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The Unicorn Factory: De/Coding and Leveraging Silicon Valley – Event with BootstrapLabs in Stockholm, Sweden

Nicolai Wadstrom, Founder and CEO of BootstrapLabs and Magnus Bergman, Venture Investment Partner at BootstrapLabs will share with Swedish entrepreneurs, local angels and the SUP46 community their journey and best tips on how to become the next unicorn!

Attendees will also receive valuable insights and learn how companies like Prezi scale from a small office in Budapest to a 300+ people company in Silicon Valley.

Guaranteed dose of inspiration will be provide to all the attendees!

EVENT AGENDA:

  • 17:00 / 17:30 – Registration
  • 17:30 / 18:00 – Keynote: Going Global? Why San Francisco? | Nicolai Wadström
  • 18:00 / 18:45 – Discussion and Q&A: Sharing stories about Prezi and Truecaller. How angel investors can groom startups to become Unicorns? | Magnus Bergman & Nicolai Wadstrom
  • 18:45 / 19:00 – Presentation of BootstrapLabs | Nicolai Wadström
  • 19:00 / 19:30 – Discussion, Q&A and Networking

SPEAKERS:

Nicolai Wadstrom Founder & CEOBootstrapLabsNicolai Wadstrom, Founder & CEO of BootstrapLabs

Twitter | Linkedin

Nicolai Wadstrom, a serial entrepreneur turned parallell entrepreneur as the founder of BootstrapLabs, a Global Venture Capital firm based in Silicon Valley. Nicolai advises all portfolio startups in their day to day operations, connecting founders with industry experts, advisors and investors to increase their likelihood of success, assisting with product design and development, positioning, go-to-market strategy and implementation, partnerships and fundraising.

Multiple time Startup CEO, CTO. Raised capital from Angels, Private Equity, Investment Banks and VC’s. Angel investor and adviser to Internet, Software, Mobile and Digital Media startups in Europe and Silicon Valley, including BootstrapLabs portfolio companies such as Prezi, Zerply, Audiodraft and Witsbits. Nicolai has been writing code since he was 10 years old, and still speaks Java fluently. He is very focused on product and technology development within the Big Data, Analytics, Internet, Mobile and Software/Cloud sectors. Nicolai is a frequent guest speaker, mentor and judge at Universities and Conferences in the US and Europe.

 

 

Magnus Bergman Venture Investment Partner BootstrapLabsMagnus Bergman, Venture Investment Partner at BootstrapLabs

Twitter | Linkedin

Entrepreneur and investor building global mobile internet companies. Has founded and invested in several successful companies including Prezi and Truecaller.
Specialised in mobile internet with a general knowledge of the special business logic of the Internet and its implications to many business verticals (e.g. telecommunications, media, financial services, retail, automotive and more).

Strategic computer scientist, product developer and general manager with 20+ years of experience covering many areas of information and communication technologies.  One of the pioneers in the Internet revolution, now specialised in the field of moble applications.

Magnus’ role as a Venture Investment Partner at BootstrapLabs is to identify and develop companies in Sweden and make them ready to move to San Francisco and BootstrapLabs with the aim to become Unicorns in the future. He is based in Stockholm at SUP46, but travels every month to SF.

Prezi raises $57M growth equity round, BootstrapLabs portfolio follow-on funding pass $90M

preziOur portfolio company Prezi, that has been eating away at Microsoft’s Powerpoint and Apple’s Keynote market shares for the last few years, is poised to become a far more mainstream product than some might have previously thought. It’s making two major announcements today.

The company announced this week on stage at Slush in Helsinki — that it has secured a $57M growth investment lead by Spectrum Equity, a growth private equity firm.

Prezi has passed the 50 million users mark, nearly doubling its user base in the past twelve months, and is attracting roughly 55,000 new users every day. Those users have now created 160 million ‘Prezis’ to date, allowing it to justifiably call itself the world’s largest publicly available database of presentations. By contrast Slideshare has only 15 million presentation. Prezi now employs 70 people in its San Francisco office, and 180 in its original home town, Budapest, which, in part thanks to them, has become a buzzing ecosystem for startups and innovation in Europe.

CEO and co-founder Peter Arvai says Spectrum has “a long term perspective, just like we do” which hints at his plans to take the platform to the next level.

Victor Parker, managing director at Spectrum Equity says they were attracted to the platform because it is “quickly becoming the preferred application for businesses, entrepreneurs and educators” and were impressed by its “growing user base and content library” as well as its “compelling business model”.

“We want to help make two billion people make better decisions,” he says. It’s not often you meet entrepreneurs quite so focused on their product, but Arvai is the archetypical product-focused startup founder, who delights in talking about his product, his team and his company.

Humans don’t just think in a logical, chronological order, they also think spatially. It’s so much easier to recall information if you can remember where it sat in relation to something else, whether that be location or by spacial association within the context of a story.

