at Credo Ventures

GUILLAUME FOURNIER:

“How big do you think this can get, and where do you see yourself in terms of size in 5 years?” If you’ve

spoken with a VC before, you have likely heard these questions uttered by every one of them, probably

several times. If you haven’t spoken to a VC before, you should make sure to give these questions a lot

of thought before meeting them. And if you are wondering whether you should try raising money from a VC, read on for a better understanding of what sort

of answers they are looking for.

1 6 I N V E S T O R ' S P E R S P E C T I V E

I N V E S T O R ' S P E R S P E C T I V E

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Investment Type What happened Performance Non VC Portfolio VC Portfolio 1 VC Portfolio 2 VC Portfolio 3

FailuresThe business failed and lost the money

– – 40,0% 40,0% 50,0%

Quasi failuresThe business failed but the investor at least managed to get its money out

1x 30,0% 20,0% 20,0% 20,0%

Good returnThe company grew a lot but not deliver up initial expectations

3x 70,0% 40,0% 20,0% 20,0%

Great returnThe company was a great success, as hoped for in the investment thesis

10x – – 20,0% 8,0%

UnicornsThe company outperformed and delivered incredible returns

50x – – – 2,0%

Initial Fund € 100,0 € 240,0 € 140,0 € 280,0 € 260,0

Money Multiple Returned 1,0x 2,4x 1,4x 2,8x 2,6x

ments of 1m. The table below compares the final money multiple, how many times the sum invested was returned, depending on the portfolio success mix.

VC Portfolio 1 would be considered a fail-ure. Over the life of the fund (10 years), the VC was only able to return 1.4x. As a com-parison, $100m invested in a conserva-tive investment plan returning 5% per year would be worth $163m (i.e. 1.6x) by then, taking compounding into account., Most VCs would be very happy with VC Portfolio 2, returning 2.8x, with 20% of its investment performing well and 20% performing according to plan. Remember all these investments are made with a plan to deliver great returns.

VC Portfolio 3 however is closer to a real, successful fund. Most investments have

failed, few have delivered, but 2 out of the 100 have delivered exponentially and made up for all the failures. As a result, the overall fund returns 2.6x and can be considered successful.

So going back to our original question “How big do you think this can get, and where do you see yourself in terms of size in 5 years?”, you can now see what type of answer the VC is looking for. Plenty of businesses can generate 3x and would find themselves willing investors. But a VC will look for the ones with a plan to deliver 10x, ideally more. He knows that most will fail, and yet, if he is able to find the few that perform beyond ex-pectations, he will generate attractive returns for his backers.

which aims to get twice or three times the money back would seem attractive, but not to a VC; not with the level of risk involved in its investments. This works if you are reasonably convinced that the investment will deliver according to plan. But remember, most of the VCs’ invest-ment will lose money because of how hard it is to make it out of that funnel. There-fore, the ones that succeed need to pay for the ones that have failed, and more, to ensure that the fund overall earns money.

A VC, to be considered successful, needs to return more than 2-3 times the ini-tial fund. So now let’s do a quick back of the envelope calculation on how to get there, when most of your investments fail. For simplicity’s sake, let’s imagine a virtual $100m fund, making 100 invest-


Examples of VCs portfolio

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Raising Venture Capital for early stage tech startups is HARD. Yes, we do have an explosion of micro VCs focused on seed investment. No, oversupply of cap-ital doesn’t make raising funding any easier. Many early stage investors are targeting seed investments while, in reality, expecting Series A-type validation. If this wasn’t enough, capital is not distributed equally. Founding a company in London, Berlin or Paris is not the same as going at it in Riga, Warsaw, Prague, Budapest or Sofia. The concentration of cap-ital is much higher in the leading tech hubs across Europe. Cities which have not yet broken into this elite ranking see considerably less capital available to fund the earliest opportunities. If raising early stage funding wasn’t challenging enough, doing it from Central Eastern Europe makes it even harder.

In theory, what we are accustomed to is the following. A small team of founders, 2-3 people, manages to bootstrap and launch a prototype. The product gains initial traction and the founders set off to raise additional capital to keep momentum going. They secure a few hundred thousand Euros

from a syndicate of VC funds to finance 18 months or so of runway. With this capital, they hope to reach sufficient metrics to close a Series A with some notable firms from London or Berlin.

The reality might be more challenging for many CEE founders. Being based in CEE means that there are only a few funds you can turn to in your home city. Angel funding might be even scarcer as there aren’t that many techs in the region. Not being able to raise that first round locally, founders try to cold pitch to whatever funds they can find in Google. Discovering how hard it is to get through with a cold email, the next step involves pitching at events and following the tech conference circuit. The good thing about conferences is that you can at least get a 1-on-1 sit down during startup/investor speed dating. Having collected a bunch of business cards, it is time to follow up and send out pitch decks, send some more emails and Skypes but the goal of closing a round is not getting any closer. VCs like the golden triangle of startup land (Prod-uct, Team, Market) but somehow are not eager to

Raising early stage funding in CEE

↗ Early stage investor focused on Software-as-a-Service

companies. Closing on 10 years of experience working

in the Internet industry on both sides of the table –

startups and venture capital. Previously a product

manager at epuls.pl.

Partner at Innovation Nest

MARCIN SZELĄG:


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close. Months go by. Being distracted with fundraising eats away precious time for product development and sales. Growth stalls. The founders are back at square one.

On the other side of the table, it doesn’t look any easier. Being a VC focused on ear-ly stage B2B software companies, I get to experience the same types of challenges trying to fund companies in the region. The local pool of investable companies is very small and partners have to look across several cities in the region to generate enough dealflow. This involves many hours spent on desktop research and drinking coffee at conferences. Investing is more about building relationships than crunching data and you cannot develop a relationship overnight. It is one of the reasons fundraising takes up so much time. Building a relationship with a local investor is much easier than doing it over a distance and there are VCs who will not commit unless there is a local partner involved. This might be the single most important reason why raising funds in CEE is so different from raising funds in tech hubs, not to mention San Francisco or New York.

What we need to understand about CEE is that it is a distributed network of very underdeveloped and fragile tech com-munities. None of the cities has enough density of founders and VCs to make the traditional fundraising model work. In order to succeed at raising early stage funding in our region, we need to build a proprietary dealflow model, with local VCs across CEE, working cross-border to share companies and mitigate the risk of funding early stage ideas. In order for this network to thrive, we need to build deep connections between the various cities,

and trust among syndicate investors. Local tech conferences play an important role in this process. TechChill, Latitude59, Infos-hare, DigitalK, Podim, Pioneers, Wolves Summit are becoming this connecting tis-sue. Showcasing the best local talent and inviting an international audience, they create the meeting ground to facilitate meaningful interactions.

There has been already much written about tech conferences. There are pros and cons of using tech events in a fund-raising strategy. I would like to encourage founders to take it seriously. Conferences are as useful as any other tool, but if you put in the effort you might be surprised about the effectiveness of this channel. VCs attend tech events for two reasons, to source deals and meet other VCs. Most tech event these days offer a matchmaking slot in the agenda. The number one mis-take I see founders make time and time again is that they do not prepare for the meetings. They have no idea what inter-ests the particular partner they will be meeting. They are terrible at pitching their company. Instead of trying to build inter-est, they start selling from the word go. My one advice to all the founders out there is to build a short list of VCs you want to talk to and prepare. Treat the meeting as the first of many steps to follow. Try to stand out from the crowd and be memorable. After the meeting, connect on LinkedIn, send a follow-up email with your pitch deck and some action points. I am sure you will be more effective than just trying to talk to some random people without not really knowing why.

Hopefully, we will be able to talk at infoShare or any of the other great events in CEE. Looking forward.

The reality might be more

challenging for many CEE

founders. Being based in CEE

means that there are only a few funds you can turn to in your

home city.


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As venture capitalists, we’re always search-ing for the next global champion to invest in, the next Oracle or Google. We compete with thousands of investors across the globe, and we believe a presence in CEE gives us a competitive advantage.

There’s intense competition in Silicon Valley among VCs for hot teams in disrup-tive industries starting from the earliest investment stage. Often, the highest-rat-ed firms need to be prepared to offer Term Sheets at the end of the meeting, to stay close to a great deal. Central and Eastern Europe has its share of great tech entre-preneurs that have built companies such as ESET, GoodData, LogMeIn, Wargaming, and many others, but Silicon Valley VCs are more reluctant to invest with local entre-preneurs due to their strong preference for Silicon Valley-based talent.

Competition at the investment stage pales in comparison with competition startups face in doing business globally. To have a chance to beat the competition,

a startup must play in the largest market (USA is almost universally the largest mar-ket in any emerging IT industry) and build the strongest company, that is, to hire the best people. The best sales and marketing people for emerging industries are to be found in Silicon Valley, close to their first customers. If a startup starts its sales else-where, it’ll most likely lose the competition

– it’s much easier for a startup to sell to Sili-con Valley clients than to clients anywhere else, and a Silicon Valley-focused competi-tor will overtake a startup fast if you focus your sales efforts in, for example, Europe.

Unlike in marketing or product man-agement, we often see that technical, en-gineering talent in Central and Eastern Europe is at the highest level globally. In several emerging technologies, CEE has technological talent punching well above its weight. One area with a great supply of technological talent is cybersecurity, giv-ing rise to the likes of AVG, Avast, ESET, Kaspersky, amongst and others. In the

fields of Data Science and Big Data too, we see superb technical teams, developing new cloud analytics tools, innovating in in-memory database space and in high-load and high-scalability infrastructure tech-nologies. We see a lot of regional developer talent contributing to various cryptocur-rencies and blockchain efforts, and many teams investigating new applications for very affordable novel machine learning tools and infrastructure.

The technology talent in the region is not only technically superb, it’s typically more loyal to an employer, and significantly more affordable than its Silicon Valley coun-terpart. Access to this talent allows CEE Venture Capital investors to build more with less, and, more importantly, to build globally relevant products better and faster. This is the edge that helps our companies compete, and this is how Almaz competes in the global VC market.

Searching for a champion

↗ His interests span software, gaming, and the Internet. He led

deal execution for Jelastic, Parallels, Acumatica, Alawar, and

other Almaz companies. Pasha is currently on the boards of

Alawar Entertainment, AlterGeo, Flirtic and Nival.

General partner at Almaz Capital

PAWEL BOGDANOV:


Do you have a business that enhances the quality of human life?

Work with us.

@BlackPearlsVC

www.blackpearls.vc/submit-a-project

We exist to support the best Polish entrepreneurs.

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Great companies can come from anywhere.

Niklas Zennström, founder of Skype, Kazaa, Atomico Ventures

Most of the capital today is still deployed in the world’s few largest hubs: Silicon Valley (40%) and China (20%). But venturing into peripheries for early stage investments and technical talent is increasingly com-mon.

Kauffman FellowPule Taukobong is the best example of that. After years in the USA, he returned to his native South Africa to bring US clients and capital to the emerging class of young, ambitious entrepreneurs. His network and know-how boosted the ecosystem to a level un-attainable with organic growth. Today s connected world has created many such opportunities outside of the main tech hubs.

It took a while for Western European and global investors to venture into the region I come from: Central Eastern Eu-rope (CEE). It became Private Equity’s

stronghold already in the 1990s with all the investments made into infrastructure and traditional businesses in the post-com-munist era.

But investing in innovative ideas?

That’s still relatively new. Since 2010 the venture capital sector has grown by 14% per annum. People are hungrier for success, more hardworking and dynamic than in many of the Western European cities. Go and explore for yourself. Here is why I think you should.

Source of Technical Talent

The Central Eastern European countries have been traditionally strong in math and sciences. 200,000 students graduate in engineering and sciences every year from the universities in the CEE European Un-ion countries. The number is on par with Germany. Their management skills usually leave still a lot of room for improvement. But I have met some exceptional individu-

als who match or exceed the performance of their counterparts in Western Europe. Poland in particular has benefited from a lot of software engineering talent coming from Ukraine since the beginning of the conflict with Russia in 2014.

Cost of Development still signifi-cantly below Western Europe

Recently I met an amazing team of five 20-somethings from Moldova who are building an enterprise software solution. They moved to Romania to a startup hub in Cluj and for EUR 10k managed to devel-op an MVP and test it on 20 clients. An equivalent work in Germany would cost around EUR 100k. The costs of develop-ment in the more expensive CEE countries incl. Czech Republic, Hungary or Poland are slowly equating with the West, but there is still around a 2–3x gap. This means a lot when you’re strained on cash.

The effects of that are reflected in the size of average investment rounds. In 2015 in Western Europe it was EUR 1.3m,

Great companies [will] come from Central Eastern

Europe↗ Partner at Black Pearls VC. Prior to that held manage-

ment roles at VC and CVC funds in Germany, Sweden

and USA. Alumni of Kauffman Fellowship, Palo Alto

based program for leading venture capitalists. Gradu-

ate of Uppsala University (MSc) and Jacobs University

(BSc).

PARTNER AT BLACK PEARLS VC

EWA A. TREITZ:


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while only EUR 0.4m in CEE EU countries. Lower human capital costs are partially responsible for this delta.

Teams determined to relocate

We have been nomads for a while. CEE en-trepreneurs know that their own country won’t suffice as a market for a venture-fund-ed company. I have not met a team yet that would not be prepared to move completely or part of their team to a different location if that would advance their business. In Europe Berlin and London have been the top destinations.

LP Landscape is improving

Public capital has been the backbone of venture investing in CEE. In 2015 36% of the funds in the region came from the government, while 18% came from asset managers and 16% from private individu-als. The Polish government has recently introduced two programs supporting the VC sector. Tax incentives for investors and EUR 660m public funds commitment into VC structures ¹, the largest such program in the European Union.

Public capital is rarely the smartest around, but it puts things into motion.

Those fund managers that succeeded in es-tablishing their track record in the market with public leverage are now well equipped to fundraise from the private sector. Still, there is a long way to go. Most of the Lim-ited Partners to-be, businessmen in the region that have some cash to deploy in alternative assets, know too little about venturing to commit their funds into it. Black Pearls VC is doing a lot of education-al work in the market about the Venture Capital asset class.

The Czech Republic based Credo Ven-tures is the largest fund in CEE operating on private funds only and it is flourishing. En-trepreneurs love it, because they know that this is the sustainable way to do business. There are still few such professionally run funds, relative to the expanding deal flow.

Location independent Businesses

Not only are the CEE entrepreneurs open to relocate, but also their businesses are of-ten location independent. Unlike Germany where 75% of capital goes into consumer businesses that require large domestic up-take markets, CEE businesses are predom-inantly focused on enterprises.

75% of VC-funded CEE companies sell to SMEs and corporations, and 1/3 operate

CompanyCountry of Origin

Current HQTarget Market

Vertical MarketBusiness

ModelStatus

Invested mUSD

Valuation at exit

LivechatPoland

(Wrocław)Wrocław Enterprise Marketing SaaS IPO (2014) 110

LogMelnHungary

(Budapest)Boston Enterprise Security SaaS IPO (2009) 30 342

AVG Technologies

Czech Republic

Amsterdam Enterprise Security SaaSIPO (2012), Trade

Sale (2016, AVAST)

252 1300

GrabCAD EstoniaCam-

bridge, MA

Enterprise Development SaaSTrade Sale

(2014, Stratasys)

13,6 100

Skype Estonia SeattleConsumer/Enterprise

Communica-tions

SaaSTrade Sale

(2011, Microsoft)

76,8 8500

a SaaS business model. In my opinion this has two advantages for VC investors. First, they are less attached to the local demand and easier to relocate to a new geography than a consumer business. Second, en-terprise businesses are on average more capital efficient ² than consumer startups. (Even though they are less likely to be-come unicorns). In markets where capital is scarce (which is everywhere other than the US hubs and China), these are the busi-nesses worth looking at.

No wonder that the five most successful exits coming from the region are in the enterprise space.

The outlook for the CEE VC market is very positive. Estonia has established itself as one of the most successful startup coun-tries in Europe with multiple international successes (Skype, Transferwise, GrabCAD).

In the next years we will see success stories coming from the region proving Zennströms s philosophy that "great com-panies can come from anywhere”.

References :

1 http://pulsinnowacji.pb.pl/4553649,41532,prawie-3-mld-zl-od-ue-na-rozwoj-start-upow

2 https://medium.com/@ewencja/the-great-prom-ise-of-consumer-facing-startups-c288a7da1bf7


Five most successful exits in the region (October 2016)

2 4

The VC world is in constant flux: new deals, new challenges, and pretty strong competition to be faster and wiser than others. We asked Tuomas Kosonen, Partner at Inventure, a Nordic-based fund, how to attract his attention, how Inventure supports their portfolio, and if the future for startups seems bright.

