BootstrapLabs around the world

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In the past few weeks, the BootstrapLabs team have been speaking at various events around the world, some highlights:

Arabnet Digital Summit (Dubai)

Benjamin Levy shared the BootstrapLabs story and spoke about how startups in emerging markets are creating grass-roots empowerment for the future of our global economy at Arabnet Digital Summit.

Also don’t miss the interview with Benjamin Levy about BootstrapLabs from the event.

2014 MENA Angel Investor Summit (Bahrain)

Benjamin Levy shared the BootstrapLabs story and gave feedback to startups at the 2014 MENA Angel Investor Summit in Bahrain, and build valuable connections in the regional startup eco-system.

New Factory Open – “Startup killed the Corporate Star” (Finland)

Nicolai Wadstrom shared insights from 20 years of startups, 5 years at BootstrapLabs of bridging startups around the world to Silicon Valley and how corporate R&D and innovation is being disrupted by Startups.

 

Arctic15 – On BootstrapLabs, Corporate innovation & Startup culture in Silicon Valley (Finland)

Nicolai Wadstrom shared the BootstrapLabs story and highlights around cultural differences between Silicon Valley and Europe when it comes to startups and Corporate Innovation.

 

Benjamin Levy in Korea

Keep an eye out for meeting up with BootstrapLabs’ Benjamin Levy in Korea in the next few weeks, he will be in Seoul to meet with potential new startups to bring to Silicon Valley or to go through our accelerator in Korea.

BootstrapLabs – looking for startups around the globe

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Great interview with Benjamin Levy from the annual Arabnet Digital Summit in Dubai

Get Inspired – Meet Matt Mullenweg, Founder of WordPress/Automattic in Asia

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MMprofileOur friend Matt will be visiting some of the hottest cities of Asia early June: Seoul, Jakarta, Singapore, Tokyo, Osaka and Manila. As most of you know by now, Matt just raised a huge round of financing, clearly putting his company in the $Bn club, and has the ambition that goes with it. As someone recently mentioned to me, “Asia is growth and you can’t afford not to have a growth strategy”. We agree and that is why BootstrapLabs is active in the region with accelerators in Malaysia and Korea.

Seems like this is resonating with Matt too as he will tour Asia in June to announce some new product features aimed specifically at this region and promised to share some of his hard earned wisdom on how to successfully build and scale an open-source, distributed companies globally. Dear Bootstrappers, please lean in and don’t miss the opportunity to meet one of the youngest and most successful tech startup founder of Silicon Valley!

Below is the schedule of cities, date and links to the events:

WP

Enjoy!

 

All the tools a Founder needs!

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foundersuite-logo

BootstrapLabs is excited to announce a new partnership with Foundersuite where we are getting 6 months of free access for all of our portfolio companies and network partners.

BootstrapLabs has been actively mentoring and advising the team at Foundersuite since 2012 when the company was just a raw idea. The concept has evolved considerably since then and is now used by almost 3k startups in 91 countries.

Screen Shot 2014-05-16 at 4.39.33 PM

Foundersuite is a SaaS platform containing productivity tools and templates for entrepreneurs. Some highlights include the Media CRM (manage PR and journalist outreach), Company Tracker (keep tabs on partners or competitors) and Investor CRM (a visual, elegant way to manage a fundraise, built on top of AngelList and LinkedIn APIs).

It also includes 70+ templates for doing things like writing a founders’ agreement, recruiting advisors, creating a cap table, building a 12 month hiring plan, and much more.

We really think FounderSuite has turned into an exciting product that really helps founders with a lot of the grind around investors, legal documents, Media/PR etc.

