Tag: investor

Webit.Festival - a place for minds to meet. Marius Ghenea, the Investment Director of 3TS Capital gave a keynote at last year’s edition about seizing opportunities and avoiding pitfalls in the fast-growing Central & Eastern Europe risk-capital ecosystem. 3TS Capital has been investing in countries in the CEE region for quite some time and Marius, as a serial entrepreneur and angel investor himself has gained deep insight on the specifics of this market. Though being quite underestimated in the years back in time, CEE is slowly but surely getting its footprint in business, tech and innovations. The region has drawn attention not only with unicorns such as Skype, Avast, Transferwise and AeroMobil but also with the emergence of multiple, active and growing startup ecosystems across and around.

CEE sure has its historical, economical and national challenges to overcome

The diversity of this region consists of countries in the EU, countries yet to join the EU, countries with an “on the way” developed startup ecosystem and ones that have yet to work towards the achievement of it. This calls for quite a turbulent, hard to define business environment with ounces of political, ethical and cultural differences ranging for each country. Despite the tiny late development, things are starting to look more and more promising. The IT sector has been rapidly growing, adding to a growing GDP for some of the countries. In the last years, we have seen business association networks popping up in the region. One of the things happening more often now is that a growing number of these national and regional associations have been connecting with large organizations and business angel associations on a European and worldwide level. Webit.Festival gathers exactly the people, entrepreneurs and investors involved in this ecosystem mixed with players in the worldwide scene to create a colorful mix. Check our website for more details of the 2018 upcoming edition.

Starting by examining the opinion of Webit’s Blue Stage audience on their belief in evolution or if God made it all, Michael Schuster, partner at Speedinvest, managed to deliver a pretty helpful and interestingly funny presentation on the topic of the two main intertwined disruptors in business: startups and investors.

Tides turn and seasons change, yesterday’s predator becomes today’s prey. Why are some companies around for tens or a hundred of years already, be it Siemens, IBM, and whatever company acknowledged by everyone as a steady rock in business, while others don’t survive the light of the next day?

Schuster presented the ideal  graph of a startup funding escalation:

А startup is launched with friends, family, getting private and angels’ investments, then going through series of rounds and going up and up until the one point IPO. It would’ve been nice if every startup story goes this way, but most of the times it doesn’t happen as ideal as this. Startups “start”, get whatever help possible, moving from getting seed investments to almost disappearing, going up and down until the moment of breaking through the market or collapsing and disappearing. For a startup, what is essential before the run for scaling, acquisitions and becoming unicorns, is that: you just need to survive. And in order to survive in the world and not become an extinct dinosaur, the law of evolution applies pretty much for startups too: it is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change. Both statistics and reality show well enough the differences between the european and US markets. The business models applied in the latter don’t always work that well in the european market which is not always taken in enough consideration. Funny enough, investment companies, as an industry that is actually funding disruption hasn’t been disrupted itself  in a long while. A lot of things need to be considered by startups while trying to get the attention of investors and customers. Big, trendy words like AI, customer centric, big data and so on are constantly thrown at the funding companies; startups are chasing investors not quite suited for them and accelerators way before the time for this has come while missing some important points.If you are interested in learning what they are, check the full video of Schuster’s presentation at last year’s Webit here: [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZRUcoHxn-c[/embed] Keep up with Webit.Festival 2018 agenda with a series of startup events such as the Founders Games, Startups & Investors Summit, nurturing the connection between thesе two intertwined parties. And more.

Bakhrom Ibragimov started his career as technology investment banker with CSFB/DLJ and Cowen & Co. He was also leading investments in European and the US technology companies with Virgin Green Fund as a Founding Principal and TLcom Capital as Investment Director. Bakhrom also was Internet Finance Director and Associate Director of Planning and Analysis in Virgin Media. Bakhrom holds two Master degrees on academic scholarships from the London School of Economics and Cambridge University, and an honors Bachelor degree from Tashkent State Technical University in Uzbekistan. Today we're talking with him about the startup success, investments and the startup ecosystem in CEE region.  Bakhrom  Ibragimov is one of the top investors you can meet this year at CEEDS by Webit, who are not afraid to invest - do you dare to become a startup superstar?  CEEDS: What is one sign of a potentially successful start up? B.I. A team deeply passionate about a product that makes a difference to a large market. CEEDS: How can you evaluate startup ecosystem in CEE region? What about in 5 years from now? B.I. I am very excited about it, a lot more activity needs to happen and is going to happen as more very smart people in the CEE commit themselves to entrepreneurship. CEEDS: Which do you prefer - small investment in a very early stage startup or large investment but later? Why? B.I. We do not invest in seed companies. We invest from Series A to growth stage. This is the stage where we can help companies more. CEEDS: Is an investment in a startup more than just money? B.I. It is. As an investor, you first of all commit to the founder vision and play your role in supporting the founder going after it. CEEDS: Have you ever regretted an investment you had made? B.I. You have unsuccessful investments, otherwise impossible to invest in the tech space. As an investor, I believe it is important to recognise what founders you can help achieve their goals and what founders you cannot help achieve their goals. You can have regrets about your personal assessment of the founder/vision match. Sometimes the vision (product – market match) is not adequate, sometimes the match between the founder and the vision is not adequate. You do not regret investments, you can regret your assessment of the ingredients. CEEDS: You say you invest in changing lives. How do you recognize that one startup will change lives? B.I. You see how many people the product addresses, what difference it makes for those people and assess in detail the initial market feedback. CEEDS: Whom you will recommend to attend CEEDS’15 by Webit? B.I. Companies looking for partners.