Agnieszka Meller, infoShare: On your web-site you say, “you invest in innovative and fast-growing companies, led by exceptional entrepreneurs and willing to disrupt their industries”. What exactly does this mean?

Tuomas Kosonen, Inventure: It’s always good to challenge investors. A partnership between a startup and an investor tends to last several years, and there-fore it is important to find the right partner to build the company with. Each investor is looking for differ-ent things in a startup. For us, there are 4 elements that we should get excited about to get seriously interested: the team and the individuals behind the

achieved traction, technology and/or business model, addressable market and market growth.

AM: Let’s say I am a startup looking for fund-ing – how would you check my willingness for disruption?

TK: You have to know your market and have a cred-ible vision of how you are going to tackle it and be-come the market leader. Great tech helps, but exe-cution matters most.

AM: What does the process from first contact to investment look like?

TK: We see hundreds of startups each year. At seed stage, it is people that matter most. In later-stage companies, we expect to see solid traction. There is no process chart or templates we follow. In the end, each company is unique. Normally the process takes around 12 months. It is simple but we want to get to know the people and the market. We want to see how

interview by Agnieszka Meller

VCs can’t afford to be local players

↗ One of four partners at Inventure, a leading early-stage ven-

ture capital company in the Nordics. Interested in software,

health tech and gaming. The investments he manages include

Blueprint Genetics, Thinglink, Bitbar, Scoro and Lingvist.

Partner at Inventure

TUOMAS KOSONEN:


2 5

the co-operation would be in future. And it is, of course, a mutual decision; investment should be much more than just money.

AM: What if I can’t wait a year?

TK: When there is an immediate fit in place, the investors can also move fast, 4 weeks could be enough. The process tends to be pretty straight-forward; no need to hide behind bureaucracy, but there are some papers to fill-in.

AM: This is the process, hopefully leading to the first money transfer. What is your philosophy after?

TK: The first months tend to be very im-portant. We want to build the basis for the strategy and co-operation with the team. We are an active investor and work closely with our portfolio companies through-out the lifecycle. That is, at least, to me something you are expected to do when investing other investors’ money on their behalf. Normally, we have identified the strengths and weaknesses of a company already, prior to the investment, and start to work on those right after. We want to help companies grow; we don’t want to micromanage them.

AM: You have already been 12 years in the market. What are the out-comes?

TK: We have built a solid portfolio of 40 companies, exited a few ones and are constantly looking for new ones. We have quite a few ones growing nicely, and expect 2017 to be an excellent year with exits. We just closed an exit with Right-ware, a company developing tools and 3D engines for embedded software, with a fo-cus on the automotive. The company was sold to China and we see more and more interest arising from Asia to European technology companies.

AM: Was there any project on the table you wrongly evaluated, and it became a great success?

TK: As a mistake, I would take the exam-ple of Rovio Entertainment, the company behind Angry Birds. I was, back in the day, raising money for that company from my then current partners, they refused to in-vest, but got me to join Inventure instead, back in 2007. It would have been an even better outcome if we had first invested in Rovio.

AM: InfoShare is focused on the CEE and The Baltics. What is your view on these regions?

TK: The Baltics have been in our focus since 2012. There is a lot of talent around, great education and, especially, ambition; people aim for the moon, and quite a few have also succeeded with their plans. I just love the attitude, no bullshit. We have not been that active in CEE, but are looking more and more around. We have one in-vestment in Hungary and, based on that experience, want to do lots of new bets in the region. The investment market is competitive throughout Europe, but we see that there are still nice opportunities for investors to help build companies in the region, especially with local partners.

AM: Inventure has three offices, in-cluding one in Shanghai. Why there?

TK: Already in 2010, we thought that VCs can’t afford to be local players. We decided to take the road opposite to the most tradi-tional one and explore the Asian markets for our portfolio companies. Our office in China serves as a market access platform to our portfolio companies. We have been helping our companies with JVs, recruit-ment, partners and customers. In two companies, we have taken an operational role, and now both startups have been ac-quired by Chinese companies. So, some-how, the strategy has paid off. There are huge opportunities in Asia, although the competition is at least as fierce as in Silicon Valley, the culture is different, barriers to market entry are more challenging, etc. I’m not saying that everyone should go in that direction; there has to be a good

reason. Many of our portfolio companies are setting up offices in Europe and the US. Asia is just not the right direction for them. But I still I recommend everyone to think seriously about the opposite road instead the most obvious one.

AM: What is your opinion on the race to get one unicorn, or even decacorn, in each country as soon as possible?

TK: There is constant competition where the companies should locate themselves. Not only with the startups, but also with the larger, listed ones. That is pretty un-derstandable. Companies create work, tax-es, positive hype and new companies, and, therefore, it is in every country’s interest to have some success stories to promote. The Nordics have been pretty successful in this, and that has brought a lot of new talent, resources and money to support the startups. When a market gets dominated with public money, it might have a nega-tive effect on risk taking, valuations and life cycles of the companies. There should always be private interest in the compa-nies, and also the founders should have some personnel risk with the company.

AM: To finish, let’s play prophet. Is the startup world going to change?

TK: There are lots of predictions. New hypes will materialize, some of the old ones will fade away, and others become mainstream. So, it’s impossible to know. However, I believe that the hype around startups overall will slow down. This will become a common, normal way to build a company. Crowdfunding will have a huge impact and bypass venture capital in vol-ume, both in numbers and amounts raised. Overall, there will be more and more mon-ey and resources available, so there has never been a better time to be an entre-preneur! Have fun out there.

AM: Thanks a lot for sharing your thoughts. Let’s hope some of the infoShare startups will join your portfolio!


2 6

Central-Eastern Europe is under the radar for many investors, so startups coming from there have just 5 minutes to attract attention and take the money. We asked Kristjan Laanemaa, found-ing partner at Karma Ventures, an Estonia-based fund to give some tips and suggest some tricks to winning the race.

Agnieszka Meller, infoShare: Karma Ventures backs companies with strong ideas delivered with unique technology, customer traction and global ambition. What are some tips for startups to increase their chances to get through your mailbox?

Kristjan Laanemaa, Karma Ventures: We at Kar-ma like to work with companies that have a really solid technology advantage that puts them ahead of the competition. And when I’m talking about technology advantage, I mean unique technology developed by the company. In broad terms, there are tech companies that are developing and selling products based on existing technologies and tech companies that are innovating, not just on product but also on technology itself. The latter are those that catch our interest.

At the same time, unique tech without a real busi-ness world application and weak commercialization is most likely not going to become a tech success story. Therefore, we also seek some kind of com-

mercial market validation to the offering. The best validation, of course, would be paying customers, but pilot customers giving strong references can also be a good indicator.

All this does not mean that other important as-pects, like an experienced team, large market size, and scalability of business model would not matter to us. They definitely need to be in place as well.

AM: Would you mind sharing your invest-ment strategy for startups interested in approaching you. What does the process, from the first contact to investment look like? Are there any milestones? Are any steps more important than others? Are any non-changeable agreements of hundreds of pages along the way? What should I know to decide if working with you fits me?

KL: Mostly, all new investment opportunities are firstly screened by one of our team members, which means reviewing the material presented by the com-pany and often having an intro call or a meeting. The screening compares the opportunity against our main filters – region, company stage, product/technology uniqueness, market size, commercial traction, team experience.

Next, we discuss opportunities at a weekly team meeting where all team members have an opportu-nity to express an opinion. If we find the opportunity

interview by Agnieszka Meller

↗ A founding partner at Karma Ventures – an early-stage

venture capital firm, specialised in late seed and A round

investments in Europe’s most promising tech startups.


Advanced technology innovation plus strong business competence

make a tech success story

Founding partner at Karma Ventures

KRISTJAN LAANEMAA:

2 7

interesting, we move to a more detailed business due diligence phase and usually agree on a meeting where the company will meet our whole team. After passing the team meeting, usually, a second meeting with our technology advisors will follow. If there is a positive conclusion, we then typically issue a term-sheet.

Between each of these milestones, we have an active dialogue with the company, where we ask for additional information and have reference calls to learn more and prepare a strong basis for a high-quality decision.

In a term-sheet, we generally try to agree on all the important investment conditions, so later the agreement drafting process is easier. When a term-sheet is signed by us we focus on closing the deal. In this stage, we would also do legal due diligence and usually only a major negative finding and not being able to agree on resolving it would derail the closing process.

AM: What kind of investor are you? Observer? Mentor? Advisor? Book-keeper? Guard? Or someone else?

KL: We invest in a relatively early stage of a tech company and in this phase, many

things are still unclear and need to be fig-ured out. We like to be an active participant in discussions on how to move forward and set everything in place to reach the next important milestones. We would never interfere with the management’s job but would rather help the team to set the right targets in order to be able to raise the next investment round, challenge them to achieve higher goals, give our opinion based on our past experience and offer our support in any way we can. This is usually done by us participating as a supervisory board member but if in the seed stage there is no board, we have an informal open dis-cussion with the founders.

AM: Last year the big news was that a new €40M European Series A Fund was to be made available for Europe-an Startups. Do you have any inter-nal priority concerning geography or industry for this fund? I presume the CEE startups are under the radar as well.

KL: We have a mandate from our investors to invest all over the European Union. But in order to have a stronger brand and better visibility, we focus our active work on at-tracting companies to work with us in the Baltic Sea countries – Scandinavia, Germa-ny, Poland and Baltics. In 2016 we sourced over 580 new deals from this area which is ca. 65% of our whole deal flow for 2016. We keep ourselves open to other regions as well but on a more opportunistic basis. Luckily, having worked with a global tech investment portfolio in Ambient Sound Investments, we have a good network, which brings us great opportunities also from regions where we don’t spend that much time.

AM: I know it might be too early, but is there any startup really close to joining your portfolio, of course, only if you feel you can share?

KL: We actually have closed three invest-ments to date. Because of different reasons, we have not yet disclosed the investments yet, but we expect to go public with them in April. A number of deals are also in the closing phase, so there will be a series of exciting announcements during the next few months.

AM: I cannot avoid the Skype ques-tion. Would you like to explain your connection with the brand?

KL: Karma’s cornerstone investment came from the founding engineers of Skype. And two of them – Jaan Tallinn and Ahti Heinla are our key advisors who help us to validate the companies from a technolo-gy angle. Also, me and one of my Karma Ventures co-founders, Margus Uudam (editor’s comment: there are altogether three co-founders, the third co-founder is Tommi Uhari), and I formerly managed the early stage tech investment portfo-lio of the Skype’s founding engineers at Ambient Sound Investments. We used to work with a number of teams that grew from Skype. So, all in all, there are several touch points but I think the main value that we get from these is the network of people that have worked on this exciting story, from the technical as well as the business side.

AM: Here’s hoping that your next investment project starts here at infoShare 2017. Thank you for your time.


2 8

The Czech Republic, which has been a member of the EU since 2004, has, in recent years, been considered an optimal business environment from which it is possible to provide services for European and global customers. This is the result of several measures, primarily improvement of the Czech government’s support for the business environment, as well as the ability of Czech intellectual capital to meet the demand for new technologies.

Support for startups in the Czech Republic

The startup boom in the Czech Republic be-gan after 2010, when projects aimed at sup-porting new startups, such as StartupYard, Impact HUB, JIC StarCube and CzechAc-celerator, were initiated. At a government level, support for startups was provided centrally from ministries and government institutions, as well as from innovation agencies, associations, regional and district entities, and other institutions focused on business support.

An active role in supporting startups is played by business, technology and startup incubators, coworking centres and acceler-

ators. There are more than seventy such fa-cilities in the Czech Republic, ranging from local centres to globally known entities such as the aforementioned StartupYard, JIC StarCube, and Impact HUB, which has three locations in the Czech Republic.

Like anywhere else in the world, start-ups in the Czech Republic struggle with financing their projects. This is one of the most important factors determining their future direction. Startups in the Czech Re-public actively seek investors in the form of investment funds and business angels, not only on the local market, but also abroad. Support from the Czech national budget, community funds and EU funds is also an important part of the Czech startup eco-system.

Focus and successes of selected Czech startups

The Czech Republic is generally strong in the field of information and communica-tion technologies. One of the most highly developed segments is security, where the Czech Republic has a good foundation in the form of globally known firms such as AVAST and AVG. The most recent repre-

The Czech Republic startup

ecosystem

Marketa is the director of the Start-up Department at

CzechInvest, where she manages programmes and activities

for startups and the startup ecosystem in the Czech Republic

and abroad, including the V4 Innovation Task Force Group.

Marketa Havlova CzechInvest,

czechstartups.org

Katerina has worked at CzechInvest for more than ten

years as an R&D project manager and is currently focussing on the

CzechStartups.org web portal, the first official online hub for

startups in the Czech Republic.

Katerina Kynclova CzechInvest,

czechstartups.org

2 8 E U R O P E & S T A R T U P S

E U R O P E & S T A R T U P S

2 9

sentatives of this field include, among oth-ers, TeskaLabs, PhoneX, and Angee, which has received more than 500,000 USD via a Kickstarter campaign, more than twice its original goal.

Startups relatively often originate from research and development programmes at universities. One of the most successful examples of this is the spin-off, Cognitive Security, which was established at the Czech Technical University in Prague, and was subsequently acquired by the American technology giant CISCO. The company’s founders now manage CISCO’s research centre in Prague.

Another successful Czech startup is STRV, which develops web and mobile ap-plications. Shortly after its establishment, the company already has several branches in the Czech Republic and abroad, and its products are even used by major companies in the United States. GoodData is probably the most successful startup in the area of cloud computing and data analysis (Big Data). Andreessen Horowitz, one of the most prestigious American investment funds, has invested in GoodData, which is currently valued at 1 billion CZK. Estab-lished in 2014, Kiwi.com, the developer of

a unique airline-ticket reservation system, has enjoyed major success in the past year. In 2016, the company’s turnover increased by 1,500% to 2.2 billion CZK.

Czech startups are also successful in the practical application of ICT. GINA Software (GINA – Geographic Information Assistant) develops tools for coordinating firefighters, paramedics, police officers, and other public safety workers in crisis situations in real time. Fields such as artificial intelligence, virtual reality (VR), the Internet of things and, for example, projects in the area of smart cities have recently gained promi-nence, not only in the Czech Republic. In the area of VR, of note are, for example, the startup Lifeliqe, which was co-founded by Ondřej Homola and develops VR-based teaching aids for schools. Another trend-ing high-tech field is green mobility. An example of a successful Czech startup in this field is BattSwap, which offers a unique solution for rapidly exchanging batteries in electric vehicles.

Investments in Czech startups

More than fifty investment funds and groups operate in the Czech Republic.

Furthermore, the launch of a National In-novation Fund is currently being planned. Thanks to the NIF, startups particularly those in the early phase of development when investing is riskiest, will be able to obtain financing.

Investment is the icing on the cake of Czech startups. Some of the the most suc-cessful investments in Czech startups in-clude Oracle’s acquisition of Apiary at the beginning of this year, BlueYard Capital’s 4 million USD investment in SpaceKnow, and the investment of 800,000 USD by the investment funds Index Ventures and Cre-doVentures in Futurelytics. Among other things, Futurelytics has won the prestig-ious SeedCamp and has been mentioned in the Financial Times.

Survey results

In cooperation with CzechInvest, Webank-ieta.pl, Startup Poland Foundation, Inter-national Visegrad Fund and other entities, Aspen Institute Praha conducted a survey in 2016, during the course of which it ob-tained data from 141 Czech startups, having approached a total of 550.

It is apparent from the survey that nearly 70% of startups are currently in the early stage and only 15% report being in the scale-up phase. Seventy-eight percent have used financing from their own resources. Local business angels or 3F (friends, family and fools) networks financially supported 13% of the surveyed startups. Only about 9% of startups used public money and only 18% plan to do so within the next six months. When asked about the greatest internal challenges, the surveyed startups listed human resources (53% of responses) and financing/investments (43%) as the top two. Entering foreign markets and export-ing were named as the most important ex-ternal challenges (43% of responses). The vast majority of startup founders and CEOs are in their twenties or thirties and have a university degree.


3 0

The startup ecosystem in Europe is reach-ing new heights every day, and this is pro-foundly so in the case of Spain. Since 2014, the growth of startups in Spain has reached high velocity, maintaining a 26% annual increase. In the last financial year alone, investment boomed to 550 million euros. In this article, we will go over some key in-

vestment and sales figures and tell you why Spain is the place to be in 2017 and beyond.

Last year, startups such as Cabify or Hawkers made their largest investment rounds, mostly from international funds. In the case of Cabify, 105 million EUR from Rakuten; Hawkers, 50 million from O’Hara Financial. In total, there were 40 interna-tional funds investing in Spain, with large volumes of money in each investment. In fact, funds in Spain are the fourth largest investors in Spain, only beaten by the USA, the UK and Japan, making Spain a very in-ternational investment scene.

