The goal of the competition is to help develop the Serbian game developing scene and certainly to help the Nordeus guys to scout  talent for their rapidly growing business.

For the uninitiated, hackathons are events where you get a number of talented guys in one place, organize them into teams and give them a deadline (usually 24h or 48h) to solve a problem.

This is a great thing for the Serbian hacking/startup scene in general since hackathons are known to not only produce a bunch of interesting stuff but also inspire a lot of people and/or create nuclei of future startup teams.

The competition itself is taking place on December 24th* in Nordeus’s Belgrade offices, with teams competing for victory in best gameplay, most innovative, visual quality and overall winner categories. Prizes are comprised of a number of gadgets including iPad2 and HTC Sensation.

See more details and apply here (in Serbian).

*in Serbia Christmas is observed in January

I’ve had the honour and privilege of being a part of SW as one of the ambassadors for which I thank both the organizers and Zira who was kind enough to refer me to them.

I had really high expectations from this event.

1000 attendees in five days is enough to build those kinds of expectations in anyone let alone other event organizers like myself, who know how challenging the logistics that come with those kinds of numbers can be.

Those expectations have been met in some aspects, not as much in other. But one thing seems to be beyond doubt – Startup Week is gearing up to be one of the defining events in the European startup scene and the crew behind it as one of it’s driving forces.

The Contents

There was a plethora of keynotes, presentations, panels and workshops last week in Vienna. Some were mind-blowing, others a bit underwhelming but all in all a compelling body of programme was prepared for the participants of #sw11 and this in itself is a great achievement and a valid reason for attending.

If you were a startup you had a few very good reasons to attend. The startup competition was very well organized, the judges (mentors) smart and experienced, hardcore but helpful, just as they should be. A significant presence of investors of all kinds is always a good thing for a startup seeking funding and many teams that I talked to took the opportunity and met with potential partners.

A number of keynotes and presentations reserved a spot in the ‘mind-blowing’ category.

Oliver Holle and Erik Bovee of Speedinvest held fantastic informational presentations. I’ve heard a fair share of VC presentations but these guys really killed it, you could really learn a lot and enjoy it too due to their great presentation style. A must for early stage startups, I hope to hear them at some point in the future, ideally when they come to Belgrade. (More on these guys here.)

The first day of the conference (counting from Monday) in general was pretty good, with Schien Ninan delivering the best presentation on presentations I’ve heard so far.

One of the best motivational keynotes I’ve listened to in person was given by Pascal Finette on Wednesday, when he compared startups to running and shared his lessons with the entrepreneurs in the audience – see more about this presentation here.

TechCrunch day was awesome, not in a small part due to Mike Butcher being on the stage most of the time. Mike is a really awesome guy but on stage – he’s a superstar, whether he’s holding a presentation himself (thou shall not pitch at the urinals), moderating a panel, having a fireside chat or presenting an awards ceremony.

A great piece of motivation and inspiration on Thursday was Facebook’s Christian Hernandez’s highlighting of Serbia’s Nordeus as his favourite European success story (an illustration of how close Nordeus and FB are), which I think all in this region can take as a signal that you can indeed make it big on a global scale no matter where you come from. (More on TC day at #sw11 here.)

To top things of, on Friday we had a chance to hear Doug Richard’s amazing story about his biggest mistake, read all about it here. Can’t wait to hear this guy again.

Despite these really great talks the programme is the one thing that offers the most in terms of potential for making Startup Week better in the future.

Most blocks were longer than optimal IMO, the panels in general could be better moderated and set-up on stage, there was no option for questions from the audience even when there was time for that, more effort could be put into working with speakers to get the most out of their talks…

Being a ‘conference whore’ I can go on and go into detail with this and other critiques but I’ll leave that for the organizers so as not to make this post more TL;DR than it already is.

Networking

Was the best thing for me at Startup Week.

A big part of my impression of this event is a sort of who’s who in the CEE startup scene which was a significant upgrade to the traditional circuit of conferences I attend. I had the chance of meeting and talking with amazing people from Germany, Austria, The Czech Republic, Slovakia, Russia… You name it, they were there.

One of my regrets were not realizing this in time and making a plan to meet as many cool people from as many different European countries, which is forming into the main motivator for me to come back next year.

All in all

The whole thing was a great experience at what is poised to become one the central European startup events, with this year’s edition just a sign of things to come it seems.

The knowledge, inspiration and connections are sure to bring value both in the short and long term. Already looking forward to next year’s edition, the planning for which is already underway if I understand correctly.