Make it work, Make it right, Make it scale

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Besides launching startups, I have been a software developer for all of my adult life (and more) – likely also something that made me an entrepreneur over 20 years ago. There is one key thing that I applied for the past 15+ years in software development, and that is the core principals of XP (Extreme Programming, which was the foundation of all Agile development methods and frameworks):

  1. Make it work.
  2. Make it right.
  3. Make it fast.

So simple, yet so powerful, when used right. Now serendipity is that this really applies to building a startup (that happen to be product companies for the most part):

  • Make it work – Does it work at all? First make it work, don’t bother about scale, do things that do not scale, get your hands dirty, actually talk to prospective customers. Often you need to be the founder/entrepreneurs to do this well, there is no substitute for knowing intimately what the pain, the problems and the value in the context you are addressing. Often it is quite different from what you first think. Even if it is your 5th startup. Don’t hire sales & marketing just yet. And this is a very Unique kind of Biz Dev work that is need.
  • Make it right – How well does it work? And where does it shine? Now you need some serious BizDev talent, you have a product, you know the pain, people like it, now you just need to make sure they actually start to use it and benefit from it. And what those people look like.
  • Make it scale – Scale it! You know those customers? Nah, we are addressing markets, in other words our product is a perfect fit and adds value to hords of customers at the same time. Now you can really start to grow and more importantly, now you can start to scale, you can also hire top sales people and marketing that run their process, models and you can actually tell all the great hires what your product really does and for whom, now let’s just find them all and make sure they use our product.

When I was writing this thought up today, I decided to link to some people that have valuable insights, such as Steve Blank, and I noticed his book recommendations include some Extreme Programming, and actually was where Eric Ries, found much of the basics for the Lean Startup.

BootstrapLabs launch Silicon Valley FastTrack Partnership with HaxAsia, a Hardware 2.0 Accelerator in Singapore

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haxasia-logoSan Francisco, April 3, 2014 – We are excited to announce that HaxAsia, a global Hardware 2.0 startup accelerator based in Singapore, is joining BootstrapLabs’ Silicon Valley Fast Track partner program. This means that BootstrapLabs and HaxAsia will jointly review and vet the Startups that go through HaxAsia’s program to find the ones that can be relocated and accelerated in Silicon Valley to build global companies.

“We’ve seen the explosion of successful crowdfunding launches recently, which brought to the world great products such as Oculus Rift and Pebble Watch,” said Slava Solonitsyn, Managing Partner of HaxAsia. “However, most of the hardware teams launching crowdfunding campaigns often fail to communicate their product ideas well, lack the distribution network and underestimate the manufacturing risks and costs. All these undermine the success of hardware startups and leads to overall disappointment when it comes to crowdfunding hardware products”.

The partnership between BootstrapLabs and HaxAsia means that companies going through HaxAsia’s program will have a strong bridge to get to Silicon Valley, and BootstrapLabs will help to select the companies best suited to do so. Once identified, BootstrapLabs will mentor and help these companies to more quickly become ready to go to Silicon Valley and possibly join BootstrapLabs’ Accelerator program in Silicon Valley.

“We are excited to work closely with HaxAsia and build future hardware 2.0 category leaders. The hardware renaissance movement is underway and many billion dollars markets are ripe for disruption”, said Ben Levy, Partner at BootstrapLabs.

Nicolai Wadstrom, Founder of BootstrapLabs added: “Beyond the experience of the partners involved, HaxAsia’s program leverages Singapore’s central location to tap into global talent, chinese manufacturing capabilities and Silicon Valley mojo, a philosophy very aligned to BootstrapLabs’ core mission.”

About HaxAsia

HaxAsia Pte. Ltd., is a new startup accelerator focused on Hardware 2.0 and Internet of Things. The program, sponsored and supported by Ruvento Ventures, Incuvest, BootstrapLabs, DI Group, SpinUp Partners and a few angels, will invest in 10 startups working on amazing consumer hardware products such as smart gadgets, wearables, drones and other connected hardware via a 180 day accelerator program to be held in Singapore, Silicon Valley and China. The program is specifically designed to avoid many of the pitfalls hardware startups struggle with, including sleek prototype vetted by industrial design partners, cost and delay of production confirmed with preferred manufacturers in China and support with crowdfunding preparation, marketing and PR.