The sectors where money is invested most are e-commerce, Fintech, and life-style. However, in relative terms these are not growing at a rate greater than other sectors. Other verticals such as videog-ames or sport are where the most growth is happening.

In 2016, 400 million was invested in web startups alone, representing over two-thirds of the total investment.

The acquisition data is even stronger, with web startups passing from 293 million sold in 2015, to 744 million in 2016. This is a 250% increase, showing great promise for the future of startups in the region.

In 2017, investment is looking to contin-ue to grow with even more international investment. We will also start to see more serial entrepreneurs and business angels

The Spanish startup ecosystem

Tristan’s focus at Startup Olé is on building a more connected entrepreneur ecosystem,

providing open collaboration opportunities and the standardisation of agreements between

stakeholders to create added value within the European startup community.

Tristan William Lawrence Guy, Project Manager at Startup Olé

Volume of Investment in Spain

500

mln €

375

250

125

0

2008 2010 2012 2014 20162006


Why Spain? Many would select other locations for leading tech ecosystems, such as Germany

for its GDP, or the UK for its commercial services exports. However, when selecting the right ecosystem for your startup, there are many

more factors to take into account.

3 1

References :

http://www.eleconomista.es/valenciana/noti-cias/7051360/10/15/La-creacion-de-startups-en-Espana-crece-un-26-en-2015.html Published 05/10/2015

http://www.elreferente.es/tecnologicos/inver-siones-startup-espa%C3%B1a-en-2016-30504 Published 23/12/2016

https://loogic.com/informe-loogic-de-inver-sion-en-startups-en-espana/ Report from 2016 with information from last 10 years. Published 13/12/2016 Table: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1RXxfKk7zm-iJ2iTVUbuB5aVfiOk_2-XVaIpgWPc6c_t4/edit#gid=1976062920

http://venture.watch/index.php/reports/ Monthly publication with annual data. Yet to see 2016

Investment and Sales for Web Startups in Spain

Year Investments Total Investment Sales Total Sales

2006 6 2,500,000.00 7 77,700,000.00

2007 25 123,150,000.00 13 257,200,000.00

2008 50 190,004,200.00 2 50,000,000.00

2009 33 67,800,000.00 2 1,400,000.00

2010 39 143,045,000.00 3 395,000,000.00

2011 69 103,775,000.00 1 80,000,000.00

2012 75 68,757,000.00 13 98,300,000.00

2013 117 143,161,000.00 18 304,500,000.00

2014 123 259,686,000.00 10 105,750,000.00

2015 115 340,158,000.00 15 293,700,000.00

2016 113 403,029,000.00 23 744,000,000.00

growing organically out of the thriving ecosystem. This will all improve the scene, making Spain more than attractive for new investment and the creation of new startups.

Apart from investment, Spain is well situated geographically. As part of the EU, Spain is often the point of entry to the Af-rican market because of its proximity, and Latin America because of language connec-tions. Spain also has below average costs for Europe, which is a major factor for young startups.

Investment and Sales for Web Startups in Spain

800 160

mln € number of deals

600 120

400 80

200 40

0 0

2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 20162006

investments total investment sales total sales


3 2

The global accomplishments of Polish startups are frequently acknowledged and Poland is broadly set to become the CEE region’s leader in digital innovation. In the last five years, the Polish tech industry has clearly gained momentum. According to the latest Startup Poland Report, there are 2,700 business entities in Poland that fall under the definition of ‘startup’. Although the majority of them remain microenter-prises, their economic impact, measured by job creation and their products’ potential for innovation, make them increasingly significant. This is reflected in the Polish government’s strategy, with its StartIn-Poland programme aiming to support the Polish ecosystem with a funding boost of 2.7 mln zloty.

Poland’s first unicorn and rising global stars

All recognised startup ecosystems around the world compete for unicorns, startup companies whose market value exceeds 1 bln US dollars. In January 2016, Fortune Magazine identified 229 such business-es, with one of them hailing from Poland.

The country has its unicorn in the gaming industry, where Poland is a world champi-on – CD Projekt, whose market valuation reached the magic number in early 2017.

Our startup scene is more than just games, however. We like building software, in particular, Software as a Service, and we use it for analytics. More than two-thirds of Polish startups offer and sell products for business (B2B model). Young, innovative companies deliver solutions to traditional business using the most forward-looking trends such as:• Big Data Analytics • Artificial Intelligence • Machine Learning • IoT

Polish startups – industry game-changers

In order to understand the way the tech-nology revolution is changing the face of the modern economy, it is worth observing startups operating in the B2B sector. In effect, the shift has fundamentally domi-nated each and every area of business man-agement: from choosing a business strategy

Experienced tech journalist and PR specialist responsible

for creating and executing communication strategies for

tech and premium brands.

Agata Kowalczyk, Head of Communications

at Startup Poland


Startups – the most innovative sector of the

Polish economyA well-built startup infrastructure, a highly educated

workforce, a strong and determined ecosystem and an advanced policy framework which supports innovation – these

are just a few key factors determining the strong growth pattern among Polish startups. It is these elements which form

the vital ingredients to a booming startup scene in Poland, adding to the strength of the Polish economy: within last six

months, the average Polish startup employed from 1 to 3 new employees; 14% of Polish startups are patent holders or in the process of obtaining a patent, in turn making them the most

innovative part of the Polish economy.

3 3

(the most state-of-the-art companies nowadays are built according to information acquired from big data analytics aggregated from vast amount of mar-ket available data) to making operational decisions (relying on automated and optimised production processes, retail, marketing, and logistics).

• FARMING: solutions introduced to farming by Polish startups such as drones and smart sensors profoundly alter the way crops are fertilised, con-tributing to cutting production costs and deliver-ing improved quality products to end-customers.

• ENERGY: smart building management systems allow for substantially lower energy consumption and cut company costs by as much as 25%.

• FINANCE: Polish data encryption technology is widely used by the financial sector (FinTech).

• RETAIL: The Southern City of Kraków is called ‘The Beacon Valley’, a home to sensors used, for instance, to pinpoint the virtual location of prod-ucts in shopping centres across the globe.

• MEDICINE: here in Poland our developers and engineers produce robots of world-class accuracy and precision for use in medicine, where cellular intervention is necessary. Similar solutions are built at Kraków’s AGH University of Science and Technology.

• THE SPACE INDUSTRY: Poles also compete suc-cessfully in the space industry, where we make use of one of our biggest strengths – big data analytics

– in this case from the satellite industry. Working with satellite data requires knowledge, compe-tence, and creativity, but does not require large financial investments. And again, here, Polish startups, agile and equipped with business skills, are making the most of opportunities given.

Direction: export

Selling patterns are going through a evolution. Almost 47% of Polish startups sell products and services to customers abroad, while others already are already working on their expansion strategies. Perfectly crafted products are born as global from the conception phase and are launched with inter-national markets in mind. One example is Booksy, a successful Polish brand which offers a convenient application for booking hair and beauty appoint-ments, first entered the US market and a further nine, although not in Poland itself. Another such solution was developed in Silicon Valley for website prototyping – UXPin.

Innovative and independent

The number one economic priority for Poland in the next three years is developing the innovation industry. The biggest challenge is going to be focus-


Development stages of polish startups:

12% Problem- -Solution Fit

39% Solution- -Product Fit

34% Product- -Market Fit

15% Scaling

Categories of products and services:

Polish startups location:

3 4

sing startups on building fearless global strategies and on actively reaching for additional, external sources for growth. If the governmental programme to sup-port the ecosystem proves meaningful, the Polish startups’ financing structure should transform profoundly. Creative fi-nancing programmes, which aim to seek the activation of both private and public capital, should not only accelerate the pro-gress made by innovative startups, but also provide new businesses with global ambitions real opportunities to compete with global innovators.

Compared to innovative tech compa-nies around the world, what makes Pol-ish startups stand out is that as many as 50% do not use external sources of capital, but bootstraps from their own savings. Even though this is a strength for the sec-tor’s potential for rapid growth, it is also

a threat. Data shows that from the nation-al market point of view, Polish startups are particularly well-rooted, independent, and focussed on pushing their selling records forward. Nevertheless, from the global market perspective, a substantial financial boost from investors is crucial to cross national borders. Moreover, external cap-ital seems to be an inevitable choice, and a win-win situation for both the investor and startup, who is expected to achieve exponential growth. Companies with cus-tomers increase their investment success as the investment risk decreases with the number of customers buying a startup’s products or services. As a result, securing capital inflow for startups is going to be essential, provided they decide to compete fearlessly and expand their market share.

The strength of the Polish startup scene is not only determined by startups’ mar- Source: Polish Startups Report 2016, Startup

Poland

ket success, but also by a maturing eco-system, an interesting offer of sectoral events and conferences, such as InfoShare, Wolves Summit, or smaller scale meetups integrating the community around, for instance, Startup Weekends. As a result, young startup projects can expect nothing less than extremely favourable conditions for growing businesses hand in hand with accelerators and incubators. Further in their development, they can also rely on the knowledge and experience of Polish venture funds, acquiring more and more expertise in modelling technological busi-nesses. More importantly, startups are gaining their voice and articulating their needs as a mature sector, engaged in ac-tivities of institutions representing their interests such as Startup Poland.

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Restrictions on the development of inno-vation

Usually, shortage of funds is mentioned as the main reason Poland underperforms in innovation rankings. There is little money for building solutions, compe-titions, idea incubators, risk financing or, finally, the infrastructure for education in such much-needed fields as computer science and English. This is, un-fortunately, true of my city as well. I observe with pain how yet another EU spending program in my region fails to address such priorities. But money is not everything.

We are limited by a rigid, over-regulated legal sys-tem which does not reflect the dynamics of social and technological change. Unfortunately, we have not adopted the Scandinavian custom of a periodic review of the country’s laws so as to gauge their true impact on society. Lawmakers seem out of step with today’s world. As a former public administration official, I must also say that the applicable copyright law is a significant barrier to growth.

However, the biggest and most important obstacle lies within ourselves. In our mentality, in our psycho-logical need to conform to the status quo, an inability to cooperate, especially in the long-term, a lack of well-understood common objectives and a lack of the ability to share experience and advice. Reluc-tance to change, to experiment and to take risks are very important factors which every innovator must take into account. The relevant resources must be assigned to create a culture of innovation inside the city, its institutions and organization. Social capital is even more difficult to build than material.

Open, innovative cities

Although controversial, I think the best promotion of the city are its people, its culture, and the lifestyles of its citizens. Part of what makes cities attractive is not so much a good advertising campaign as it is the people and spirit of the city.

This is what makes people willing to share in-formation about a town or city, post pictures on Instagram, and to like it on social media. It is this difficult-to- grasp perception of the city, where open-ness and innovation in business, education, and cul-ture begins to play a dominant role. Thus, a city that wants to be considered cool, worth a visit or even moving to, chooses this path as it becomes more attractive. The city’s real advertising campaign is the quality of life it brings, and even more, whether you can fall in love with it.

A tri-city (Gdańsk, Sopot, Gdynia) ecosys-tem — a startup metropolis

Gdańsk is a part of the Polish Tricity, in reality, a sev-en-city urban metropolitan area. Administrative boundaries are barely noticeable to visitors, and in practice, we live, work, spend our leisure time freely moving between several municipalities. The same is true with our startup and tech scenes. Some live in Gdańsk but work in Gdynia, while others study in Sopot or Gdańsk, while living in Gdynia. A map created by the grassroots startup community shows it well: incubators, coworking facilities, startups, accelerators, representatives of venture capital and various events are scattered all over and beyond the Tricity. They complement each other, sometimes compete with each other, but always enrich the whole agglomeration.

This is what, I think, distinguishes it from other cities that I know. It is the prevalence of cooperation and mutual goodwill over the competition. At any rate, competition is non-destructive, but stimulates the development. As the market of innovative com-panies and projects grows bigger, so there is space for everyone.

Parks and Incubators

Of key importance are institutions established to promote entrepreneurship in different ways. From my point of view, even more important is the atti-tude of the people managing them, and their will-

Tricity startup ecosystem

Consultant, entrepreneur, trainer. Former Head of

Mayor’s Office in Gdansk & Plenipotentiary of the

Mayor for Innovation.

After years of various trials and projects, the city of Gdańsk, as with other metropolitan cities,

has developed its own model that stimulates and supports innovation and, in my opinion, is the uniqueness of this peculiar ecosystem. The model is not based on any financial program or grant, but on a broad platform of cooperation.

Tomasz Nadolny, Openity.pl


3 6

ingness to cooperate. Thus, in Gdańsk, you will never hear that EU-funded technology parks are throwing money down the drain.

The startup zone of the Pomeranian Sci-ence and Technology Park has fostered the considerable achievements its incubat-ed projects, and hosts many interesting events, highly specialized and targeted to a wider audience. In the Gdańsk Science and Technology Park, which is admin-istered by the Economic Zone, there is space for young companies and an area for laboratories. Here, the implementa-tion of scientific achievements and their commercialization takes place. The park is also a home to the Polish space sector.

Many events geared towards startup people and those associated with the tech-business are hosted there. A nation-wide network of Academic Enterprise Incubators also complements the range of possibilities.

The key institution for the local gov-ernment is Incubator Starter for Gdańsk Entrepreneurship Foundation, with its coworking, meeting and off ice space, Crazy Room, many accelerative activities, training events and many, many others.

Gdańsk has stood so firmly on its feet that some private initiatives have also appeared. O4, founded by private entre-preneur Maciej Grabski, is located in the Olivia Business Centre office complex. Its creation alone represents the next, higher

stage of the business environment, where the market becomes mature enough for business to take over financing from the public sector.

Only two years old and unique to our part of Europe is CLIPSTER which com-bines the resources and experience of pub-lic and private entrepreneurs. CLIPSTER caters to technological nomads who want a place to live and work, and also offers mentoring support. For about 230 EUR per month, the entrepreneur with an idea and the chance of a global success can rent a flat and a space to develop their business.

Pre-incubation and accelerative programs

Any living or working environment should include the opportunity for meetings, networking, imitating, learning, and the exchange of experience. Such events, increasingly more specialised and more widely available are plentiful in the above-mentioned institutions, universi-ties, and often in larger and more welcom-ing eateries. I attend many and I know well that it is extremely difficult to attend even half of what is freely available. If some-one wants to broaden their knowledge and learn new skills, it is enough to use what is available. The range of offerings is truly impressive and includes the more es-tablished and regular 3camp, Aula Polska,

Code for Poland Trójmiasto Brigade, Geek Girls Carrots Trójmiasto, HackerSpace Meetups, Creative Mornings in Starter, Startup Weekend Space, and Startup Eve.

Large conferences and competitions, most are supported by the local govern-ment, are a celebration for the commu-nity, an opportunity to summarize, give awards and invite visitors from the outside. They are also our best promotional tool. To mention just a few: Smart Metropolia, Blog Forum Gdańsk and one of the biggest events of its kind in this part of Europe – infoShare.

The fact that the city authorities should skillfully and wherever possible support innovation and the startups of various stripes sounds like a cliché today, but these are only successful in very few places. The key is the right combination of people in the right place. It seems to me that such initiatives have no chance of development without the understanding of local gov-ernment, which indicates direction and sets priorities.

I would say that several cities in Poland, including Gdańsk, are lucky to have such visionaries at the helm. However, in order for priorities to be implemented, repre-sentative of local government need to co-operate with the startup ecosystem. In Gdańsk, we are lucky to have a group of people in office who are open-minded and willing to help and experiment, who go be-yond their duties and offer much-needed advice and logistical support. Fearlessness in cooperation with business, the NGO sector, and the academic community is the major benefit of the team with whom I was lucky enough to work for the last few years. An open approach towards the new ideas of entrepreneurs and locals is another feature of Gdańsk, so contact City Hall representatives during upcoming events, such as infoShare.


TRICITY PARKS AND INCUBATORS

O4 - space for startups in Olivia Business Centre

The new idea: CLIPSTER in private-public partnership

AIP incubatorswww.aipgdansk.inkubatory.pl

Gdańsk Entrepreneurship Foundation - STARTER www.inkubatorstarter.pl

Pomeranian Science and Technology Park in Gdyniawww.ppnt.pl/pl/startup

Science and Technology Park in Gdanskwww.gpnt.pl/oferta/inkubator

3 8

To better understand the title of this ar-ticle, we need to first revisit the origins of coworking, and define what coworking really means.

Coworking, according to Deskmag’s The Coworker’s profile is a style of work that involves a shared working environment, often an office, and independent activi-ty. Unlike in a typical office environment, those coworking are usually not employed by the same organization.