This is a good chance to give special thanks to Nataša and Pedja of the .ME domain for making my coverage of Startup Week possible, happy to work with you guys.

PS

Here’s a list of posts about Startup Week on this blog:

Monday: Outstanding
VCs are stupid. Not.
Tuesday: Gamification
Wednesday: Strange is Good
Never Walk
Thursday: TechCrunch Day
Friday: Ready, Aim, Fire – The Story of Doug Richard’s Biggest Mistake
Panel: lessons from bulding a successful startup in CEE (coming soon)

Here I’ll try to retell it while trying to preserve the awesomeness of the story which will be hard to achieve since it will be hardly possible due to absence of Doug’s great presentation style.

The biggest mistake ever

At a conference a couple years ago he was asked what was the biggest mistake he has ever made.

This question caught him off guard and he didn’t have an answer, he hadn’t thought about it thus far.

Actually he had two personality traits that prevented him to lash out an answer on the spot: he’s a very data-driven person, very precise; also he is in a very good mood or a very bad mood.

On one occasion following the conference, when he was in a particularly bad mood, he decided to quantify his main suspects for the biggest mistake and the main candidate won. A wave of depression followed.

Prior to this talk he decided it would be best, more illustrative, if he shared with us his mistake and the lessons he learned, instead of giving out a round of advice.

Zeros, commas, lots of ‘em

In the second half of the 90s his company made software for TV and movies but soon they were also making commercial graphics software for homes and businesses.

At one of the trade shows that they exhibited at, a high level executive from the fourth largest publicly traded software company at the time came up to him offering to buy the company.

After a little bit of back and forth between the suitor and his co-founder whose extreme shyness compelled him to hide behind the curtains the deal was struck.

The main factor was the figure already prepared on a piece of paper, and what a figure: it had ones, zeros, commas, a whole bunch those two really, a very nice number.

Back then that was all I knew about negotiation.

There were just two conditions

The first one was that he moves to Dallas, Texas, where the company was headquartered. (Doug hates Texas. Mainly because of the large number of Texans there.)

When his wife told her friend that they had to move from Dallas she asked her “So are you going to go or divorce him?”. Apparently from an LA perspective those were equally understandable options.

The second condition was that he and his co-founder were to be payed in stock which they had to hold on to for 100 days, a popular form of transactions in those days.

After the value of the shares fell 99% 89 days after the deal, Doug was rather annoyed to put it mildly.

Lesson: always take cash.

Not only was he now broke, he was in debt – he got a big house which came with a big mortgage.

After 3 days of sulking, as time passed Doug became angrier and angrier with each   day. He realized he wanted revenge to be his guide.

He met with people who were the largest investors in the company who agreed with his sentiments that the situation was disastrous and that the management was bad but also informed him that as investors they won’t do anything.

Lesson: investors don’t do anything.

Since he was still young and in an appropriate mode which can be surmised as ‘ready, fire, aim’ he decided that he will run the company. After allying himself with all the unsatisfied stakeholders he proceeded with a hostile takeover of sorts and installed himself as the president and CEO.

Revenge be my guide

His first act (btw. his second largest mistake ever) was to gather all the company executives from all over the world in Texas and fire them all on the spot.

And the thought still puts a smile on my face.

He then bought an around-the-world ticket to visit all the 17 offices around the globe. The people there were understandably terrified at the news – their bosses had gone and never came back.

At that point he held 19 titles since he still hadn’t replaced the fired executives. This had to change, fast.

So he did what no-one would expect or suspect – he chose the new executives randomly, took the first ones to look him in the eye.

This was a problem in places like Japan where no-one looks you in the eyes. Except this Korean woman. And having a Korean woman as a executive in Japan was pretty radical, to say the least.

Doug gave one piece of instruction to his new executive team: go out, make money for me, send it to me. If they needed anything more than that they were given an additional piece of instruction they were told that he’s “busy, go sort it out on yourself.”

And now for the power of trust

What they heard instead is – “I trust you completely and I am sure that you can do it! Go go go!”, because no-one could have thought that he actually picked people randomly. When you give absolute trust to people they come up with incredible results.

In the end, 17 out of 18 executives came through, delivering growth for 17 consecutive quarters. All of them did, all but him.

In the end he sold the company:

For cash.

And that’s how the story of Doug’s biggest mistakes ends. ‘Twas a pleasure hearing it, take the chance and catch him when you see him billed at a conference.

