Today I was on TakeOff (http://takeoff.ideias3.com/2008) giving a talk on ideas, innovation and entrepreneurship. I wanted to twitt the conference, but the people and talks were far more interesting than possible posts, so here's my this year resume.
I was the second speaker, at 10:40AM, in an event where the attendees and panel were (far) from other places than host city, so I thought that only few people showed up, but boy I was wrong and instead I got a nice and enthusiastic audience. So my congrats go first for the organization. Good event, nice job. My talk can be found here: http://paradigma.pt/~vd/files/take-off_20080419.pdf Basically I started wondering how could made a 40m talk about something that I'm not even an expert on, and so I've chosen the entrepreneurship problems, questions and my take on them, using the 7Syntax experience. If you got any questions, feel free to poke me, in the third slide you've got my contacts. From the start; the first talk was about IPN and their relation with incubating new companies. Bottom line, they get 30% of all sales for facilities. Bad, bad business. Unfortunately the speaker just left after his talk, so we couldn't address more questions. After me, It was time for, IMHO, a huge ... errr... confused talk about VC, money and startups. I didn't understand how can someone get money without contract and then considering "series B" round, after seed... Didn't understand the project, idea or their business model ... Before lunch, Bruno Pedro discloses Tarpipe, giving the audience the possibility to discuss the project and idea. At lunch me, Mário Valente, Celso Martinho, Bruno Pedro and André Ribeirinho talked about interesting "stuff". Oh! Thanks for the free lunch :) The afternoon began with Adegga, explaining how they started the project, how they managed to get stuff done, trading services and how they survived so far with the company. I've found it too commercial, for my event expectations. Next came along the "heavyweight" Mário Valente, which still grabs (always) my full attention. Great talk about what he didn't do, talk and knows. The Spanish Inquisition should be a must next year! I'm in. Celso, are you in ? :) It was the best talk about entrepreneurship, failing, how not to do and he explored his next three ideas; european opensource consultancy, mobile games and the portuguese YCombinator/SeedCamp. The majority voted the last one. After the cheerful coffee break with a lot of prt.sc members, one of the communities present there, the other was Sapo, Celso Martinho gave a talk about Sapo and their history. Again, too much commercial, but nice end video about their mail infrastructure change. Good work and a lot of opensource used there, it changed my opinion a little about Sapo. The final one was what I expected most, which should give another perspective about Business Angels and Venture Capital in Portugal. Unfortunately it has the same structure as one I've saw last year. No detailed information there, mainly buzzwords and business lingo. There were some unanswered questions, but I believe that I'll have more opportunities to ask them. Bottom line; It was a great panel and nice audience, with a lot of people interested and a lot of will to startup. For prt.sc was the first event where so many bloggers meet. Next year the limit is raised, pay attention to that and we have a great event about entrepreneurs and ideas. //VD _______________________________________________ tce mailing list tce@lists.paradigma.pt http://lists.paradigma.pt/mailman/listinfo/tce