It is perfect for work-at-home profession-als, independent contractors, or people who travel frequently, and as a result works well with as it is now being called ‘digital no-madism’. According to Ilana DeBare, the author of the San Francisco Chronicle’s article Shared work spaces a wave of the fu-ture, coworking is also the social gathering of a group of people who are still working independently, but share values and are interested in the synergy between people who value working in the same place along-side each other.

So where and when did it all start? The idea of a space with people working inde-pendently in the same physical space, but with possible collaboration, isn’t anything new. Since the early 90s, community ori-ented physical spaces called ‘hackerspaces’ opened around the world. The first time the

word ‘coworking’ was used was in 1999 by Bernard DeKoven to describe the movement as he, “ … realized that people and business were too isolated and hierarchical to be con-sidered ‘working together as equals’”.

A community center for entrepreneurs called Shraubenfabrik opened in Vienna in 2002, and three years later, the first official coworking space opened its doors in San Francisco. In 2007, the term ‘coworking’ was acknowledged by Google and the first article about the movement was published in Wikipedia – and as Mindspace observed,

“If Google and Wikipedia acknowledge it, it must be official.”

From its spark of inception and humble beginnings, the coworking movement was on its way to its peak, with coworking spaces in every major city in every country, exponentially growing in size every year. Studies have shown that, since 2006, the number of coworking spaces has doubled every year as public demand continues to grow. That means something!

What is the current outlook in Europe? It is hard to count the spaces in Europe, as there is not a day without someone starting something new. In London, for instance, there are already at least 100 coworking spaces. In Paris, we can find around 70 and in the Polish Tricity area we have at least 20.

The future of working is

coworking

But the winner is Barcelona in Spain, with more than 120 coworking spaces.

A coworking space can be small, for just a few people sharing an office or it can be or enormous, for at least 400, over a few floors, for both large and small companies, entrepreneurs and freelancers. It can even house more than 1000 members, perhaps working on a come-and-go basis – as is the case of Hubud, an amazing coworking space in Bali where 5000 members have worked for over 5 years using only a 400 square meter space. You name it, they’ve got it.

Let’s use numbers and an example to show how it all works. A perfect example of how successful the coworking idea can be is O4 – the biggest coworking space in Gdańsk, located in Olivia Business Centre, which launched their business 2 years ago, in 2015. At that time they had one floor, three employees and a couple of companies interested. Now, after two years, they have 2500 square meters of office space spanning three floors, 7 meeting rooms, 4 conference

Graduated from Gdańsk Medical University in 2015 and has been pretty busy since then. She has lived

in Europe and the US, and moved to Japan in March 2017. Fascinated by smart solutions and new ideas. Digital nomad. Writes, does, makes things happen.

Weronika Szarafin, O4

3 8 K N O W L E D G E B A Y

K N O W L E D G E B A Y

3 9

rooms and almost 300 workstations. Want to know more? It presently houses at least 500 members, more than 60 companies and NGOs, 700 hours of business meetings every month and 7 people who run it all; and this all happened in less than 2 years. That’s what we call growth!

Coworking, like every business trend, is also transforming to fit everyone’s needs. That’s why you can find a space that suits your needs. In the US, a coworking Mecca, you can find specialized spaces. Are you an artist? A coworking community is waiting for you. Are you an IT specialist? You can find a place that attracts IT freelancers. Are you working on your health app and are tired of your own home? We have all been there, so there is a coworking space that focuses on health-related solutions.

Another trend is to make it easier for the ‘digital nomads’ or ‘tech spats’ (tech expats) by creating so-called coworking societies. As a result, a person can travel around the world and join other coworkings for a few

days for free as a part of his agreement with his primary coworking space. They are not chained to the desk and can move in a day, their mobility being one of their greatest assets. And, as Peter Levels from nomadlist.io predicts, “There will be 1 billion digital nomads by 2035.”

But that’s not all. There are on average, 56 coworking spaces in every city with at least million inhabitants. What about smaller cities? Or villages? This may be the future of coworking, making it easier for people outside the city center.

But remember, coworking is usually much more than just a space with desks to rent. Coworking means community, it means sharing, and it means joint re-sponsibility for the space. It means events covering a whole host of different topics, including conferences, meetings, work-shops, spending time together, language classes, cooking classes, partying, educat-ing and trusting. It means that you can be a part of a community with similar goals.

You can meet people who will become your collaborators or coworkers, but also friends. As demand grows, coworkings at-tract specialists from different branches of business with more and more attractions. And, as Steve Munroe, CEO of Hubud, says,

“Membership is nice – but scale vertically. Services, not seats.”

Why has coworking become so popular so quickly? The answer is very simple: because it works. It is a perfect space for everyone and it is a perfect combination of work and an inspiring environment. Are you a parent just going back to work after parental leave? There is a place for you. Are you a freelancer that couldn’t make it in the home office environment? You will find people like you ready to share their experience. Do you al-ready have an amazing business idea but are looking for people? Just join a good cowork-ing. Do you work for an international IT or PR/marketing company and prefer an open space on your own terms? We are waiting for you. It really is that simple.


HUBUD coworking space in Bali

4 0

UNITING BUSINESS AND FUNCoworking space for freelancers and SMEs

FIND YOUR MISSING PIECE OF THE PUZZLEhttp://o4.network/

4 1

Raising an A-round is hard. Really, really hard.

Only a third of those who close a seed rounds later do an A-round 1. (And it is probably even worse, as there are probably more seed sounds done, but that don’t get registered.) One reason that it is hard is be-cause it should be, from a pure Darwinist standpoint. Now, when everyone is an an-

gel investor, a lot of ideas get funded, and of course very few actually figure it out.

Another reason is that they didn’t get their metrics right. Maybe because they didn’t know what metric to accomplish, or that they are talking to the wrong in-vestors. This is especially hard if you are a deep-tech startup.

Some kinds of startups, have more or less ‘documented’ KPIs they should reach – marketplaces (unit economics), games (stickiness), b2b tools (MRR), 2 social networks (gazillions of users), but what about AI-companies or any ‘funda-mental technology’?

Extreme ambition requires less metrics

The question you should ask yourself is what you are, and then optimize for that. Or to be more exact: what you will be per-ceived as.

The more linear your impact on the world is expected to be, the more you will be measured on linear metrics.

Can you show that it works? The more unique your technology is and disrup-tive your idea is the more forgiving peo-ple will be. If you are creating a new way of running the Internet, or connecting your

Why deep-tech startups shouldn’t monetize.

And what they should do instead.

One of the Nordics most influential angel investors with over 60 investments and the co-founder of the NordicMakers angel group.

Originally a computer science engineer who founded a deep tech

company finally acquired by Blackberry for $150m.

Hampus Jacobsson, Angel

Investor

The question you should ask yourself

is what you are, and then optimize

for that. Or to be more exact: what you will be

perceived as.


4 2

brain to silicon, or building an Artificial General Intelligence, the more people will look at the team and testimonials from people who should get what you are doing.

Don’t dabble, clearly articulate how you measure success

Whatever company you are, you should fo-cus on as few metrics as possible and nail-ing them. Having some sales, some free users, some proof of a cool tech roadmap, and some product metrics won’t make an-yone happy. It will just give a shattered im-pression. Find the one metric that proves the case! (That means that for example doing an Enterprise tier of your amazing platform might hurt you. Or opening up the platform to developers, might divert the focus.)

First and foremost you need to show that the technology or product works. Decide out what your product metric is 3 and show how that improves and how you plan to advance it.

A good product metric has both a quality side and a volume side – if you are work-ing with arbitrage the quality is your cut, and the volume is how much money flows through, if you are doing a recommenda-tion algorithm it is accepted recommen-dations of given recommendations vs. number of given recommendations, and so forth.

You also need to ask a couple of inves-tors what their FUDs 4 are and probably you need some kind of mitigation against those. Maybe people don’t get the value; then you maybe need someone paying you, maybe they don’t get that it can scale, then show the bigger picture, etc. But that is more hygiene than focus. Remember that different investors like different things (and the same thing for partners at one firm) so make sure to direct your attention to the few VCs who understand what you are doing and can add value.

Show external validation of value

Secondly, you need to show how what you are creating has value. Again, the more disruptive what you are creating is, the more people can settle for a ‘discounted value flow’. You will need to compensate this with a stellar team and vision on your side, though!

Often validation is needed though. It might be hundreds of really credible com-panies using your open source technolo-gy, it might be a few big names using your product even though they are not paying, or anything. But you need some kind of validation of value, where money is good, but it doesn’t have to be money; it can be joint marketing, sensitive data, or that the product is integrated tightly and will be horribly hard to stop using. You need to show that it isn’t some researcher (‘the CTO office’) or the janitor playing with your stuff, but someone who actually is investing in it.

Explain the bigger idea

You might know where you are going, but you need to make your future investors (and current employees and investors) see it too. How are you fundamentally chang-ing the world, and what will the world look like when you rule. In VC associate lingo:

“What is the Total Addressable Market”? Often it is good to show some spread of possible customers and users too. The more you can change, the less number of possible customers you need of course, but if the only customer possible is Face-book then you are building an acquihire company.

And this isn’t just a spreadsheet exer-cise – most investors can agree too that the harder it is to get what a company is trying to achieve, the lousier the company it probably is.

Secondly, you need to show how what you

are creating has value. Again, the more disruptive

what you are creating is, the

more people can settle for a ‘discounted

value flow’. You will need to

compensate this with a stellar

team and vision on your side,

though!


4 3

Show that the founders aren’t bottlenecks

Last but not least, you have to show that you have people skills. Ideally, you can attract talent that is senior to you too. Some great startups fail by having amaz-ing founders, but who are assholes, who don’t get the value of company culture and great people, and who can’t recruit at all.

And, sometimes, just sometimes, avoid monetization…

I know this is a bit controversial (to in Europe), but I think ambitious startups are damaged by monetization. There are three reasons:1. If it is obvious that your success would

be huge if it happened, you can remove thresholds to growth and just go all in. Charging will just make this growth slower. If The Facebook had a paid prod-uct, they wouldn’t be the social fabric of the Internet today.

2. There is a risk that revenue becomes your internal success metric, and you and the team will de-focus from what you are supposed to accomplish – the product metric.

3. That VCs suddenly put you in the wrong bucket or just get a comparable met-ric which shouldn’t be compared (“No, sorry – it is hard for us to do a $3m round in a company with only $6000 MRR!”). Charging for your product of course shows value, but you can pack-age it differently. Charge for a trial or an integration, and not recurring revenue.One often mentioned reason to mone-

tize is to be less dependent on investors, but make sure to do the math – if you can become cash flow positive very soon, then go ahead, but if you will end up covering 10% of your costs the money won’t be of use other than as a signal, and then you sit there with only the $6000 MRR to show.

1 https://mattermark.com/startup-gradua-tion-rate-surprisingly-low/

2 http://christophjanz.blogspot.com/2016/06/saas-funding-napkin-mobile-friendly.html

³ https://hajak.se/one-metric-to-rule-them-

all-3998feff75b3

4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear,_uncer-tainty_and_doubt

I would recommend you to charge your customers to prove that there is value, but avoid doing it in line with your business model. Don’t charge them monthly, by the meter, or whatever, as you don’t want a ‘comparable’. Charge trial fees or some-thing that shows that people think there is value.

To summarize

All companies have a similar equation of Value of Success × Probability of Success. If you can reap a huge future value, you don’t have to prove it as hard.

If you are one of those who fundamen-tally change the laws of economy or tech-nology:• Align your vision and show a ‘wow demo’,

underpinned by early metrics. Explain your plan. Find stellar people who sees the future like you – both employees and investors. Don’t monetize in line with your business model as it will be too little. Make people part with money as a proof of value.Otherwise:

• Hit your company type’s KPIs, or you won’t do an A-round. Laser focus on getting your MRR, unit economics, CAC, LTV, or retention to where they should be.

End of message.


4 4

How many decisions do you think the average person makes in a single day?

According to recent research by Cornell University, the average adult makes about 35,000 conscious decisions a day, and that’s not even counting the time our brain is on autopilot. The rise in global technol-ogy usage has given us many amazing benefits, but created a new problem: decision fatigue.

Aaron Shapiro, CEO of Huge, coined the term An-ticipatory design in 2015 as a method by which it’s up to the designer to simplify processes as much as possible for users, minimizing difficulty, by making decisions on their behalf.

This is the key point of the Anticipatory move-ment: simplification, for a better customer experi-ence. For you to effectively implement Anticipatory design into your products, you will need to utilize a combination of machine learning, excellent User Experience design, and an ioT platform from which to collect and transmit your data.

The overall concept is not new, but we’re only now being able to tap into its true potential. Early attempts, like Microsoft’s Clippy or Eliza, the first chatbot, were steps in the right direction, but limited by their lack of connectivity to the cloud and other data sources.

By being able to store and analyze vast quantities of data in real time, to connect to multiple APIs for additional sources of information and provide instan-taneous results or human-style interactions, the new designs are creating near-frictionless experiences.

But how can I know what my user will want? Shouldn’t you give them the choice?

This is perhaps the hardest stumbling block to getting started in Anticipatory Design: How can you selectively strip away user choice, while still intelligently giving them everything they need?

Whatever your product, when designing, you’ll need to think of yourself as a customer, someone using this in a real-world situation.

Ask these questions:1. Why am I using this product?2. What is the most important thing that I want

to know?3. What are my most likely actions?

And as a designer, how can I make this easier for the customer?

Let’s use Spotify as an example. When thinking from the user perspective, the answers become clear:1. I want to listen to music.2. I want to know what music is available.3. I’m going to search for music, find some, and then

play it.That’s a lot of decisions there – and it can be quite

a while from when you first open the app, to the time you start hearing music – causing the dreaded decision fatigue. To make it easier, Spotify added two different Anticipatory elements: This includes both new and existing songs. Additionally, they allow you to connect to Facebook to hear what your friends are playing. This allows the user the flexi-bility of listening to existing music, but saves them from decisions they don’t want to make.

As Aaron Shapiro says, the top 5 things to keep in mind with Anticipatory design are:1. Imagine the business as if is a service. How do

you serve your users?2. Allow digital access to that service.3. Think of ways to automate service delivery.4. Launch an automated version of your service.5. Carefully decide which decisions your users will

be comfortable giving up, then consider the eth-ical implications of taking over each choice.

Decision fatigue

Known as the ‘Unicorn Whisperer’ due to

her special focus on entrepreneurs. Growth

expert, executive coach, author, and speaker. As a founding employee of

Evernote, she oversaw the company’s growth from thousands to 100 mln

customers.

Heather Wilde, CTO of ROCeteer

How many decisions do you think the average person

makes in a single day?


4 5

I believe that there are only two types of organiza-tions and understanding them is the key to under-standing innovation*.

The first, Innovators, are good at trying new things. The second, Distributors, are good at doing the same things repeatedly.

Innovators are often called ‘startups’ and Distrib-utors ‘corporations’. This nomenclature is counter-productive for understanding innovation landscape, because ‘startup’ is associated with young age and small size, while ‘corporations’ with being large and old.

Neither age nor size is a predisposition to belong-ing to one group or another. A young, small company can be a Distributor, and a large and old one can be an Innovator. But they cannot be both at the same time.

A common misconception from executives at Distributor-type companies is that they need to adopt more of the startup culture to become more innovative.

I believe this assumption to be false. Assuming that the goal is to become more competitive and not to switch to the other type.

Innovators are risk tolerant; Distributors are risk averse.

Innovators are experimentation oriented, Distrib-utors are process oriented.

These qualities exclude each other. If you want to become better at running experiments, your ability to maintain efficient processes has to decline and the other way around.

Instead of attempting to become more innova-tive, Distributors should strive to create mutually beneficial relationships with Innovators. This way both types of organizations can focus on what they are good at and combine the benefits of fast-paced experimentation and efficient delivery to customers.

Innovators & distributors

Founder of Startup Safary, international franchise of

events established in Berlin that has expanded to 13 cities around the world.

Started as a tech journalist at the age of 12 before

becoming an entrepreneur.

Maciej Laskus, CEO and Founder of Startup Safary

* I understand ‘innovation’ as new solutions to known prob-lems or solutions to new problems. I do not qualify incremen-tal improvements, e.g. more computation power of new gen-erations of processors as innovation for this consideration.

Innovators are risk tolerant;

Distributors are risk averse.

Innovators are experimentation

oriented, Distributors are

process oriented.


4 6

Radical innovation and uncertainty: a guide for

founders

There are two ways of thinking when creating, and you need both to be radically innovative. It is painful, but there are some mental models that makes it easier.

The deductive and the inductive

I think a person can create in two different ways; deductively and inductively. If you create products deductively you copy, project, or add a feature. You go from one truth to another. Incremental innovation is what the theory calls it. That is where the Lean Startup methods are best.