The program is flexible in a sense that there is no deadline for the application, the only requirement is that startups need to launch their crowdfunding campaign within 6 months from receiving the accelerator’s funding. The team can get up to USD50K upfront from HaxAsia itself, and up to USD1M from HaxAsia backers, upon successful crowdfunding campaign. In order to qualify for the program, the teams need to demonstrate a functional prototype.

Read more about HaxAsia here

About BootstrapLabs Silicon Valley Fast Track

BootstrapLabs Silicon Valley Fast Track is a partner program for Incubators and Accelerators designed to jumpstart local startups and innovation eco-systems around the world through existing incubators and accelerators, and provide them with a Silicon Valley DNA, link and quick path for their startups with global potential to reach the world from Silicon Valley.

Read more about BootstrapLabs here

 

Top Silicon Valley Insiders Join BootstrapLabs Advisory Board

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Accelerator program for foreign startups gets boost from top minds
in cloud, mobile, infrastructure and marketing

March 25, 2014, San Francisco, California — Silicon Valley-based BootstrapLabs, a global accelerator for foreign technology startups, today announced that Jason Hoffman, VP at Ericsson and Founder of Joyent, Rikard Steiber, Chief Digital Officer at Modern Times Group and former Global Marketing Director of Mobile and Social Advertising at Google and Ariel Poler, active Silicon Valley Angel Investor, Founder of one of the first web-analytics companies and a pioneer of SMS marketing, have joined its advisory board and will act as BrainTrust to BootstrapLabs and its founders.

The purpose of BootstrapLabs Advisory Board is to assist BootstrapLabs’ founders, Nicolai Wadstrom and Benjamin Levy, expand their reach and influence in all corners of the globe to further allow talented entrepreneurs to join Silicon Valley unrivaled ecosystem to build global companies and accelerating equity value creation for all stakeholders.

BootstrapLabs recently announced a round of growth financing to expand its operations internationally and back more foreign entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley to go global.

“BootstrapLabs is a great platform for helping entrepreneurs from outside Silicon Valley leverage everything we’ve learned here about starting and growing technology companies,” said Ariel Poler.

“We think it is good practice to apply the same advice we give to our startups and surround ourselves with deeply connected, smart and globally minded individuals that genuinely care about our endeavor and will help us take it to the next level,” said Benjamin Levy, Partner and Co-Founder of BootstrapLabs.

“As an entrepreneur, founder and operator for 20 years – I know that one of the most important things for a founder is to have smart advisors and stakeholders in your company that contribute their expertise and networks. I am very excited to have some of these visionaries that have been part of building the Silicon Valley eco-system on our advisory team,” said Nicolai Wadstrom, Founder of BootstrapLabs.

Meet the BrainTrust

Jason Hoffman is a VP at Ericsson and is the product and P&L owner (GM) of the Ericsson cloud software, hardware and services business and part of the leadership team in Product Area Core Networks, Business Unit Networks. Prior to that he was a founder and the CTO at Joyent, a pioneering high performance cloud IaaS and software provider, where he ran product, engineering, operations and commercial management for nearly a decade. Jason is also an angel investor, strategy and execution advisor, venture and private equity advisor and on the boards of the WordPress Foundation, npm Inc and New Context, a Digital Garage company. Jason has a BS and MS from UCLA and a PhD from UCSD.

Rikard Steiber is Chief Digital Officer and Executive Vice President of Modern Times Group Mtg AB since February 4, 2013. Rikard served as a Global Marketing Director of Mobile and Social Advertising at Google Inc., since September 2009. He served as a Director of Product Marketing at Google EMEA since 2007 and previously headed the global ads marketing team. Rikard was a Co-Founder and CEO of XLENT Strategy and Digiscope Consulting in Stockholm and served as its Chief Executive Officer. He was a Co-Founder of Scandinavia Online AB. He started his career with P&G at the telecom giant TeliaSonera. He has been a Director of Cision AB since March 2012. Rikard is an Alumnus of SDA Bocconi and Chalmers University.

