Learning to fly: building tech startups in CEE

Spark.me, 26 september

The fabulous me

• Small time tech entrepreneur• Founded of How to Web & Startup Spotlight• Also founded Tech Hub Bucharest, Tech Angels

and others• Mentor at Seedcamp, Springboard / Tech

Stars, Eleven, LAUNCHub, Rockstart, HackFWD and others

• @bogdaniordache

Who are we?

The h4ck3rs

Engineering + lack of resources = the hacking culture

#1 Engineers build good tools for engineers

Market disconnection

Does it worth it?

Local product companies

Service oriented companies

40 developers x 8 hours x 22 days x 12 months x 50 USD / hour

Evernote?

#2 Building innovative products for the global web

Look for models

Nordeus, LogMeIn, Bitdefender, Avangate, Prezi, Telerik, Ubervu, 123ContactForm,

Codeanywhere, Mavenhut ….

SaaS or gaming

MVP costs, later monetization?

#3 Evaluate SaaS and gaming first

Tons of learning resources

Stanford, MIT, Harvard

TechCrunch, PandoDaily, TheNextWeb

Tens of blogs

Meet your local community

#4 Connect to your local community & to global knowledge

Money & learning

Early stage money? Ha!

Tens of accelerators

#5 Reach out to accelerators

Building a startup is a learning process

Meet mentors, decrypt message, repeat

Mentors are biased

Mentors are not necessarelly clients

Skin in the game?

#6 Figure out not what mentors are saying, but why

Hope you enjoyed it

Best time to start.

You’ve got no excuse.

Start it now.

Thank you!