One of the Nordics most influential angel investors with over 60 investments and the co-founder of the NordicMakers angel group.

Originally a computer science engineer who founded a deep tech

company finally acquired by Blackberry for $150m.

Hampus Jacobsson, Angel

Investor

Inductive methods are harder to explain. They feel like eureka moments, but are the sum of many impressions over time and a lot of work. But building a product with a purely inductive mindset will, at best, lead to art. No more.

How radical innovation is done

Radical innovation requires both mindsets. By be-lieving you are seeing the future clearly, but being humble in understanding that you are merely feeling. You will need help to make that tangible. And then iterating on that. Otherwise you are just drifting in frustration. The sole ‘visionary founder’ is most often a very lonely and misunderstood person. You need to combine the inductive process with a de-ductive.

Creating an entirely new product feels like the blind leading the deaf. The inductive and the de-ductive both are totally lost in their unique way. By cooperating and fighting through the communica-tion issues, they can create. In conflicts, you need to address the whys, assumptions, and principles, which lead you forward. Figure out how to fight in a constructive manner ¹ with your co-founder.

Don’t give up, embrace it. The obstacle is the way if you want to do disruptive innovation. And that world is not like other ².

Creating a patchwork of informed guesses

There are many methods on getting closer. All these are just triangulation, and none of them will be answers. They will give you more ‘feeling’ and conviction, but no customer will tell you what you should be building next.

“I see it. Clearly. It is just blurry” is

a phrase I have been mocked for

many times. It is how I create a product,

and exactly how I feel. Mixed with panic.


4 7

Bradstreet? How would a bike from Tesla look like?

The fourth one is working by analogy or vision. I loved the one Google used many years; What business models would work in the (infinite) library of Alexandria? How would education be in multiplayer co-op mode? How can you scale Tony Robbins so everyone get a personal development coach?

Again, these don’t provide answers but a playing field for your minds to make your idea more tangible.

Predict panic, not clear progress

The feeling of panic, imbalance, confusion, and most of all frustration isn’t unnatural or that you are not progressing. It is a sig-nal that you are working. It is painful going through the cognitive dissonance of the two modes. Luck favors the gritty.

The first product is not the definitive one either. It will need to evolve into a plat-form or other unique defendabilities, but for now it is just an experiment gathering data for you.

Startups are different to most things. They are ventures into the unknown, where you have to combine the mind of an artist with one of an engineer. Dreams with Details. Imagination with Implemen-tation. Future with Now.

Innovation is more an art and not a craft. It is the cooperation of two processes that don’t seem to blend well. Don’t worry if you find it hard and that there is little pre-scription that works.

The third one is imagining a deity trying to solve the problem. What would education with VR look like if Apple did it? How would Google

implement Dun & Bradstreet? How would a bike from Tesla look like?

4 7

“When he set out to invent the light bulb, Edison was not tinkering with candles.”

The first one is creating prototypes on a deadline. You set off a day, or even a week, and just build a prototype – preferably for an open minded customer or an imagined one. It is important to focus on this task and set everything else aside as well as constrain-ing the time, so you don’t question things or even worse try to make it perfect. Great is the enemy of good. And remember, you are not after anything you can build on, just something to give you insight.

The second one is to interview users to truly get under the skin. Let them walk you through an event where you think your product could be useful, without leading them at all. You can even start with “what is a day like.” Drill down when they are on subjects you care about. Ask why things are as they are. Ask what the consequences of problems are. Ask how they would solve the problem instead. Don’t ask them about solutions. I can’t stress this enough; don’t talk about solutions, you are not a sales-person, you are an anthropologist.

The third one is imagining a deity trying to solve the problem. What would education with VR look like if Apple did it? How would Google implement Dun &

¹ https://hajak.se/why-founders-need-to-fight-or-lose-it-all-bdf66a91776c

2 https://hajak.se/why-deep-tech-startups-shouldnt-monetize-and-what-they-should-do-instead-ac710f59c815

G r o w w i t h T e c h — M A Y 2 0 1 7

4 9

I am really proud that, based on Stack Over-flow data, we can present, for the first time, such a comprehensive study of the software developer market in the CEE region. This shows that countries in the region have a real talent pool in the IT industry that can help their economies to take the advantage of either attracting the biggest interna-

tional tech companies or building strong local software challengers. Additionally, these numbers also support rising startup ecosystems.

Central & Eastern Europe Developer

LandscapeWith over a million software developers in the Central

Eastern Europe region, about a quarter of them in Poland, Ukraine, Romania and the Czech Republic, are also reach-

ing a creditable level of a 100 thousand.

Co-founder of infoShare tech conference and

infoShare Academy coding school, member of the

Startup Poland Foundation Advisory Board. Previously a senior manager at wp.pl responsible for tech and

business development of the biggest Polish e-mail service, adserver technology, search

services, and many more.

Grzegorz Borowski, Fundacja infoShare

Another interesting point is that, in the majority of the CEE countries, we are see-ing a huge concentration of developers in their capital cities, reaching up to 93% in Latvia. In contrast, Poland’s, capital Warsaw accounts for only for 29%, and in Ukraine, Kiev numbers 43%.

If you look at software developer density, the number of software developers com-pared to the labor force as a whole, we see that Slovakia and Estonia are true leaders, achieving 3.7 and 3.0, developers per 100 working people respectively, versus a re-gional average of around 1.3.

Poland is the biggest, most diversified country in the region with 254 thou-sand developers and seven hubs (Warsaw, Kraków, Wrocław, Katowice, Poznań, Gdańsk and Łodź) each with at least 10 thousand developers. Being based in Po-land I find this quite satisfying, but on the other hand I see that there is still at least 50 thousand employees missing on the market. Therefore, the national and local governments should treat this seriously, constantly looking for opportunities by improving educational models and building relocation incentives for experts from other cities and countries. Because, in the face of the Industry 4.0 revolution, and with the almost total digitalization of every aspect of our lives, the potential of developers can act as the most important competitive ad-vantage for their economies.

We are seeing a huge

concentration of developers in their

capital cities

4 9

T E C H W O R L D


5 0

Key findings

• There are roughly 1 million professional-grade software developers across Central & Eastern Europe (CEE) · One-quarter of these are in Poland · Across CEE, there are approximately 1.3 develop-

ers for every 100 people in the work force• Across CEE, 15% of Web developers are using the

Java Web stack · Most popular Web development language in

the region is PHP · Java market share of Web developers has been

steady over last 4 years

Methodology and data sources

The bulk of the data in this report are based on devel-opers’ interactions with content on the English-lan-guage version of Stack Overflow• Stack Overflow is the world’s largest website for

software developers, with more than 40 million unique visitors a month. These visitors come to Stack Overflow to ask and answer technical ques-tions with their peers in our community, which make up 95%+ of developers globally. The average visitor comes seven times a month to either con-sume or contribute to content. The sum of this activity is more than 20 million page views a day during the average work week.

• When developers visit Stack Overflow, our da-tabase records their IP and MAC addresses, and their web browser is offered a cookie to track their visitation history. By combining this information, we’re able to build a user history that spans mul-tiple devices and working locations, regardless of whether the user is logged in during a particular visit (or, for that matter, has registered for a login at all).

• At the same time, we record which technologies are tagged on the questions each developer is vis-iting. Our machine learning platform uses the history of tags a developer has interacted with over the last 30 days to assign probabilities that he or she is of a particular ‘kind’ (such as a mobile developer, or systems administrator), and working on a particular stack (such as the .NET stack).

• This allows us to understand exactly how many professional-grade software developers are in a given area, where they are based (for home and

work, so sometimes also their commute between the two), the types of developers they are, and the technologies they use.

We mined Stack Overflow user activity data in three ways

• Cross-sectional estimates of most developer ‘kind’ and ‘stack’ populations were generated by our machine learning platform, which classifies users using a multi-step process: first determining an overall kind, e.g. ‘Web developer,’ then a sub-kind, e.g. ‘front-end Web developer,’ and finally a separate classification of the stack(s) the devel-oper is working on. These classification models apply to all visitors to the main Stack Overflow English-language site, regardless of whether they are registered users or logged in. The bulk of the data in this report and the accompanying spread-sheet are outputs from this system.

• Time-series trends in developer kinds and tech-nical stacks were generated by looking at a ran-dom sample of 25% of all traffic over the last five years. Rather than counting ‘heads’ the way the classification models do, this technique aggregat-ed all traffic in a region or country and looked at to what extent it was Java-oriented, Python-oriented, etc. These time series measures were then normal-ized to the canonical percentages of developers of each kind and stack generated by the machine learning platform.

• Time series trends in interest in Firebase and related technologies were generated by look-ing at the number of questions asked on the Eng-lish-language Stack Overflow related to each tag, on a by-region, by-quarter basis. (While questions are a different quantity than people, we’ve found in the past that the number of questions asked and the number of people consuming that content tend to be highly correlated.)

Data definitions and notes of caution

• What we mean by ‘developer’: We classify some-one as a ‘developer’ for purposes of this analysis if their usage of Stack Overflow is frequent enough to make us think they’re coding for a living or planning to some day. In addition to professional software developers, the data do include but also university (and, in some cases, high school) stu-

5 0 T E C H W O R L D

Stack Overflow is the largest online community for programmers to learn,

share their knowledge, and advance their careers. Founded in 2008, Stack Overflow sees 40 million visitors each month and is the flagship site of the Stack Exchange network, home to 150+ Q&A sites dedicated to niche topics. https://stackoverflow.com/

Stack Overflow

5 1

dents and intensive hobbyists. In most cases, however, our classification engine is able to detect the patterns associated with these more casual users and filter them out from our counts.

• What we mean by ‘mobile develop-er’: We classify someone as a ‘mobile developer’ (sometimes referred to in this report as ‘developer specializing in mobile apps’) if a large proportion of the content they’re viewing on Stack Over-flow is tagged with either a mobile oper-ating system, a mobile SDK, or similar technologies that are meant specifically for building mobile device applications. This spans Android, iOS, and Windows Phone. Developers who work on cloud back ends, databases, or other services that may be called by a mobile app are

classified separately (primarily as ‘back-end Web developers’ or ‘full-stack Web developers,’ depending on the extent to which they use front-end technologies). Developers who work on mobile-enabled websites may be classified as designers, Web developers, or mobile developers, depending on their individual content usage.

• Someone can be two things: Our ma-chine learning platform doesn’t tag a giv-en individual with a single classification. Rather, it assigns each visitor a probabili-ty that they’re a Web developer, a mobile developer, etc. In some cases, a developer may be counted as both a full-stack Web developer and a

• Someone can be two places: Many Stack Overflow users login from both

their offices and their homes, and we record them as ‘present’ in both places. Some users also VPN in such a way that we think they’re somewhere they’re not. This report presents data at the country and regional level, so these ‘migrations’ don’t have a large effect on the findings.

• English only, for now: The data in this report are based solely on the Eng-lish-language version of Stack Overflow. Data from the recently-launched Rus-sian-language Stack Overflow may be incorporated into future reports. In gen-eral, we find that developers in foreign language markets do view content on the English Stack Overflow, but they’re less likely to contribute new questions, answers, and comments than their peers in Anglophone countries.

Developer populations in CEE

Developer Developer population of Central & Estern Europe (thousands)

Po

lan

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Ukr

ain

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Cze

ch

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254

166

118

100

8064

51 47 4538 34

27 24 20 18

Nearly a quarter (24%) are based in Poland; additional 35% in Ukraine, Romania, and Czech Rep.• Central & Eastern Europe’s developers

account for 6% of the global total.

THERE ARE JUST OVER 1 MILLION DEVELOPERS IN CEE


5 2

Slovakia and Estonia have especially high densities of developers• Relatively low ratios in Ukraine, Belarus,

and Romania may be due to large num-bers of developers in those countries pre-ferring to consume content in Russian or another language. Activity from the Russian-language Stack Overflow is not accounted for in our data.

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3,7

3,0

1,91,8 1,8 1,8

1,71,5 1,5

1,41,3

1,21,0

0,90,7

THERE ARE 1.3 DEVELOPERS FOR EVERY 100 PEOPLE IN THE LABOR FORCE ACROSS CEE

Developer Populations,

Ukraine (thousands)

Percentage of all developers in country in capital city metro area, CEE

By comparison, roughly 7% of developers in the USA are in the Washington DC area

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93%

85%

79%75% 75%

73% 73%70%

64%62%

50% 50%

42% 41%

29%

RELATIVELY HIGH PROPORTIONS OF DEVELOPERS IN CEE ARE IN THE CAPITAL CITIES OF THEIR RESPECTIVE COUNTRIES

Kie

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68 477

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5

Developers per 100 people in labor force


5 3

THERE ARE 68K MOBILE DEVELOPERS AND 164K BACK-END WEB DEVELOPERS IN CEE

2.4 back-end specialists per mobile devel-oper in region• Lowest ratio is Ukraine at 1.8:1• Highest ratio is Estonia at 4.4:1

Comparison of Mobile Developer and Back-end Web Developer population in Eastern European cities

Mobile developers Back - end Web

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Comparizon of Mobile Developer and Back-end Web Developer Populations in Central & Eastern Europe (thousands)

Mobile developers Back - end Web

Po

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ch

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HIGHEST METRO-LEVEL POPULATION OF MOBILE DEVELOPERS IN KIEV AND WARSAW


5 4

Percentage distribution of Mobile, Web and other kinds of developers in Eastern Europe

Mobile developers Web developers

5%

74%

9%

74%

4%

66%

4%

75%

6%

65%

6% 6%

68% 68%

5 %

72%

6%

68%

6%

67%

7%

73%

6%

69%

6%

67%

9%

75%

5%

72%

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Hu

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a

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Lat

via

DISTRIBUTION OF MOBILE AND WEB DEVELOPERS REMAINS SIMILAR ACROSS CEE, MIRRORING GLOBAL TRENDS

Developer populations in Belarus Cities

38 128

2 502

2 169

1 728

1 322

1 140

Minsk

Gomel

Grodno

Viceibsk

Brest

Mogilev

BELARUS: 45,116 DEVELOPERS

Majority of Belarusian developers are located in Minsk

Country populations


BULGARIA: 51,024 DEVELOPERS

70.4% of Bulgaria’s developer population are based in Sofia

Developer populations in Bulgaria Cities

35 942

4 327

3 968

1 188

Sofia

Plovdiv

Varna

Burgas

5 5

CZECH REPUBLIC: 100,498 DEVELOPERS

As seen in other CEE countries, the majority are concentrated in the capital city of Prague

Developer populations in Czech Republic Cities

50 619

17 738

5 705

3 044

1 970

1 766

1 586

250

Prague

Brno

Ostrava

Pilsen area

Olomous/ Prosejov

area

Hradec Kralove

area

Ceske Budejovice

area

Karlovy Vary area

5 5

HUNGARY: 79,977 DEVELOPERS

The vast majority of Hungarian develop-ers are concentrated in Budapest

Developer populations in Hungary Cities

58 452

3 702

1 732

1 178

877

101

Budapest

Szeged

Miskolc

Gyor

Sopron

Debrecen

ESTONIA HAS 21,047 DEVELOPERS

While this is a relatively small number, in Tallinn, this represents almost 3.5% of the total population

Developer populations in Estonia Cities

Tallinn

Tartu

15 388

3 963


5 6

LITHUANIA: 25,264 DEVELOPERS

Lithuania has a more balanced distribu-tion of developers across its major cities than other Central Eastern European countries

Developer populations in Lithuania Cities

16 172

9 022

1 376

Vilnius

Kaunas

Klaipeda

POLAND: 254,188 DEVELOPERS

76% of Polish developers are spread across Warsaw, Krakow, Wroclaw, Katowice, Poznan and Gdansk/Gdynia

Developer populations in Poland Cities

74 252

32 570

24 337

24 204

22 400

16 082

10 762

4 487

4 358

4 156

4 059

3 231

2 492

Warsaw

Krakow

Wroclaw

Karowice

Poznan

Gdansk/Gdynia

Lodz

Szczecin

Lublin

Bialystok

Rzeszow

Bydgoszcz

Torun

LATVIA: 18,040 DEVELOPERS

As in other Eastern/Central European cities, most Latvian developers are con-centrated in the capital city of Riga

Developer populations in Latvia Cities

16 750

288

Riga

Liepaja area


5 7

SLOVAKIA: 24,976 DEVELOPERS

Bratislava is the main location for devel-opers in Slovakia

Developer populations in Slovakia Cities

Bratislava

Kosice

Presov

18 994

5 487

910

UKRAINE: 165,864 DEVELOPERS

While most Ukraine developers are locat-ed in Kiev, there are also relatively high populations of Ukrainian developers

Developer populations in Ukraine Cities

68 477

23 348

19 684

11 822

9 453

5 169

2 484

1 921

1 676

1 378

495

Kiev

Kharkiv

Lviv metro

Dnipro

Odessa

Zaporizhia

Mykolaiv

Donetsk

Poltava

Sevas-topol

Luhansk

ROMANIA: 77,637 DEVELOPERS

88% of developers in Romania are based in either Bucharest or Cluj-Napoca

Developer populations in Romania Cities

Bucharest

Cluj-Napoca

Iasi

Timisoara

Constanta

49 360

18 864

9 736

7 134

1 559


5 8

The exception is Belarus, where Java has taken its place

Penetration of popular Web stacks in CEE

Full Stack Web Java

Full Stack .Net

Full Stack Node.JS

Full Stack PHP

Full Stack Python

Full Stack Ruby

Full Stack Wordpress

Bulgaria 13% 21% 16% 23% 6% 15% 17%

Belarus 21% 19% 18% 13% 9% 15% 12%

Czech Republic

15% 19% 12% 20% 14% 12% 13%

Estonia 18% 9% 14% 20% 20% 13% 15%

Greece 16% 14% 11% 20% 14% 12% 17%

Croatia 15% 19% 12% 17% 14% 12% 14%

Hungary 17% 18% 12% 21% 10% 11% 13%

Lithuania 12% 21% 13% 26% 8% 13% 16%

Poland 17% 17% 13% 18% 13% 14% 14%

Romania 17% 16% 13% 23% 9% 12% 16%

Serbia 14% 20% 14% 21% 9% 15% 18%

Slovenia 12% 19% 12% 16% 19% 10% 14%

Slovakia 16% 16% 12% 21% 11% 12% 15%

Ukraine 14% 14% 21% 21% 10% 19% 18%

Latvia 14% 13% 14% 27% 9% 15% 16%

PHP IS THE MOST POPULAR WEB LANGUAGE THROUGHOUT CEE


Web development in CEE

5 9

• While 16% of developers globally use Java for Web development, this ranges on a regional basis from 12% in Sub-Saharan Africa to 19% in North America.