It turns out you won’t have to wait too long since Doug is scheduled to talk at the How to Web 2011 conference. If you decide to come ping me, would love too meet as many new European (and beyond) startup folks. And make sure you follow @SEEHub for the latest updates. 

The first keynote of the second day was given by Stefan Glaenzer, one of the top figures in the European investor community. He’s invested in many companies notably Last.fm and Serbia’s Limundo, while also forming an incubator and an investment fund.

The first company he started with his friends, a DJing company, was started with the single goal of having fun. Stefan sees entrepreneurship as a singularly exciting experience and recommends it to everyone out there.

One experience he presented to the audience that I found really interesting is that one of his company had taken part in a startup competition back in the late ’90s. Out of 20 companies, they came in as the 20th company. The last.

“Why the hell didn’t we stop? Something inside told us that this is it, that it’s working, we believed strongly in the idea.”

18 months later they were worth 150 million euros.

(photo via Startup Week Facebook)

Passion Capital, the fund that Stefan now runs and through which he invests in startups is named that with a reason – they are into passionate people. This is important because when things get tough (and they will) passion is what will help you to get through.

Before this talk Stefan asked companies that he’s invested into through the fund what is crucial for success for tech entrepreneurs. Here is an overview of advice he relayed from his crews and from his own practice.

• The way they invest is to focus mostly on the quality of the team, so keep that in mind.
• One of the most important things for startups are the first five employees. In startups you cannot have mediocre people, you need above-average people.
• Luck is an underestimated factor, most investors and seasoned people will tell you so, also keep in mind, not everything is under your control.
• Don’t waste your time with business plans, they are a form of science fiction.
• Entrepreneurs need to just trust and go with their instincts.
• No way to see the future, period, get over it.
• Saying no is far more important than saying yes.

European opportunities

In a panel on successful European startup strategies Mike Butcher (who is the best panel moderator I’ve had the pleasure of watching) talked to a number of entrepreneures including Emi Gal of Branient, Tariq Krim of Netvibes, Constantin Bisanz of brands4friends and others.

When it comes to scaling fast one of the benefits of the Valley ecosystem is that there you can get an operations manager from Google or Apple who can grow you from 50 to 500 people, which is expertise that is lacking in Europe.

Instagram was noted as an example that you can become really huge globally even with just a handful of people, if you find really great people that can push technology to it’s limit so that you can, simply put, do more with less.

As for bringing in new people one approach is to go at it very slowly so that you make sure that you got the best possible people available, which is where you can also try and have interns. One of Europe’s advantages in this sense and in general is a large number of talented and affordable developers.

‘The Next Big Thing‘ candidates – education, life documenting – AI-ish – apps, generally everything that is processing large amounts of ever-more available data through algorithms, mobile.

One of the final points came as an answer to a question from the audience, which is something that I’ve been thinking about quite a bit lately – how to get students to not join corporations and go found a startup?

An important point is that many students are just not the kinds of people that want to / or can start a company, and with a good reason, so any attempt to promote entrepreneurship must be made with that in mind.

On the Platform

One of the best and most enjoyable presentations of the second day came from Christian Hernandez who is head of Facebook’s International Business Department, basically the main guy for Europe, who talked to us about the Platform.

In his view the platform is one of the most compelling environments for a startup to launch on. Facebook now has 800 million users worldwide, and is a dominant social network in most countries, with massive amounts of sharing each day.

Three different graphs are available for FB developers namely the Social graph (Identity), the Open graph (Objects) and the Interest graph (Connections).

The platform is basically a series of APIs, with Facebook.com actually being a site that is built on top of the whole thing, a point for the consumption of the platform, the vision being to make the Internet social.

One of the greatest features when using Facebook’s platform is the pictures of your friends. Yep.

When anyone sees pictures of their friends around the web near to any kind of content or other interactive element people are 10 times more likely to click. This kind of social context can help build considerably higher levels of engagement.

There are scientific reasons underpinning this occurrence – our bodies release a hormone called oxytocin when we see a familiar face. Christian’s challenge to everyone is to make people ooze oxytocin.

Facebook’s goal in general is to help people make great apps and his goal especially is to have as much great apps coming from Europe, to show to the people in the Valley that we’re at least as good as they are.

What made this presentation especially enjoyable is that Christian presented Nordeus‘s Top Eleven as his favourite app from Europe. It’s probably a great piece of encouragement to all teams from our region to see one of the products coming from SEE be this highly recommended by Facebook’s top European guy on this big of a conference.

