

Top 20 Teams for Mini Seedcamp London - daleharvey
http://blog.seedcamp.com/2009/04/top-20-teams-for-mini-seedcamp-london.html

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jlees
Would be nice if they told those of us who didn't make it, rather than letting
us figure it out by process of elimination. :|

Still, some interesting looking startups on the list!

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pclark
yeah, totally. Interesting choices, a lot of those aren't _that_ early, as in,
they've had one round of funding...

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wheels
It was the same in Berlin last year, actually (probably the largest of the
"minis" that year, which we were at). Several of the teams had already raised
angel funding and the team that got second place had already raised a Series A
round.

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pclark
how did you find it? I think you guys (Directed Edge) are really onto
something.

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wheels
It was a good event in general; that was really early for us -- in fact a few
days before we started full-time on Directed Edge. I think most of the
interesting German VCs had people there and the mentoring was quite good.

On the one hand I was a little put off that many of the startups there weren't
really at the seed phase, but on the other hand that meant we got to be
connected to them (most of whom were in Berlin) and that network of
connections ended up being quite useful for us.

On the other hand, even at Seedcamp proper this year (I know the folks from
all of the German teams that were there and several of the other teams) it was
similar. At least one, and I assume more than one, of the "winning" teams had
already raised an order of magnitude more money than they got out of Seedcamp.
I've also heard from multiple folks that there was something of a snafu in the
way that the term sheets were handled.

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pclark
I've heard equally "interesting" things about seedcamp from other sources.
Curious.

Did you get funding? Did seedcamp help?

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wheels
It helped with connections and I think that's the way to view it. Being there
is definitely a win. The investment side of things is a bit shakier. The thing
I'd say, if you happened to get to the final phase, is to think seriously
about what terms are acceptable to you and to have a lawyer on call for the
final evening that can review the terms.

At this point we've not sought major investment, though we are in contact with
a few VCs that have been tracking us. We pitched to one of the VCs that came
to us and then realized that we weren't ready for such and how much time and
effort was going to be involved in trying to raise a round. Since we weren't
in a money crunch decided to put that off and continue to focus on getting our
product further along before messing with investment.