• Though the Java stack is the #1 most commonly used globally, it isn’t the #1 language of choice in any given region – rather, it ‘wins’ globally by

Percentage developer share for most common Web stacks, all regions

Technical stack: Full-stack Web

Java

Technical stack: Full-stack Web Microsoft


NodeJS


PHP


Python


RubyOnRails

Technical stack: Full-stack Web Wordpress

Entire world 16% 16% 13% 15% 15% 13% 13%

North America 17% 15% 12% 8% 19% 12% 10%

LatAm Region 13% 17% 13% 21% 10% 15% 14%

British Isles 14% 17% 11% 12% 21% 12% 12%

Western Europe

16% 15% 14% 17% 17% 13% 14%

Nordics 14% 21% 15% 12% 17% 12% 13%

CEE Region 15% 17% 15% 20% 13% 14% 15%

Russia 13% 17% 16% 18% 18% 15% 13%

MENAT 15% 26% 9% 18% 8% 10% 12%

Sub-Saharan Africa

12% 21% 9% 23% 11% 9% 11%

SE Asia 18% 18% 12% 19% 9% 13% 15%

Other APAC 14% 15% 14% 11% 18% 15% 12%

being the #2 choice in the largest regions (North America, Western Europe, and SE Asia).

• More developed markets (e.g. North America, Nordics) make greater use of Python for Web development, while many emerging markets (e.g. LatAm, SE Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa) are using PHP more heavily.

IN TERMS OF WEB STACK DEVELOPER SHARES, CEE RESEMBLES SE ASIA AND LATAM MORE CLOSELY THAN THE REST OF EUROPE


6 0

Fastest gains and highest penetrations in Ukraine, Belarus

Developer market shares of common Web development stack in CEE, 2012-2016

2012 2013 2014 2015 2016

Python 9% 10% 10% 10% 11%

PHP 7% 7% 7% 6% 6%

Java 7% 7% 7% 7% 7%

.Net 11% 10% 9% 9% 9%

Node.JS 2% 2% 3% 3% 3%

Ruby 3% 4% 3% 3% 3%

Python 9% 10% 10% 10% 11%

Node.JS gaining developer share throughout CEE, 2012-2016

2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 SLOPE

Ukraine 14% 16% 18% 19% 21% 2%

Belarus 12% 14% 16% 17% 18% 1%

Bulgaria 12% 13% 14% 15% 16% 1%

Latvia 11% 12% 13% 14% 14% 1%

Estonia 11% 12% 12% 13% 14% 1%

Serbia 10% 12% 12% 13% 14% 1%

Poland 9% 11% 11% 12% 13% 1%

Lithuania 9% 11% 11% 12% 13% 1%

Slovakia 9% 10% 11% 12% 12% 1%

Croatia 9% 10% 11% 11% 12% 1%

Hungary 9% 10% 11% 11% 12% 1%

Slovenia 9% 10% 10% 11% 12% 1%

Czech

Republic8% 10% 10% 11% 12% 1%

Greece 8% 9% 10% 11% 11% 1%

.NET LOSING DEVELOPERS TO NODE, PYTHON IN CEE

NODE.JS GAINING DEVELOPER SHARE THROUGHOUT CEE


6 1

Strongest adoption growth in Estonia, Slovakia

Percentage of developers who use Python for Web development Central & Eastern Europe, 2012-2016

2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 SLOPE

Estonia 18% 18% 18% 19% 20% 1%

Slovakia 15% 15% 16% 18% 19% 1%

Croatia 11% 12% 12% 13% 14% 1%

Greece 10% 11% 12% 13% 14% 1%

Czech

Republic11% 11% 12% 13% 14% 1%

Poland 11% 11% 12% 12% 13% 0%

Slovenia 9% 9% 9% 10% 11% 1%

Hungary 8% 9% 9% 10% 10% 1%

Ukraine 9% 9% 9% 10% 10% 0%

Belarus 7% 8% 8% 9% 9% 1%

Latvia 7% 8% 8% 8% 9% 0%

Serbia 7% 7% 8% 8% 9% 0%

Lithuania 7% 7% 7% 8% 8% 0%

Bulgaria 5% 6% 6% 6% 6% 0%

PYTHON USAGE FOR WEB DEVELOP-MENT GROWING THROUGHOUT CEE

6 1

Although we might say that PHP is rather not sexy, it still holds the position of the most popular web language, not only in Poland, but also across the CEE region. It is worth noticing that Python is favoured in North America, the British Isles, the Nor-dics, Western Europe and even Russia, but not in Eastern Europe. This will probably change soon due to the dynamic increase of Python usage in the region.

JavaScript is the most approved pro-gramming language of the world, used by nearly 62% of developers. A large variety of frameworks and libraries, such as ReactJS, AngularJS, Vue.js or Node.js make this lan-guage more and more in demand every year. This is what’s happening in Poland – PHP remains at the same level, but Node.js is growing dynamically.

Co-founder of infoShare, the biggest tech conference in CEE region. Co-founder of

infoShare Academy. Previously the Head of Web Development

Department at Wirtualna Polska.

Andrzej Kiesz, Fundacja infoShare


6 2

IT industry regardless of the age

Choosing a completely different career path is fea-sible even if it may seem problematic. The mobili-ty and courage related to a change of profession is typical mainly for young people. People aged 29-35 and, sometimes, elderly people as well, have no fear of choosing a new professional environment and industry – even a few times in a short period of time. Generations present on the labour market for a few or a dozen years perceive a career development op-portunity in a completely different way than their a few decades' older colleagues. They do not feel that they are wasting their time when they start a job differing from what they learned during the 5 years’ long studies. They are aware that the current situation on the labour market requires lifetime learning. The statistics show that, with the current rate of changes in the economy, we will change the learned profession 3-5 times throughout our lives.

The IT sector is one of the industries that invite new specialists into its ranks. It is still described as developing dynamically, which entails an increased

Career on a new track – sector change to IT

It was difficult to imagine just a dozen years ago that a long-term employee could decide to change the sector and its career path. If

you commit yourself to a job and profession you do it for good – you can safely say that this was the motto of employees in the PRL

period. The situation changed completely with years so that nobody is surprised today if an architect, geodesist or a call centre worker suddenly decides to become a programmer.

Originator and organizer of infoShare, the biggest tech conference in CEE. Creator

and CEO of infoShare Academy coding school. In IT for 15 years, previously

IT director in Wirtualna Polska. Mentor in startup

programmes.

Marcin Pokojski, CEO of infoShare

Academy

10 000

14 000

12 000

8 000

6 000

4 000

2 000

0

junior specialist

experienced specialist

senior specialist

specialist – expert

team leader

employment contract contract commission contract

Sedlak & Sedlak salary report for the IT industry 2016. Gross salaries in the IT industry in Poland for 2016 on different levels

of an organization based on different types of contracts


6 3

demand for programmers. The labour mar-ket lacked as many as many as 50 thousand IT specialists last year. Such a great defi-ciency of human resources intensifies the competition among employers who tempt potential employees with attractive sala-ries and long lists of non-monetary benefits.

According to the research ordered by GoldenLine, higher salaries are the best reason for employees to think about find-ing a new job. Considering high salaries offered to programmers, the vision of an IT job is really tempting. The best of them, having a few years’ professional experi-ence and employed on contracts can earn over ten thousand zlotys monthly. In turn, junior specialists can count on 2-3.5 thou-sand zlotys net at the beginning of their careers.

To whom is the IT industry open? Is it really worthwhile to turn to it? Not only those who plan their professional careers but also employees with long-term profes-sional experience in other areas can give other fields a try.

Work in the IT area and take advan-tage of benefits

Despite being attached to the job in which one spent many years, there comes a mo-ment in the life of a worker when one starts thinking about a change of a sector. Reasons may include the discouragement due to repeatable tasks, no chance of de-velopment or dissatisfaction with financial conditions. It is also a natural thing that the longer the period of employment, the more difficult it is to make a decision to turn to another profession. The fear of the unknown is worth overcoming not only in order to break down one’s internal barriers but also because of real benefits offered by a job in a different sector.

The range of benefits of the program-mer’s profession is very wide. A discussion about increasing salaries for programmers and non-fiscal benefits guaranteed by employers has been heard on the labour market for a long time. The possibility of remote working, medical care, subscrip-

Sources:

http://hrpress.pl/artykuly/rozwoj-pracownikow/rotacja-pracownikow-kto-i-dlaczego-zmienia-pra-codawce/

http://praca.money.pl/poradniki/artykul/zmiana-branzy-kariery-zawodowej---co-sie-z,162,0,1795746.html

https://raportplacowy.pl/pl/static,o-nas.html

https://raportplacowy.pl/pl/article,-show,58,nowy-kolejny-poczatek.html

http://wynagrodzenia.pl/artykul/praktyki-wyna-gradzania-w-it-premia-rekomendacyjna

http://media.goldenline.pl/pr/341564/dlacze-go-szukamy-innej-pracy-raport-goldenline

tions for sports activities and co-funding of foreign language courses became a stand-ard in companies employing IT specialists. Other increasingly popular features include creative rest zones where one can play billiards, tickets to concerts or excellently equipped, modern offices. The specificity of the programmer’s work and prospective additional benefits encourage many people to decide to change their profession. But, how to start?

Most important first step

Before we commence to change our profes-sion, let us think what exactly we would like to do and what specialization to choose. Regarding IT sector, we need to have it in mind that the sector is very extensive and continuously developing. A change of a ca-reer path always entails a challenge and the need for proper preparation, e.g. in the form of a training course or graduation of an appropriate school.

Front-end or back-end? Docker or, per-haps, Spring Framework Core? There is a lot of specialist terminology in the IT as well as terms one can hear in the industry jargon. Programming requires specific personality traits and skills that facilitate the start in the sector. For example, if you have analyt-ical skills, capability of abstract thinking and communicate in English, your start in the IT sector should not be difficult. A lin-guistic talent is a great advantage; however, slower learners of a foreign language should not be discouraged.

Employees thinking about a change of their current field and turning to the IT sector can take up programming courses and intense courses that make it possible to build durable foundations for a new ca-reer. An important thing is that, in order to change the industry and become a program-mer, one does not have to graduate from IT studies. The labour market is open to those who gain necessary skills at intense courses or the increasingly popular boot camps. It is important that they offer a practical ap-proach thanks to which the sector change will be less stressful and more seamless.

Programmer fills knowledge gaps

More and more employers become aware of the importance of offering training to employees and meet them half-way. The acquisition of new competencies and the opportunity for lifelong learning are pri-orities for many employees. Acquisition of new competencies offered in industries that develop dynamically and undergo numerous changes should be a daily oc-currence for employees. Whether we talk about soft or hard competencies, it is im-portant to make it possible to specialists to follow the requirements of the industry.

Participation in training courses im-proving the qualif ication continues to a benefit that the employers willingly offer. Why? It is beneficial both for the employee and for the employer. The em-ployee gains knowledge that can also be used in another company while the em-ployer will be able to enjoy the support of a well-trained employee. Even freelance programmers should be intent on improv-ing their knowledge and participating in training courses. Thanks to such training, they will gain a competitive edge and im-prove their choice of employers.


6 4

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6 5

for beginners: professional pro-

gramming courses "from zero to hero"

for developers: full upskilling path

from regular to senior Java Developer

corporate trainings in: Java, .Net,

JavaScript, SQL, Python, React,

Angular, TDD, CI, BigData / Hadoop,

Docker, GO & oth.

[email protected]

Najnowsze technologie, fantastycznie ludzie, ambitne projekty

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lli J

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new

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Ang

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My SQ

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LinuxBootstrap

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www

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PHP

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.BespokeChat is a professional chat agent outsourcing company which offers sales, support and lead generation assistance to a wide range of small and medi-um-sized companies. Any website with 2,000 or more monthly visits has the potential to become a.Be-spokeChat customer.

The company’s goal is to be the first line of customer ser-vice oriented to increase their partner’s sales and to filter and pass on only valuable, validat-ed leads. .BespokeChat’s main task is to get a foot in the door, to approach potential customers and start developing a relation-ship with them through chat. To

do that, .BespokeChat provides an extension of service to the customer’s normal office hours. They offer their services 15 hours a day, 7 days a week. Chats are conducted 100% by real people; no chatbots included.

The .BespokeChat team is very good at what they do. For example, they managed to increase the con-version for the language-learning service Lerni, by a whopping 50 %. That’s 50% more paying customers after introducing .BespokeChat’s services to the website.

Currently .BespokeChat servic-es companies only in Polish but the company aims to add another languages in the future.

1 BespokeChatc o u n t r y c i t y

Poland Wrocław

y e a r f o u n d e d i n d u s t r i e s

2015 Customer care, E-commerce & online marketplaces, Media & Communications

BUY.BOX is an e-commerce plug-in which connects web pub-lishers with online shops.

BUY.BOX is primarily a price comparison engine which shortens the way of a customer to the online store. It allows the user to find the cheapest deal already on the web-site where a product description or review is,eliminating the need for a traditional visit to a price com-parison site, or to browse directly online store listings in search of the most favorable offer.

For website owners BUY.BOX is an element enriching their website or blog with attractive functionality, and thanks to the high CTR ratio and conversion rate, is an attrac-tive additional source of income.

For online stores BUY.BOX is an excellent channel to promote and sell their products and servic-es. BUY.BOX provides them with high-quality traffic.

BUY.BOX operates on e-com-merce and performance marketing markets.

3 BUY.BOXc o u n t r y c i t y

Poland Poznań


2013 E-commerce & online marketplaces, Marketing & Adtech

Better Media Suite is cloud-based platform enabling the cre-ation and publishing of rich mo-bile applications with real-time UI control, content and presentation management.

It consists of two products Play-Better and ReadBetter.PlayBetter helps create and manage mul-ti-screen TV/VOD streaming appli-cations with no unnecessary coding and with dedicated integrationwith Online TV Providers, OTT Vendors and other media companies.

ReadBetter is a Next Generation Newsstand Management System that helps to personalize, manage and monetize your mobile press ki-osk, giving competitive advantage especially for press publishers.

Our products are addressed to: · Small media companies search-ing for ready-to-use publishing software

· Companies wanting to reduce time-to-market (delivery time) with multi-screen applications

With our product implementation, we can help with: · Cross platform configuration and content management control in real-time

· Effective communication with your user-base

· Key metrics monitoring in multiple dimensions with valuable insight for making ever correct business decisions

· Identifying potential errors per application, platform and country

2 Better Media Suitec o u n t r y c i t y

Poland Wrocław


2016 Media & Communications, Mobile, Software Development

2017STARTUP

BUSINESSCARDS


6 6

In today’s market, people are used to personalized products, including personalized content and media. Interactive video and cinematic VR provides the possi-bility of making video content more accurate, more immersive for view-ers and better matched to a single customer’s needs.

