STARTeurope – 2010 in review

It’s coming for you… x-mas, new years eve, family, friends and too much food. For us too! GAAAAAH!

Well, it is time to take a look at 2010. You, too, probably take a minute to think about what you have been up to in the past year. This is our public introspection

Actually talking about “Ooooh we did this and did that” and “Ooooh we rocked or did not” is worth less than simply looking at data. Luckily, some of us kept tabs on what we did and broke it down into stats.
Hohoho!

• Events – 13
• People reached – 1182
• Participants – 708
• Pitches heard – 185
• Teams formed – 83
• New STARTups – 15
• STARTups helped – 63
• Mentors – 98
• Experts – 37
• Nationalities – 27

Let’s take a look at how we all did, shall we? Using uber ninja graphics! *haaaaia*

I think the graph speaks for itself. Out of our 708 participants, about 25% pitch their ideas. Kudos. Brave people

“Good pitches” means that the pitch led to the formation of a team. However good the ideas are, if the pitch is bad… you’re dead. Ok, the “Bad pitches” weren’t that bad. Usually it had to do with pitching to oneself instead of the audience. Being a techy, I tend to focus my pitch on the use of cucumber for behavior driven development and the fact that the algorithm is partly put on the cloud, handled via MapReduce and what not. <= forget about an interdisciplinary team. Sucks.

Oh, and not attending a pitch training. The chances of finding a team increase immensely by tagging along for one of those. Over the next few events I’ll gather stats on this too, so that I can say how awesome it is based on data and not just experience. Cus, as you know, data is what counts.

This is the number of teams ending up surviving and which continued working after the event. Decent figure, 20%. The pitches taking place at our events are EARLY stage pitches. Most pivot (as in change direction), some decide to do something else entirely (as in give up on the idea, not just changing it a bit) and some ideas survive.

Oh, take a look at this will you!? Beauty! Ok except for the color scheme, perchance.
The number of pitches which led to bonafide groups continuing to work after the event – some of them are currently in negotiations regarding funding from pretty damn top tier VC’s, some have received public funding and some are making revenues.
We do not count the startups we helped here, that just came by and hung out. Or which were already bonafide startups coming along for the networking and input.

So that’s about that for now. We are currently 7 people dedicating from 20 to 60 hours a week to help early stage startups in Austria, Pristina and Portugal – looking forward to scaling our endeavors with the help of some friends, like Microsoft Austria, Kapsch, Industriellen Vereinigung Wien and others that see the value which is created by a few crazy bastards and Steffi.

What drives us?

I took the liberty of including this little presentation for you to take a look at – it’s not really good without us telling the story behind it – please drop fredrik.debong@starteurope.at a line with the major bugs and strange jumps in the narration!

Well, merry x-mas. Happy new year. Happy festivus-for-the-restuvas and see you in 2011.