Startup Challenge Finals

The ten startups that came to the finals were really amazing, kudos to the organizers for attracting such high quality teams.

My favourites were Pocket Guide (a runner-up) and Quoteroller, with the winner being MySugr, a startup that “captured the zeitgeist of mobile, health and social gaming” as Mike Butcher says in his post on Startup Week and the competition to which I’m linking here for your convenience.

Pascal Finette‘s presentation yesterday at the Startup Week conference was one of those, and was probably the best presentation of the day too.

He sees running as a metaphor for life and for business and he used it to provide entrepreneurs with a list of what is needed for building a successful startup.

Along the traditional and well-tested blood, sweat and tears approach Pascal added the necessity to win, to not be in the race just for the sake of it but to go for the win.

Also, the importance of setting you goals high, of not shying away from being ambitious. Both of these points are echoed in the title of the talk which is also the title of this post.

Here is his deck and below are the points he made in the presentation, hopefully at some point in the near future a video of the presentation will be available too.

1) Train hard – training is your starting point.
2) Make sacrifices – good ol’ no pain gain.
3) Make positive choices – in his first startup among all the investors he found he went for the one with the best terms, against his guts. When the whole thing turned sour the takeaway was – trust yourself and make positive choices for yourself.
4) Seek your potential – figure out what are you good at and then work on perfecting that.
5) Set high goals – there were medical papers claiming that the human heart will burst if a person runs a mile under 4 minutes. When the first guy succeeded 3 more did it in a few weeks. The lesson here is that you should be ambitious and aim high regardless of the conventional wisdom. Also – if you think your market is Germany or Austria (or Serbia) – it isn’t, it’s the whole world.
6) Relax under pressure – if you’re tense you will annoy people around you and you won’t enjoy yourself.
7) Attack pain – if you’re doing it right you will be in danger of burning out, your inner self will tell that you can’t do it anymore that you have to stop. The only way to combat this is that  you cannot do it anymore. but you have to attack the pain.
8) Push the pace – race to the best of your ability from the get-go, every single day, never hold back. This is really important as a method of motivating your team.
9) Work as a team – in your startup you have to be a team, you cannot do it alone.
10) Run to win – if you run a race, if you run a business – run to win! It’s not a festival it’s a race. The spirit of the marathon is to do or die.
Mile 21: defeat the Wall – when you run out of physical ability, when you run into the wall. it will come, your preserverence is necessary.
Relentless Focus & Boring Consistency – the essence of building a business is <- that. you will have so many choices but you have to focus on the one thing that you want to build.

The room responded in style, which was a bit strange in this setting, a conservative, imperial  XIX century establishment. Yet, as Georg Kapsch from IV-Wien whose building this is said, strange is good when entrepreneurship is in question.

Startup Week is a startup in itself. When the idea came around to make a startup conference it was rejected because that is too conventional (“boring“) so this idea of a festival-like event which lasts for 5 days (“no-one does 5 days“). When it was suggested that this isn’t possible it served as an added point of motivation.

One of the goals was to put CE and Vienna on the map. Perhaps one day this will be the point when Vienna started it’s way to becoming the new European center of gravity for startups, even though too “isn’t possible“.

Don’t be (too) greedy

In the two panels moderated by Erik Bovee of Speedinvest we could hear a number of useful pieces of information from the investors and entrepreneurs that participated in them.

Christian Mandl told us the story of how their low cost airline got an offer to get acquired by a stronger competing player and how they turned down the offer because it would give a return on investment ‘only’ three times higher than what was invested. Bottom line – don’t be too greedy, sometimes it’s OK to just “take the money and run“.

In responding to a question from yours truly on how to decide when to go for the top of the game and when to sell your company to an acquirer, Gilles Clouët pointed out that it’s not easy for anyone to know in advance how he’ll react to a “gun at his head” – a situation when you are offered a truly life-changing figure which is something no-one can prepare themselves for.

When I think of this I always remember the Zuck’s turning down of a billion dollars+ from Yahoo back in 2006. This was a great decision in retrospect because, obviously, Facebook is so wildly successful now but also because Y! is now also known as the place where startups go to die. Anyways you need to have balls of steel and a strong and clear vision for such a thing.

Listening to Felix Petersen is the worst best idea today

I met Felix Petersen at last year’s How to Web and very much liked the guy, with one of the main reasons for that being that he immediately bought my elevator (literally) pitch to come to a MoMo Serbia event, which we’re still to realize at some point in future.

He presented Amen to us, his new venture launched at Disrupt conference last month.