Ariel Poler is an entrepreneur, mentor and investor. Ariel was the founder of IPRO, the first web analytics company, Topica, one of the first email communities, and TextMarks, a pioneering provider of SMS marketing services. He was board member of Kana Software, LinkExchange, StumbleUpon and Odeo. Ariel currently serves on the boards of Freedom Financial and Strava. His angel investments include AdMob, Flixster, Slideshare, VivaReal, Optimizely, Mashery, Thumbtack, Viki and NexTag. Ariel holds a B.S. in Mathematics with Computer Science from MIT and an MBA from Stanford University. He is originally from Venezuela and lives in San Francisco with his wife and three children. Ariel is addicted to kitesurfing – particularly kite racing, foiling and kiting on waves.

About BootstrapLabs

BootstrapLabs runs a 6+6 month hands-­on accelerator program in Silicon Valley tailored for foreign startups. We focus on technology startups with global potential and assist them building disruptive companies by relocating to Silicon Valley, while maintaining their roots in their country of origin. Our approach is focused on relationship building and fast execution to accelerate equity value creation. We connect founders to industry thought leaders, strategic partners and smart investors in our network to ensure their long term success. Since 2009, BootstrapLabs has helped foreign startups such as Prezi, AudioDraft and Zerply connect and relocate to Silicon Valley for good, while maintaining offices in their home countries.

PRESS CONTACT

Prezi invests $100M in the White House ConnectED initiative!

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We just got the news from Peter Arvai (CEO and Co-founder of Prezi), as he gets ready to meet with President Obama this Friday the 28th. Peter will also show President Obama what makes Prezi the best way to share ideas and knowledge and share the story of how Prezi grew from 3 founders with big ideas and dreams in Hungary to Silicon Valley and to the World (Peter and me will share with those who attend Global Technology Symposium as well). This is part of Prezi’s commitment to join other industry leaders and invest $100M into the White House ConnectED initiative.

About Prezi’s support for ConnectED
Prezi, the software for delivering memorable presentations has joined other industry leaders in support of President Obama’s ConnectED initiative. Prezi’s commitment will provide $100 million in Edu Pro licenses to hundreds of thousands of high schools and educators across America. With Prezi, teachers will have a better way to help their students explore subjects, see how ideas are related, and collaborate with each other.

“Better education is our best chance to sustainably improve the world. Through the President’s ConnectED initiative, we’re making sure that more schools have access to the innovative tools that will inspire an expanding mind,” said Peter Arvai, co-founder and chief executive officer of Prezi. “Prezi, in particular, will help teachers convey ideas and enable students to understand and retain concepts. We are extremely excited to participate in the initiative and grateful to the nearly 40 million people in our Prezi community who have made it possible.”

The White House previously announced $750 million in commitments from 7 partners including  Apple, Microsoft, AT&T, Sprint, Verizon, Autodesk, and O’Reilly Media. Prezi and Adobe are the latest technology companies to join the initiative, bringing the total ConnectED investment to more than $1 billion.

Short re-cap on Prezi today
Prezi is the presentation software that uses an open canvas instead of traditional slides to help people explore ideas, collaborate more effectively, and create visually dynamic presentations. More than 35 million people from over 190 countries use Prezi from their desktops, browsers, iPads, or iPhones.Founded in 2009, and with offices in San Francisco and Budapest, Prezi provides a unique solution for anyone who needs to deliver a “wow” experience or simply share an idea—anytime, anywhere.

BootstrapLabs launch Silicon Valley FastTrack Partnership with Swedish Incubator MINC

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We are excited to announce that Minc (a leading startup incubator in Malmö, Sweden) is joining BootstrapLabs’ partner program Silicon Valley Fast Track. This means that BootstrapLabs and Minc jointly will review and vet the Startups that go through Minc’s program to find the ones that can be accelerated from Silicon Valley to to build global companies.