So it was that Prezi’s interactive, zoomable canvas which could show the relationships between a big story and the finer details, that created such waves in 2009.

This also means that follow-on funding for BootstrapLabs’ portfolio companies pass $90M.

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

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 ideaanytime, anywhere.

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

screen-shot-2013-11-14-at-8-22-20-am

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

Prezi Hackathon II: 2 days, 37 hackers

Fresh from the Prezi blog:

Last weekend, 37 hackers, including Prezi employees and students from around the world, spent two days in the Prezi office to create fun, and (sometimes) useful projects using Prezi.

After two days, teams presented their incredible projects:

  • Prezi Kinect Hack: Control your prezi using body gestures
  • Prezi Wars: Use Prezi Meeting to play a third-person shooter with your friends
  • WebGL Prezi: The results are in, our developers tackled creating a rough version of Prezi in WebGL!
  • Prezi Usage Map: A zoomable map of prezi creations, visits, and tweets about Prezi
  • Whiteboard to Prezi application: Automatically create a prezi from a photo you’ve taken
  • Hipchat bot: Type in a command in hipchat, our HP bot will let the office know what’s up; break something in Prezi, sirens and lights!
  • Democratic Voting in Prezi: Make life’s toughest decisions using Prezi voting
  • Prezi Logo from Post-its: See the Prezi logo, made “pixel by pixel” from Post-it notes
Check out a nice video from Day 1 (stay tuned for Day 2 footage):

And some nice photos of the weekend (more to come!):

Third-person Prezi Meeting shooters are no joke
Hackers working on the hardware
Hackers taking a step back
Prezi uses Kinect motions to navigate
And the hackers seem to like the results
A zoomable map of real-time Prezi usage
One team created a third-person shooter in Prezi Meeting
Make life's most important decisions in Prezi
Prezi co-founder can be seen and heard, even when in SF
Prezi employees' children make circular art tool
Made from post-it notes


Read more…

Prezi Named "Rising Star" in the Deloitte Technology Fast 50

Fresh from the Prezi blog:

We are pleased to announce that Prezi has received the second prize “Rising Star” in the Deloitte Technology Fast 50. This prestigious annual award honors the fastest growing technology companies in Central Europe.

Read more…

Prezi Zooms to 5 Million Users

Fresh from the Prezi blog:

We are thrilled to announce that, today, Prezi crossed the 5 million user mark!

Prezi Zooms to 5 Million Users on Prezi

You continue to inspire us with your creativity, enthusiasm, and with the amazing prezis you create. Please continue to innovate and let us know if you have new ideas for how to use Prezi.

Thank you!


Read more…

Work together in real time with Prezi Meeting!

Fresh from the Prezi blog:

You can now work together in real time on the same prezi! With Prezi Meeting, teams can collaborate live or simply present prezis with up to 10 people in a prezi at one time. Prezi Meeting is included in all license types.

Here’s how to start Prezi Meeting:

  • Open a prezi to edit
  • Click “Meeting” from the menu bar in the upper right corner of the screen

Now you have two options:

  1. Select “Invite to edit” to generate a link that you can send to anyone. When your invited collaborators open the link, you will see their avatars. Text, images, and videos added to the prezi are visible to everyone, giving remote team members the sensation of being in the same creative space together. (When you are invited to co-edit a prezi you will enter the Prezi Meeting in Show mode upon clicking the link. To start co-editing the prezi, switch to Edit mode).
  2. Select “Start online presentation” to generate a link that you can send to anyone. When recipients open this link, they can watch as you present, but will not be able to edit the prezi. This link expires 10 minutes after you have closed the prezi and finished the session.

Here’s how to navigate in Prezi Meeting:

  1. To follow an avatar: click an avatar and select “Take a look”
  2. To give a collaborator control of the prezi (you are currently the presenter): click on the avatar and select “Hand over presentation”
  3. To navigate on your own: click on the avatar and select “Explore freely”

To add an extra dimension to the co-editing process, you can use communications tools such as Skype.


Read more…

Prezi close VC-round and establish advisory board with Twitter founder Jack Dorsey

21st of June, San Francisco. For immediate release.

BoostrapLabs client Prezi, Inc closed a series A-round from Danish VC SunStone Capital. At the same time Twitter founder Jack Dorsey is coming onboard as an advisor to Prezi, to assist Prezi

BootstrapLabs has been working with Prezi since February this year; advicing the founders and helping establish strategy, roadmaps, funding and advisory members for it’s US establishment, and this week it is official that:

  • Prezi, Inc has been established and Prezi now has it’s head company in the US (Silicon Valley).
  • Prezi, Inc has closed an funding round from danish VC Sunstone Capital to further accelerate the company’s product development and international roll-out.
  • TED is investing in Prezi, Inc.
  • Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter, Inc (and the originator of the idea), is coming onboard as an advisory board member to advise Prezi on matters ranging from fund raising to
    technological development.

TechCrunch wrote about the funding round and there is more information on the Prezi blog as well.