This is a “platform for opinions”, aming to find out the best (and worst) of everything. I  like the app and the concept even though it’s still not something that I’d use every day. (Btw. should you need an invite ping me.)

Never Walk

The best presentation today came from Pascal Finette an entrepreneur / investor, now the director of Mozilla’s WebFWD accelerator.

When he was depressed a couple of years ago he discovered the therapeutic properties of running, which is his passion.

He sees running as a metaphor for life and for business and in his motivational talk he presented his recommendations to aspiring entrepreneurs, from things like working hard and making sacrifices to  to win at every cost.

More on this presentation in a separate post.

Kicking it in SEE

One of the misconceptions I love to see shattered best is the one that physical location is the defining factor for tech business success (namely that you can’t succeed in the SEE region) and it was a great pleasure to be present at this panel which illustrated very nicely that such is not the case.

While location is of significant importance knowledge, creativity, common sense and good ol’ hard work are the things that make you successful anywhere in the world.

Branko Milutinović of Nordeus, Vladimir Nikolić of Limundo and Viktor Marohnić of ShoutEm shared their views on what were the factors in their success stories and what are the good and bad things when you’re starting a tech company in the SEE.

So much at this moment, a special post dedicated to this panel coming soon.

Startup challenge finals

I hoped to see more of the SEE teams make it to the finals but having two of them, Double Recall and SalesPod is not a bad result, below is the picture with the logos all the finalists.

This post is a part of the coverage of Startup Week 2011, follow @SEEHub for more on the conference and the SEE startup scene in general.

I headed out to the Vienna Hub which is an amazing place which allows people to come and work together in a very inspiring environment, do meeting, hold and participate in workshops… As a part of the Startup Week Focus Events a Gamification Workshop was held there, which was one of the main reasons for me to come to Vienna for a week.

I’ve become very interested in this topic after I realized how hooked my friends and I were getting hooked on Foursquare because of the points system and the badges, even though these are the simplest possible game mechanics that can be applied to a product.

To take a step back and see what gamification is – it’s an application of game mechanics to solve problems and engage audiences. To illustrate this with a practical example in practical terms, and in lieu with the mentioned example of Foursquare, it’s a way for you to have more users for your product and to get it to use it more. Moreover, it’s a way for you to make better experiences for your users, to help them do their tasks easier and with a higher level of enjoyment.

The workshop itself wasn’t really for me since it was way too abstract and also the focus wasn’t on software. The topic of the practical part was the reform of the Austrian education system, and creating a game to get children to tell the legislators what they need for better education.

Gamification is a great tool for education, as can be seen in the example of Code Academy, and this is a big opportunity for the future.

So the workshop was great fun and even though it wasn’t as ‘deep’ as I’d hoped for, though I came away with valuable insights on how to approach organizing such a thing back home, and had a great time with the team I worked with.

This is a part of the Startup Week coverage, be in the loop by following @SEEHub on Twitter.

This was my favourite workshop of the first day of Startup Week, a refreshing look on how to approach the process of seeking an investment on the one hand and how to approach and interact with your prospective investor on the other.

Oliver Holle presented Speedinvest to the crowd, of which you can read more in this post on TC Europe. They say that they are still very fresh out of their entrepreneurial roles and as such “perhaps more honest than other VCs”.

They see the region as full of talent and innovation but underserved with money, with lots of gaps to be filled, which is where they aim to come in. The target locations are countries along the Danube, places that are a few hours away by car or within an hour’s flight.

What followed was a series of useful, straightforward advice to keep in mind when seeking funding, here’s an overview.

5 investor myths

1) VCs are stupid – they are not; bullshit will not get you anywhere but out the door.
2) You need a hockey stick
3) It’s all about the right pitch – good ones better than the bad ones, that much is true, but ultimately your product and/or your figures actually sell
4) Avoid dumb money – can be great if you’ve nailed everything and just need scaling resources
5) Dilution is death – don’t care about dilution, care about the terms; ie. 20% of $55 million is better than 70% of nothing

Phases of marriage

1st contact – be fast and to the point, this is the first test. Don’t chase at all the investors at the same time, don’t always try to talk to the CEO/partner, associates are OK for starters.

1st meeting – don’t assume they have seen what you sent them, go from the start; build trust, this is of great importanc.

2nd meeting – if yuo’re only desire is to sell something, it won’t work – be honest and open. Also, know what you’re doing / want to do, you need to seem as if you know more about the thing you’re making than the guys across the table.