The partnership between BootstrapLabs and Minc means that companies going through Minc’s programs will have a quicker path to get to Silicon Valley, and BootstrapLabs will help to select the companies best suited to do so. Once identified, BootstrapLabs will mentor and help these companies to more quickly become ready to go to Silicon Valley and possibly join BootstrapLabs’ Accelerator program in Silicon Valley.

About Minc

logo-minc

Minc is a hotspot for entrepreneurs, creators, developers, business angels and investors located in the heart of Malmö, Sweden and Minc is the leading incubator in Southern Sweden with Alumni Companies such as Polar Rose (acquired by Apple), Algotrim (acuired by Apple), vErgic and Apsis.

Read more about Minc here

About BootstrapLabs Silicon Valley Fast Track

BootstrapLabs Silicon Valley Fast Track is a partner program for Incubators and Accelerators designed to jumpstart local startups and innovation eco-systems around the world through existing incubators and accelerators, and provide them with a Silicon Valley DNA, link and quick path for their startups with global potential to reach the world from Silicon Valley.

Read more about Silicon Valley Fast Track here

PITME Catalyst Conference will unite 500 innovation leaders

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PITME_NewOn February 13th, 2014 the PITME Catalyst Conference will unite 500 innovation leaders to empower the next generation job creators in the Middle East.  PITME Catalyst is bringing together top influencers, global entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and technologists from both the Middle East and Silicon Valley to harness a discussion around the startup ecosystem in both flourishing regions.  Catalyst is a unique learning and networking opportunity for all!  
 
When: February 13th 8am-6pm
Where: Yoshi’s SF 1330 Fillmore St. San Francisco, CA
 
Featured Speakers:
  • Randy Williams, Founder & CEO Keiretsu Forum
  • Deena Shakir, Business Development Google For Social Impact
  • Pejman Nozad, Founding Manager Pejman Mar Ventures
  • Clint Nelsen, Co-Founder Startup Labs & Startup Weekend
  • Adriana Gascoigne, CEO & Founder Girls in Tech
  • Dr. Ossama Hassanein, Chairman of the Board TechWadi.org
 
For more information and registration details please visit: http://pitmecatalyst2014.eventbrite.com/?aff=BootstrapLabs
Use code “BootstrapLabs” for 30% off tickets and tables.

Startup BD: Hacking The Strategic Partnership

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On February 20th, 5:30 pm, San Francisco

Startup BD is about growing your company by doing deals.

Experts from Facebook, Pinterest, Klout, Spotify, DocuSign, Foundersuite, Automattic (WordPress), MessageMe and more will talk about how to use strategic partnerships, APIs, and platforms to fuel growth. We will also cover best practice, tips for doing deals, and pitfalls to avoid.

Come join us early, stay late, join the fun.

Sign-up at www.startupbd.com

Use code BSL25 to get a discount.

 

M&A pace down in 2013, is Venture Capital cooling down?

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bulldog-on-iceVenture capitalists sold only 388 companies via mergers or acquisitions last year, according to data from the National Venture Capital Association, Thomson Reuters (our own BootstrapRadar is showing similar stats). It is the lowest such total since 2009, and nearly a 23% decline from 2012.

Does that mean that the VC industry is cooling down? Most likely not…

The IPO market was very strong in 2013 and VC’s really try to maximize the return multiple vs quicker exits, and the mindset across Silicon Valley is pretty optimistic and many of the top companies either went public during 2013, filed to go public or is expecting to go public within the next year or two (this includes well-known names such as AirBNB, Box, Dropbox, Square or less know Enterprise companies that are performing really well, but more under the radar of the Startup blogs, Palantir etc).

What we are seeing right now might actually mean that the top performing VCs are selling fewer companies than in the past few years but they may actually be generating higher returns (multiples).