A good solution for all video producers is the interactive video editing toolset Deligic, designed as a web application.1. The platform offers an engine for

playing game-like (interactive) movies, web advertisements or video courses.

2. The Deligic editor allows the cre-ation of interactive movies from commonly created resources in-

cluding video, VR content, music, images and digital documents.

3. A watcher-tracking service analy-ses users’ behaviour data, so pro-ducers can follow users’ needs and respond to them. Deligic software provides:

· an interactive player, enabling navigation through the video and displaying information associated with the content.

· an interactive video editor, provid-ing tools to design interactions and build navigation into the video.

Deligic services are addressed to digital advertisement agencies, educational facilities and film post-production studios or media houses.

Now, you can make interactive video on your own.

7 InventCorec o u n t r y c i t y

Poland Gdańsk


2013 AR/VR, Media & Communications, Software Development

Click2CallMe – We connect your business with customers.

Click2CallMe improves the way end customers call retail and ser-vice businesses while browsing their websites.

Thanks to our online Click2CallMe service, there is no need for poten-tial customers to pickup the phone, dial phone numbers found on a web page and make standard mobile or fixed line calls.

The idea behind the service is a game-changer: click on the web button to make the call. We aim for the best customer experience pos-sible. No more typing mistakes or hunting lost glasses.

Calls are made directly from the web browser and are free to custom-ers: business consultants answer calls directly in the browser or using our mobile app.

Click2CallMe can be used by a wide range of companies but is pri-marily targeted at small to medium businesses in various market seg-ments, such as retail, e-commerce, services, healthcare andtravel agencies. Flexible subscriptions schemes fit any requirement.

Visit www.click2callme.pl web-page and start using for free today.

→ www.click2callme.pl

4 Click2CallMec o u n t r y c i t y

Poland Warszawa


2016 Media & Communications

DeepDoc is a personal web ap-plication-based well-being system, deep learning algorithm and Mes-senger chatbot. It aims to seamless-ly take care of the emotional and mental well-being of the individual. It gives the user a sense of securi-ty, due to its ongoing mood moni-toring. It is an end-to-end solution which diagnoses the individuals’ mood, based on their Instagram activity, helping them to stay men-tally healthy, thanks to custom-ized psycho-educational content served by a chatbot directly to the users' Facebook Messenger, and, if required, connecting them to an on-demand psychotherapist.

Our core target are those com-panies with well-being programs,

which are aware of absenteeism is-sues. According to the World Health Organization, in the EU, around 100 million people suffer from major de-pression or depressed mood, with 50% of them left untreated due to misdiagnosis. This results in a loss of revenue amounting to EU 170 billion euros per year. 60 mln Europeans, aged 20-40 between use Instagram, an age range which overlaps with the high-risk group for depression.

In two weeks, we managed to at-tract 1300 users who have used our MVP product.

We cooperate with the StressLab research unit and Maja Polikows-ka-Herman, psychiatrist, psycho-therapist and lecturer at the Medical University of Warsaw.

6 DeepDocc o u n t r y c i t y

Poland Warszawa


2017 Artificial Intelligence, Health & Medtech & Wellbeing, Smart city & smart home

Cycle is a project to create a natural alternative for family planning.

Worn under armpit in the form of a patch, a small sensor monitors women's ovulatory cycle, precisely anticipating her fertile days and so increasing the chances of con-ceiving a baby. The World Health Organization estimates that nearly 50 million couples worldwide fail to conceive a baby within a year of trying, whereas people who use natural family planning are four times less likely to encounter prob-lems with getting pregnant.

A mobile application takes care of the full cycle analysis, making this is a convenient, simple and non-engaging solution. Cycle also helps avoid unplanned pregnancy, without the need for the Pill or bar-rier methods.

Such a natural approach is at a premium, especially in the our times of chemical solutions. It is an effective diary for the 21st century in a world that is becoming more and more aware of what is healthy and what is not.

→ www.yourcycle.eu

5 CYCLEc o u n t r y c i t y

Poland Lublin


2016 Health & Medtech & Wellbeing, Wearable Technology

6 6 S T A R T U P B U S I N E S S C A R D S

6 7

Edward.ai – assistant for sales teams

Sales managers want to have all sales information in one place to aid proper decision making. How-ever, sales reps hate their CRMs. Edward.ai fixes this by being an in-telligent assistant which connects data, gathers it automatically in the background, and then helps to draw proper conclusions, push-ing insights to sales reps. It also gives sales managers a full picture of the performance of their team, including phone calls, meetings and messages, divided into time spent with customers. The platform can be easily integrated with any

other software, including existing CRMs.

Edward uses unique solutions to get the most from context and data: · It is one of the world’s first ‘push like’ intelligent assistants which uses machine learning to improve usage

· It works on top of your data; it uses a conversational user interface, which will soon revolutionize the way we use software

· It can learn user behaviours to improve itself, just like a real as-sistant

· It promotes good habits in sales, and lets users work faster and smarter

9 Edwardc o u n t r y c i t y

Poland Kraków


2016 Branża Analytics & Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, Software Development

Equally is a mobile application designed for convenient, fast and simple division of bills and pay-ments among a group of friends. The app also allows for an immedi-ate repayment and an automatic reminder of any debts.

Most people don’t repay money borrowed simply because they have forgotten. They may also have forgotten that someone else had paid for them, or,that they them-selves had paid and how much they had paid. For various reasons,they don’t want to ask for the money back. Our study has confirmed the existence of the problem of burdensome division of collective bills and getting reimbursement. The most important aspects of this

problem are: a lack of convenience, limited capacity for quick non-cash settlements, a need to keep up with arrears, the discomfort in having to make a claim, any and possible conflicts.

In Poland alone, there are cur-rently over 10 million smartphone owners, of whom our defined tar-get group is the approximately 1 million digital native, socially ac-tive people, aged between 15-26, living in bigger cities – and this group is constantly growing. The most interested potential users are: roommates, joint meal attendants, people traveling together, people shopping together, and students, including participants of foreign exchanges.

11 Equallyc o u n t r y c i t y

Poland Warszawa


2016 Finance & Banking & Insurance, Mobile

Enlyse changes the way of solv-ing environmental problems.

The Enlyse platform connects artificial intelligence, cloud com-puting and high quality sensors to minimize human impact on the en-vironment. Insight from data helps cities and industry understand how to make our environment better, at a fraction of the cost of traditional methods.

Our flying laboratory repre-sents a new trend in environ-mental monitoring. The Enlyse platform has plug-and-play ar-

chitecture, which allows for the rapid, customized deployment of low-cost high-quality sensors that measure temperature, humid-ity, particulate matter, pressure, noise, volatile organic compounds, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, ozone and many others. A modular design allows for the easy inte-gration of new innovative sensors and the latest communication technology.

→ www.enlyse.com

10 Enlysec o u n t r y c i t y

Poland Gniezno


2017 Analytics & Big Data, Smart city & smart home, Software Development

E-jobin is a web application whose main goal is to enable re-mote psychological assessment of job applicants. Thanks to the solu-tion, initial screening is no longer an issue and recruiters can get in touch with only those people who are really suitable for the position. Assessment is based on the com-petencies relevant to a particular job description and is carried out by professional psychologists, us-ing the method of an asynchronous video-interview.

E-jobin is used by many custom-ers, ranging from niche recruitment agencies and SMBs, to multi-sub-

sidiary enterprises. Size does not matter. Anyone who is in the game of hunting the best employees will benefit from using our solution. It cuts to a minimum the time wast-ed with the candidates who end up being unsuitable for the position. It allows hiring managers to focus on valuable candidates and,so maxi-mize their efficiency.

E-jobin has successfully proven its value in the Czech Republic and we're looking to expand to other European countries. However, the ‘no-boundaries’ concept allows quick expansion to other, more distant markets as well.

8 e-jobinc o u n t r y c i t y

Czech Republic Brno


2015 Inspiration & Knowledge, Business opportunities, Networking


6 8

Game Vu is an RPG/AR/VR diag-nostic game that evaluates team roles, personality traits and the player’s competences. The Game Vu is dedicated to the recruitment and selection process, for the di-agnosis and development of the employee’s potential and for cre-ating profiles, dossiers and CVs. The game is also forto job seekers and for corporations and entrepre-neurs looking for staff members. Assessment based on the Game Vu helps people avoid writing CVs and taking stressful, inefficient

self-report questionnaires. It will be more reliable and less depend-ent on the self-presentation skills often used to make CV more im-pressive. The Game Vu facilitates contact between candidates and the companies looking for them, without the unnecessary partic-ipation of recruitment agencies. The game is based on scientifical-ly formulated psychological tools. The game provides a new dimen-sion in recruitment. Candidates do not declare who they are, they just show it.

15 Game Vuc o u n t r y c i t y

Poland Warszawa


2017 AR/VR, Gaming, Software Development

ExoLimbs is a complete solu-tion that significantly improves the process of rehabilitation of the joints of the lower limbs. It is also a stabilizing device, diagnostic and rehabilitation mobile robot, al-lowing everyone access to modern rehabilitation. Problems with the joints of the lower limbs, and espe-cially the knee may apply to anyone

– both professional athletes, people with disabilities, as well as ordinary people. Globally,as many as every fourth person struggles with injury or degeneration of the knee joints.

ExoLimbs combines the func-tionality of three types of medical

equipment – orthopedic stabilizer, diagnostic equipment, and robot-ic rehabilitation, which increases the effectiveness of therapy, while reducing costs. Its additional ad-vantage is mobility, supporting the movement of off-site rehabil-itation.

The main objective of social Ex-oLimbs is to reduce the number of people with limited independent mobility. The tool increases pro-gress in rehabilitation in the home and eventually, thanks to further work on the project, enables users to navigate the ExoLimbs in an ur-ban environment.

12 ExoLimbsc o u n t r y c i t y

Poland Wrocław


2014 Health & Medtech & Wellbeing, Robotics

FlowVision is a drastic cure for improving your business produc-tivity. Its manufacturing execution system is based on bare codes for process recording and experience of lean professionals in data anal-ysis.

The system collects data based on each operation, setup, failure and unnecessary downtime and,-thus safe time of production super-vision and do this more precisely.

It will check whether you make money or lose money, not only once a quarter, but immediately just after each operation.

Your people will stop guessing and looking for information, but will start to plan their activities and react to real problems as soon as they appear.

The system was designed for small and medium companies but can cooperate with larger MRPs as a MES module for production control.

FlowVision can manage the en-tire production process. You can define resources and their costs, create product and its technology, establish orders and prepare job cards. The system can then collect data and prepare analyses and KPIs.

At present, the system has been successfully implemented and is able to manage as many as 5 lines. Implementation takes less than a week and costs less than few days of consulting.

All you need to do is to start to Measure Your Process and Man-age It.

14 FlowVisionc o u n t r y c i t y

Poland Starogard Gd/Gdynia


2014 Analytics & Big Data

Feedpresso is a product for those who want to be betterin-formed than anyone else.

Feedpresso is a news and blog reader that uses artificial intelli-gence to help you find the most val-uable content on the web, including blogs and news.

Unlike Feedly or Flipboard, Feedpresso is a premium service that cares about you reading, not clicking.

Feedpresso utilizes machine learning to devise automatic rec-ommendations of valuable content to the reader, based on their read-ing habits and history.

The paid-service business model ensures a reader-first approach. Feedpresso focusses on provid-

ing a valuable reading experience instead of driving clicks and page views.

680 mln people in Europe alone do not use English as their first language. Most of these people consume news in languages oth-er than English, for which there are no established news reading platforms.

Recent developments support Feedpresso's focus on premium and subscription based service.

Demand for subscription-based content soared after US Election Day, outbreaks of fake news and much media criticism. For exam-ple, NYTimes.com added 276,000 subscribers in Q4 2017 alone, their highest increase yet.

13 Feedpressoc o u n t r y c i t y

United Kingdom London


2015 Artificial Intelligence, Media & Communications, Mobile


6 9

iosLinks.info and PythonLinks.info are the world's largest iOS and Python directories. If you search on Google for iOS Database Libraries, you get 16,500,000 results. It would take some time to sort through all of those pages. If you go to the iOS Links page on database libraries, you get a curated tree of 29 libraries organized into 6 categories, and one subcategory. iOS Links also includes a rapidly growing geo-graphical database of companies which are developing for iOS.

Curated lists are proliferating on the web. Mostly, they are imple-

mented as static web pages with a limited number of levels and cat-egories. They often end up having way more than 7 items in each cat-egory, and to prevent further cate-gory overflow, they reject perfectly good content. Dynamic hierarchies such as iOS Links and Python Links avoid these problems, and can expand as needed. Indeed, some of the pages on the more mature Python Links website are already 8 levels deep.

If you are looking to hire an iOS or Python developer, let me know, I know lots.

17 Blogoryc o u n t r y c i t y

Poland Katowice


2017 E-commerce & online marketplaces

Jobzzy.com is an innovative solution for sourcing candidates. It improves the recruitment process by helping companies find candi-dates interested in the job offer that are a better fit for the opening, in an easy, cost-effective way. The service is targeted to employers, both corporate and SMEs that would like to increase their pool of

sourced candidates, particularly for managerial and highly special-ized positions.

The global staffing market is now estimated at 415 billion euros, with internet-based recruitment solu-tions as the most dynamically growing sub-segment. Jobzzy.com intends to be a forerunner and key innovator in this significant shift.

19 Jobzzyc o u n t r y c i t y

Poland Warszawa


2017 Other

iSourceTec offers applications improving the performance of Shared Services Centers and oth-er high-volume back-office opera-tions. Products range from internal CRM tools to full blown workflow and automation solutions, includ-ing RPA technology.

According to The Association of Business Service Leaders (ABSL), Poland has become one of the leading destinations on the global business services map, with more than 200,000 people employed in the sector. iSourceTec caters for the needs of business service

centers to drive efficiency and bet-ter their processes.

iSourceTec’s solutions automate high volume, repetitive, transac-tional activities, freeing up capac-ity to fuel further growth of the centers and reduce the cost of running business. Additional ben-efits of iSourceTec’s RPA and au-tomation tools reducing mundane tasks include: process quality, job satisfaction and lower attrition. Thanks to iSourceTec’s self-financ-ing pricing model, companies can enjoy immediate savings.

18 iSourceTecc o u n t r y c i t y

Poland Gdańsk


2017 Analytics & Big Data, Finance & Banking & Insurance, Robotics

InSalon is a web platform where users can easily book hair and beauty appointments. Browse nearby salons, check other users’ reviews and book visits 24/7. Addi-tionally, InSalon helps beauty pro-fessionals and salons manage their

business and bring new customers. Registration is not required, the layout is clean and simple with great focus on a search near me mechanism. The platform is target-ed to women aged 16-50 interested in beauty treatments.

16 InSalonc o u n t r y c i t y

Poland Gdańsk




7 0

Nais.pl is a modern SaaS plat-form (software as a service) offer-ing: · Motivation and bonus solutions for talent management in small and large companies

· A wide range of valuable offers in one place

· An innovative, transparent and honest business model

· Tools for easy management of benefits and ongoing access to reports and statistics

The nais motivational programs are personalized and meet the needs of employees; they build a lifestyle and motivate workers from the millennium generation.

Today, nearly 100 platform

partners provide over 1600 digital entertainment, education, culture and art, health and beauty, medical care, sports, gifts and shopping options. B2B nais clients are em-ployers, large and small 3-person companies, and suppliers of prod-ucts and services. B2C clients are platform users and employees.

Currently, salaries and standard motivation programs in Poland are no longer the most important fac-tors attractingthe best employees. Employees expect something new. Nais offers aspirational solutions that build relationships between employees and employers.

The niasplatform was created by a dedicated team at Viamobile LLC.

23 naisc o u n t r y c i t y

Poland Warszawa


2015 HR-Saas Platform

According to recent studies, be-tween 60% and 78% of specialists in current employment are considering changing their job, without actually actively looking to make the change. Classic methods of recruitment rely on candidates actively seeking work, and so are becoming less and less effective. A few years ago, for every posting on a job board, a company could receive up to a hundred ap-plications.

But not anymore.LepszaPraca.pl is the remedy.

Now, it no longer matters if candi-dates are active or not. It no longer matters how often they visit job boards, if at all. All that matters is that, thanks to LepszaPraca.pl, com-panies get the specialists they need.

It’s simpler, faster, and innovative – LepszaPraca.pl is a marketplace for headhunters.How does it work?

A company looking for a specialist places a Bounty on LepszaPraca.pl, and headhunters search for the perfect candidate. Anyone of the over 200 registered headhunters can work for any of 250 registered companies, on any number of pro-jects, and a single project can be taken up by any number of head-hunters.