Follow up – continue to build relationships. Make sure you have a plan b for more investment, for if you don’t it might negatively influence your position. Last chance to clean out the closet of any skeletons.

Term sheet – should be simple and friendly, choose carefully which (if any) points you want to fight over.

‘Now forget all that’

Is how Oliver’s colleague Erik started his talk, the essence of which could be boiled down to – if you want to play in America, you need to be American.

If you plan on going to the Valley you need an incredibly good plan, network of friends and mentors. And a whole lot of energy and persistence. And the CEO is going to need to leave his girlfriend behind and move to Palo Alto.

Warm intros are essential, start courting wanted investors 12 months in advance. Also – ask for advice. The VCs will be flattered and will generally be willing to help you out. Ask for money – get advice, ask for advice – get money.

Perception of momentum, buzz and a short window of opportunity contribute to a higher probability of getting an investment. Also, prehaps a little dose of arrogance won’t hurt, unless you’re dealing with Speedinvest of course.

All in all, an awesome block with Speedinvest guys, great to have you in this region.

The first couple days are focused on the Startup Challenge which is an integral part of this manifestation.

I was lucky enough to be a part of #sw11 as an ambassador and thus have access to today’s workshops which were organized for the startups that were accepted into the competition (a number of which are from the SEE region).

Lawyer up

The first workshop today was courtesy of lawyer guys from Herbst Vavrovsky Kinsky who talked to us about all the many things one could and should think about when performing formal actions such as forming a company, issuing stock, accepting an investment etc.

The presentations were full of important and useful information but it was a bit hard to stay focused, would be great to hear these topics in a more dynamic manner, however challenging this may be for legal themes. One could take inspiration, though perhaps not the exact explicit recipe, from Mike Monteiro as presented here.

In any case the HVK guys demonstrated their knowledge on the matter of everything you might need a lawyer for a startup, I’d certainly like to have them by my side in such an endeavor. Hopefully we’ll get a chance to go through their slides, if nothing else to have a reference on what are the things one should think about once you get off the ground.

Don’t try this with Speedinvest

In two very dynamic and candid presentations the guys from Speedinvest presented themselves to us and gave advice on how to approach seeking of an investment and how to (not) take a shot at getting funding from the US and moving there.

One of the statements that stuck with me most is “VCs are not stupid”, which is how I titled the post which covers these presentations to a greater extent. So, the investor is not an idiot and you shouldn’t try to bullshit him, you should be open and honest since this is going to be your partner in the future. However he is also a businessman so you should hedge your approach, prepare other options and a position to negotiate yourself optimal terms.

And if you want to go to the US – you need to be a US company, simple as that. No board meetings in German (or any other non-English language), Austrian taxes or Serbian laws are something US investors want to hassle with.

See more about what these guys presented in a dedicated post.

Thou shall outstand

Schien Ninan has a company which trains people to do outstanding presentations and the guy knows his stuff.

We have a really poor presentation culture, which is a both a pitty and an opportunity. Schien’s slide below says it all – 20% of people would rather visit a dentist than listen through a bad presentation at their company.

You need to do outstanding presentations since it can help further your goal and because the standard is so low that you can stand out with just a little effort.

As for when presenting a startup you should focus on a format that is both formal since it is serious (right?) business but also ‘pitchy’ – you want to win someone over and get him to do something, to activate him.

All in all, an outstanding presentation by Schien.
~~~

At this point I had to run to attend to some business which required a working Internet connection which is also the only thing that failed yesterday (ironically in the building of the biggest Austrian telecoms provider), which was rather annoying.

However the overall level of organization and out-of-this-world muffins more-less made up for this, though it would be smart to heed this failure and make sure the connection runs better for the rest of the conference.

#sw11 started great, follow @SEEHub for more updates in the coming days and do ping if up for coffee/chat during the week.

There were a bunch of things I loved about the company before this, many parts of their story, but the experience, the look and feel of the interface were really amazing, above expectations even though not that surprising. Being a designer this is especially important to me.

The whole thing reminded me of this keynote I saw recently in which Joe Gebbia, one of the two co-founders, tells their story which I find very inspiring, especially the now-famous Obama-Os episode.

Give it a go, it’s a good one.

PS

Joe replied yesterday to a tweet of mine in which I praised the interface/UX of the site. While the tweet was a simple ‘thanks:)‘ it’s pretty cool that the guy has not only the time to follow mentions for @airbnb but also to put out little courteous snippets like that one. One more reason for me to stay the fan – looking forward to my first airbnb experience!