Prezi hits 30M+ users, doubling annually, and has ‘not used a dime’ of investors’ money

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Our portfolio company Prezi is Zooming ideas from Budapest to the World!

Since 2009, Prezi has gone from 3 founders and a few early team members in Budapest to a US company scaling to the world from San Francisco Bay area/Silicon Valley.

Today there are 36,000,000 people zooming through to visualize their ideas, and they are joined by another 1.5M every month. And Prezi has a strong balance sheet, being profitable and the bulk of all funds raised have not been used.

But the most amazing part is that Prezi is an inspiration to a whole new generation of Hungarian entrepreneurs, and at BootstrapLabs we are seeing more and more exciting teams and ideas come out of Hungary. Today Prezi employees ~ 4 x the amount of staff in Budapest vs San Francisco. Prezi have a great impact for Hungary, even though they “left” to become a Silicon Valley company.

Read more at VentureBeat

We welcome Smartsy to BootstrapLabs!

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77261-df6fc67ab325405cfc98927cc50c4cce-thumb_jpgWe welcome Smartsy to the BootstrapLabs Silicon Valley Accelerator Program!

Smartsy leverages the 3Bn+ camera installed on smartphones to deliver a simple “snap and _learn, _save, _buy, _comment” user experience through it’s mobile app to magazine readers while driving near zero cost app downloads by partnering with publishers and brands to advertise it to millions of readers.

With 12Bn product pages printed in the US each year (excl. 230Bn advertising pages), Smartsy is already working with some of the world biggest fashion magazines, brands and retailers, including Biba, Grazzia, Zoomdle, Red Bull, LVMH and others, to unlock an overlooked multi-billion dollars market opportunity.

More details here and also check-out Smartsy’s AngelList profile!

 

Founders: The only thing that really matters…

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urlI have been telling the entrepreneurs that I meet daily through my work at BootstrapLabs and various panels and keynotes that I do, that I am looking for two things at the core of every founder that I work with:

  • Passion
  • Meaning

The first one might be easier to grasp; simply follow your passion, if you do not have passion for what you are trying to build you will not succeed, it is simply to hard (no matter where in the world you are) to build a company, that with-out the drive that comes out of passion you will simply not succeed.

Meaning on the other hand is very subjective and maybe harder to grasp, so I wanted to elaborate on this for a bit, as my approach to this grew out of many years of entrepreneurship and helping other entrepreneurs.

I think the first time somebody spelled this out was Guy Kawasaki at Garage Ventures, in his book “The Art of Start” (he talks about it in this video from 2006 @ TieCon).

Over the years and tapping into my own history of startup successes and failures, I have distilled “Making Meaning” to a compass and navigator, that helps me (and founders I work with) to keep focus on the things that will have an impact. Building a startup is about being disruptive and going against convention and breaking what everybody expects to be the truth, what is already there, and breaking all the rules (of engagement).

  • So how do you keep your priorities straight and focused?
  • How do you balance “follow the rules of engagement” with the million things you could do everyday in your startup, and pick the ones that are relevant?

You try to weigh everything you do to assess if it makes meaning, and I have divided this into 2 main things:

  • Make things that have meaning for yourself.
  • Make things that have meaning to our world (in other words have great impact, big strokes).

Making meaning for yourself, get’s you up in the morning, it creates motivation to spend all this time on building your company (sometimes taking time from your most loved ones). Making meaning to our world; is anybody else appreciating what you do? Will it make the world better? Make things more efficient? More accessible? Improving quality of life? Are you touching enough people? I can go on, but I think you get the picture. At the end if you have enough impact you are creating a lot of value.

If you follow these thoughts you will see that this resonates well with investors (here in Silicon Valley), being angels or VCs – investors invest in founders that won’t give up and truly believe in what they do and that do things that will have enough impact in our world to be really valuable.

Love to hear your thoughts on this?