Effectiveness is a priority. Making recruitment easy is the

goal.LepszaPraca.pl started locally in

Poland but we plan to expand glob-ally in the near future.

20 LepszaPraca.plc o u n t r y c i t y

Poland Wrocław


2016 HR

MyWheels assists users while driving and helps with car main-tenance. With its permanent con-nection to a vehicle's onboard computer via Bluetooth, our appli-cation gathers and analyzes engine performance and stores it in the Cloud. We give users a simple, but powerful tool with a history of their rides, advanced reports and charts, error code monitoring, expenses journal, LIVE data view of your ve-hicle's performance and many more.

The size of the market is unlim-ited, simply because, in the auto-motive industry, there are many possible channels of monetization of our business. Some of the most important include insurance com-panies, gas stations, institutions

dealing with automotive statistics, and road safety. In the future, we also plan to collaborate with the e-commerce market.

We are building a business model that provides diversification of rev-enue sources in the long term. As for patents, they are not needed because the real magic happens on our cloud servers, hidden from our competitors. We also use existing, affordable devices, which operate on the popular ELM327 protocol. Our strength is the low entry barrier for our users because our App is free, compatible with most devices on the market and we provide them with an easy to read summary of their car's performance and main-tenance costs in real time.

22 MyWheelsc o u n t r y c i t y

Poland Warszawa


2014 Analytics & Big Data, Transport & Automotive

myAtmosphere is a mobile appli-cation project for managing person-al hobbies and events. It is designed for mobile application users who would like to find other people of similar interests, and find places and events related to their hobbies.

In this application, users can safely key in their hobbies without worry that their information will be later used by search engines or that they will receive personalised ads in the future. The application collects all data impersonally.

By using this application, us-ers will be able to find the place

where they would like to be, es-tablish contact with people hav-ing similar interests more easily, and,ultimately, be better able to utilize the location where they are. The application is designed using the newest technology trends and using cost-effective technologies, thus making potential investments in this project more profitable within a reasonable time.

For more details, don't hesitate to ask at [email protected]

→ [email protected]

21 myAtmospherec o u n t r y c i t y

Poland Warszawa


2017 Media & Communications, Mobile, Software Development


7 1

Pikmy is a simple way of con-necting and motivating friends to get things done together in time, by the use of activity icons. People want to make emotional connec-tions in even the simplest activities and want to spend more time with the friends they love. Biking, shop-ping or pizza mean more when we do these with friends.

Icons are the best form of com-munication because these reflect the shared emotional connections within the group. Young people in their interaction friends, social gatherings, and collective decision

making can now do so with a pal-ette of feelings, expressed as icons.

Company workers can use the app in their daily business to bet-ter integrate with co-workers. Pik-my’s growth business potential is through real-time direct sales and stronger integration with brands and their products.

Today, most social applications and platforms have moved from the real world to virtual reality, but the most powerful force in technology does the reverse. Pikmy uses vir-tual reality to create a better real world.

25 Pikmyc o u n t r y c i t y

United Kingdom London


2016 Mobile, Software Development

www.REACHaBLOGGER.pl is a platform, a marketplace, which allows Bloggers and Vloggers to sell advertising publications and product tests on their blogs and forAdvertisers, ad agencies, media houses, e-commerce and brands to buy such services. Transactions are concluded through the plat-form, automatically, asin an e-store.

Over 3,700 blogs and over 1,800 Customers are currently registered on the platform. The platform has been used by such brands as: Zalando, Reiffeisen, Idea Bank, Rankomat.pl, Medicover, Bluerank, K-2, Money.pl and many more.

→ www.REACHaBLOGGER.pl

27 Reach a Bloggerc o u n t r y c i t y

Poland Warszawa


2014 E-commerce & online marketplaces, Marketing & Adtech, Media & Communications

POKAZON is a community portal with live cameras, allowing for shar-ing paid presentations concerning education, hobbies or information. It is addressed to YouTube audienc-es and extends to target groups using educational and specialist content, i.e. students taking pri-vate lessons.

Three major functionalities and values of the POKAZON are:1. opportunity for broadcasters to

earn real money2. source of knowledge – involving

direct interaction with broad-casters

3. fulfillment, realisation of your passions, gaining popularityThe idea for the working princi-

ple of the POKAZON portal was bor-rowed from the adult entertainment

industry, which successfully uses live streaming, with users paying with virtual money for content.

Broadcasts are divided into: · General: viewers have unlimited access to presentations. They may reward broadcasters with tokens and talk to the broadcaster and other users on chat, displayed beside the camera view.

· Private presentation 1+1: the viewer pays for a specified peri-od of broadcast in private with the broadcaster; they see and hear each other and they may chat as well.

· Presentation 1 + selected users: a broadcast,e.g. webinars, where only those who have paid for ac-cess, at a sum specified by the broadcaster, may participate.

26 POKAZONc o u n t r y c i t y

Poland Katowice


2017 PR & Media relations

PartyGoer is an innovative mo-bile application for residents of large cities which aims to integrate community members interested in clubbing. It includes 4 functional-ities facilitating nightlife in major cities. Its most important point is the Pubcrawler – a city game that allows the user to collect points for each club activity. With our solution, we want to contribute to

the development of nightlife and culture, and promote tourism in Polish cities. The application also provides the opportunity to col-laborate with organizations, cities and brands. For more details, visit our website www.partygoer.org or www.codreamstudio.com.

→ www.codreamstudio.com

24 PartyGoerc o u n t r y c i t y

Poland Wrocław


2017 Mobile, Music & Entertainment


7 2

You want to do more. Timeline lets you. It's that simple.

What is Timeline? Timeline is an intelligent time assistant.

Why do you need it?If you lack productivity, Timeline

is the best service to help you, with it's superb Getting Things Done methodology implementation.

With a beautiful, easy to use in-terface and an AI assistant ready for your commands, both written

and spoken, Timeline is there to help you with your everyday life, thanks to advanced algorithms that organize your work for you.

Regardless of who you are, a stu-dent, businessman, engineer, law-yer, housewife or doctor, you can use Timeline and you will benefit from doing so, because Timeline is for everyone, from amateur film-makers to big scale environmental architects. Try it today.

31 Timeline: tasks assistantc o u n t r y c i t y

Poland Gdańsk


2016 Health & Medtech & Wellbeing, Mobile, Time management

Restea is an on-line platform connecting individuals looking for cleaning services with top-quality, pre-screened independent profes-sionals. With a seamless 60-sec-ond booking process and secure payment, backed by a well-trained support team, Restea is the easiest and most convenient way to book home and office cleaning services in Poland.

Every day, in the largest Polish cities, hundreds of customers struggle to find a trusted cleaner who can provide a reliable service at a sure price.

In Restea, our customers always know how much they will pay and payment is only processed on confirmation that they were happy with the service. Our cleaners are carefully selected, pre-screened and fully-insured professionals, happy to provide cleaning ser-vices to the highest standards.

Restea is a dynamic startup company based in Gdansk – one of the biggest agglomerations in Poland, and is due to start servic-ing 6 other major cities nationwide within 12 months.

Author: Jacek Siewiaryn m: +48 694 403 636

28 Resteac o u n t r y c i t y

Poland Gdańsk



The Aidlab chest strap is de-signed with health-focused individ-uals in mind, to offer them an effec-tive way to keep track of their health. The Aidlab device works by being comfortably worn on the chest and offers 24/7 health tracking, as well as sleep monitoring and orientation tracking. Moreover, the Aidlab acts as a fitness tracker that will count your sit-ups, push-ups and more,

to ensure you can optimize your workouts to be the best they can be.

The Aidlab chest strap is open, enabling it to communicate with a number of different apps that are all focused on analyzing the data that it captures. This eliminates the constraints that are often in place with fitness trackers that can only be used with a single app to analyze the data.

30 Aidlabc o u n t r y c i t y

Poland Gdańsk


2014 Health & Medtech & Wellbeing, Wearable Technology

Shining Riding was created for all equestrian students. This project is going to be a stripped, arranged, practical app, designed to grow horse riding skills. It gives access to knowledge and experi-ence to all less experienced rid-ers in an accessible, gaming and engaging style. Customers are all horse riding adepts, 45 million people worldwide. Shining Riding is designed and planned to reach 1-10% of this number.

The first 3 months of testing in

Poland, resulted in the sale of 150 virtual training sessions to a a to-tal value of 12 000 PLN, all without high marketing expenses – only 500 PLN. Poland has only 1% of customer groups, with much lower average revenues.

We need investors to accelerate app development and translation into other languages.

Contact:Filip Piechowiak+48 505 691 [email protected]

29 Shining Ridingc o u n t r y c i t y

United Kingdom Rotherham


2015 Education, Gaming, Mobile


7 3

Webanti – Real-time website security

Security is of the utmost im-portance nowadays: everyday we hear of security holes and hacked websites. Prevention and knowl-edge are all you need. Webanti is an antivirus dedicated for websites, which protects against malware, ransomware and backdoors. Our advanced system thoroughly scans every single file hosted on a server in search of malicious code and is an effective heuristic engine that detects every possible virus on a server. Webanti performs impec-

cably even with the most hidden of malwares. With real-time protection, the user is informed of an attack in less than 1 second. Most attacks occur when a backdoor has been hosted on a website for at least a few weeks, when you already have it in your backups.

As soon as we detect any danger, we will immediately take measures in order to remove malicious soft-ware and protect you Webanti will also help you eliminate malware from your website, either automat-ically with panel options, or manu-ally through our experts.

33 Webanti Appc o u n t r y c i t y

Poland Katowice


2016 Security

YOSO is an app which turns smartphones into analogue cam-eras.

Sounds ridiculous? Remember those albums full of photos from Christmases, trips, and holidays. They weren’t perfect but, despite it all, you smiled and had positive feelings when browsing them, as it was not about perfection but about collecting memories.

Today, everyone takes thou-sands of photos we do not have time to look at again. Instead of being fully involved in particular activities, we view concerts, monu-ments, food or loved ones through the screens of our smartphones.

This is why YOSO was creat-ed. The app allows you to choose

camera rolls of 12, 24 or 36 photos. After snapping, the photos are not saved on your smartphone and you do not have access to them. Af-ter you use up your entire roll, we print out the photos on high-qual-ity photo paper and ship them in a beautiful album box, so that you can enjoy your precious moments.

YOSO is a perfect solution for event and travel agencies. YOSO extends the brand exposure and links it with the positive memories of customers.

Enter infoshare 2017 when choosing a camera roll and to get a 30% discount. Available on iOS.

→ www.yosoapp.com

35 YOSOc o u n t r y c i t y

Estonia Tartu


2016 Media

Wolveson is a social networking platform which connects great minds from around the world to build awesome startups. Both the social networking and startup market are huge and still expand-ing but Wolveson fills the niche of social networking apps for start-ups. Wolveson solves the problem of the low number of successful startups, which comes from, among other things, weak teams and work organization issues. Many inter-esting people have great ideas, but have difficulty finding start-up partners. Those individuals

can now find co-founders and create a startup in the Wolveson app. They can browse other users’ profiles, using preferred filters to find a perfect candidate. When they create a startup together, they are given the simple Taskboard tool for managing projects. To begin, they put tasks in TODO section, work on them in the IN PROGRESS section and, when finished, move them to DONE section. If the functionality is not enough, they can rebuild Taskboard to meet their needs, by adding several plug-ins. Wolveson connects creative individuals.

34 wolvesonc o u n t r y c i t y

Poland Gdańsk


2016 Media & Communications

Event Horizon, Ltd. is a game de-veloper located in Gdynia. Its debut project is Tower of Time – a sto-ry-driven RPG game with real-time combat, attractive 3D graphics and innovative game mechanics. The size of the game is exceptionally large for an independent project

– gameplay time is expected to be between 20-30h, depending on how deep the player wants to explore the world and its lore. The game was developed from the outset with the aim of a release on both PC/Mac/Linux as well as IOS (iPad).

The project is run using JIRA/GIT-HUB process, making it pos-sible for various freelancers from around the world to contribute. The development platform is Unity,

heavily customized to fit the com-plexity of the game mechanics. Tower of Time has recently been approved on Steam Greenlight, af-ter just 12 days, getting very pos-itive feedback and an exceptional number of YES votes. On the day of approval, the game was ranked 31st out of the 3000+ games then present on Greenlight.

www.toweroftime.co

https://twitter.com/Tower_of_Time

https://www.facebook.com/tower-oftime/

https://www.youtube.com/tower-oftime

→ www.toweroftime.co

32 Event Horizonc o u n t r y c i t y

Poland Gdynia


2016 Gaming


74

Hector24 saves horses’ lives.Hector24 is the world’s first cam-

era to continuously monitor and analyze the behavior of a horse in its stable, creating daily statistics and sending alerts and reports about the health of the horse di-rectly to a mobile phone. Owners are able to react quickly in case of distress and have peace of mind when everything is in order.

There are 100 million horses in the world, of which 12.5 million are owned by our potential individual customers.

A horse is a family member, friend, sports partner, is curious and unaware of the dangers. It spends 75% of its time unattended, in a stable often 30-60 km away, like a child in a boarding school.

Hector24 costs a mere 30-75 Euro per month. Colic can kill a horse within an hour and the cost of sav-ing a horse can be several thou-sand Euros.

Hector24 is equipped with ad-vanced artificial intelligence algo-rithms.

The team consists of horse own-ers, veterinarians, scientists, robots, image analysis experts, program-mers, engineers, housing designers, marketing and sales specialists.

Break Even Point = 1000 users, in the second year of operation.

Contact: Bazyli Glowacki (Found-er, CEO), +48 698 513 585, [email protected],

→ www.Hector24.com

37 Hector24c o u n t r y c i t y

Poland Poznań


2016 Artificial Intelligence, Health & Medtech & Wellbeing, Industrial internet & IoE

Can you remember the last time you felt you needed a massage? Did you need it in two days' time, or right then? Wellaphy is a mas-sage therapy uberization platform, designed with one sole purpose in mind: to make massage servic-es available on demand – with no appointment, no waiting time, and no hassle.

The platform consists of a suite of mobile applications (client- and provider-side), as well as an ad-vanced, AI-based matchmaking algorithm. The latter ensures cli-ents receive a high-quality, com-

petitively priced service as soon as possible, while simultaneously allowing providers to maximize their work efficiency and earnings.

Aimed at people who value both their well-being and their time, the Wellaphy platform brings the massage therapist to the client, rather than the other way around. It provides a convenient one-stop destination for browsing available offers, reviewing ratings, and or-dering services. Now, a relaxing massage can be enjoyed in the comfort and privacy of one's own home – any time it is needed!

39 Wellaphyc o u n t r y c i t y

Poland Gdańsk


2016 Health & Medtech & Wellbeing

The ProblemWe cook occasionally, careless-

ly and unconsciously. We eat pro-cessed foods made of low-quality ingredients, often in random plac-es and in a rush because cook-ing requires a lot of effort today. Most people are convinced that they can’t cook and are too tired to thumb through cookbooks or search the Internet, finding cook-ing to difficult.The Product

Smartcook simply brings happi-ness by showing people how to cook anything they want. Apart from be-ing the world's largest cookbook, cooking lessons, step-by-step video recipes, a scale, chopping board, and worktop in one single device,

Smartcook is also an original algo-rithm providing culinary content based on mimicry – the most ef-fective type of learning which has been neglected in the art of cooking.The Customer

Smartcook will be offered to the premium segment, to cooking en-thusiasts and those in technology from the liberal professions, man-agerial positions, chefs, and culi-nary bloggers. There are over 130 million households in the leading five European countries alone. The number of households in the USA is ca. 120 million.

You are the best cook around, you don't know it yet!

→ www.smartcook.com

38 Smartcookc o u n t r y c i t y

Poland Kraków


2014 Food & Nutrition & Agtech, Health & Medtech & Wellbeing, Smart city & smart home

Powerhouse is an intelligent building in Gdansk. It is completely electric with a very low energy de-mand and without running costs. It is ecological with no emissions and it is intelligent. It acquires and stores energy, and this energy is used to charge electric vehicles. Powerhouse is part of the HOUSE – ENERGY – MOBILITY energy infra-structure and solves the problem of the waste of energy and money. There is currently an energy rev-olution running through the de-velopment of low-energy building technology: the acquisition, the accumulation of energy and the

development of electric cars. By combining the home-battery-cellu-lar infrastructure with added value, it has been proven to return any initial investment.

Powerhouse offers a solution for company headquarters, or a private home, along with an in-dependent intelligent energy in-frastructure.

Powerhouse is open to part-ners and investors to build smart infrastructure. We invite you to cooperate.

→ www.powerhouses.eu

36 PowerHousec o u n t r y c i t y

Poland Gdańsk


2016 Cleantech/Energy, Smart city & smart home

74 S T A R T U P B U S I N E S S C A R D S

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