On my way back home from Barcelona, where I attended 2023 edition of EU Start-up summit, I draft a few notes about it, and would like to share them with you.
Here is a very eclectic and personal list of the events highlights:
- European Startup ecosystem has a bright future: many young (very young) people gathered in Barcelona to present their projects.
- Put AI in your life: funding is so much more abundant….
- Days of wine and roses, or namely, Growth-At-All-Costs days, are over. Now, the buzzword is Capital Efficiency (what the hell have you been doing guys???!!!!) We've always been at the Capital Efficiency neighborhood.
- Business model comes first, says Alexander Osterwalder, renowned author of Business Model Generation. MVP comes second. This seems hard to grasp for some agile teams.
- Moving first beats perfection any day of the week, says Shrestha Chowdhury, founder and CTO of Razor Group.
- There is a wide range of VC offerings suiting almost any need: from crowdsourcing, series A, B, C, through preseed, or seed. You name it.
- No doubts (besides mine, and many others who have recently endorsed hybrid workplace models) about work model: full remote work rules. No room form presential work beyond team building activities. I keep thinking that working on a project face-to-face, at least for a few days a week, helps a great deal when building a team.
- Do you think you're doing a great job? Attend meetings like that, you'll meet truly great projects. You think you're struggling to get the job done? Attend meetings like this, and will be in good company. Get out there and learn what others are doing. Share your story. It's worth the effort.
- Ties (and suits) are dead, even for the money guys. Long life to sneakers. It's not like I didn't know, but it still surprises me (well I'm over 50).
My conference journey doesn't end here! In the coming months, I'll be attending three more exciting events: NSTC'23 in London on May 15th-16th, UNICOM Testing Conference in London on May 25th, and ExpoQA'23 in Madrid on June 31st and July 1st.
I'm eager to continue learning from the incredible minds shaping the future of European entrepreneurship at these conferences and the 2024 edition of the EU Start-up Summit.
I hope to see you at one of these events!
