We’re launching the process to bring forth a new generation of BoundBreakers and thus inviting teams, individuals, hackers, scientists, artists and entrepreneurs to join our program! This year, the program is going to be divided into two parts.
First part
The first lasts for two months through May and June 2012 and serves as a general-purpose startup accelerator program. What you’ll learn in those two months are the indispensable tools of entrepreneurship, wrapping the program up with an open demo day.
We’ll start of with an introductory session, outlining what’s about to happen and opening the floor to any questions that might arise. We’ll give you a sneak preview into the sessions to follow. You’ll cotinue with tactical and strategically positioning your company or idea in your second workshop, as always, learning from and teaching other teams as you progress.
You’ll then prepare an executive summary, critique these with your peers and move on to pitching. After all, when you need funding it’s all about making that VC want you
What comes next is customer development, followed by an intorduction to the so called product matrix. The final two workshops are going to focus on how to gain traction in (and through) the media and lastly your final preparations for the upcoming demo day (in SLO in June).
When demo day comes, you’ll present your company, pitch in front of VCs and get some invaluable feedback concerning your idea, your company, your product. We are going to select a pool of companies to take to the second phase and the top three teams are going to be treated with a waiver of the costs of the second phase of the program.
Throughout the workshops, you’re going to be inspired and given help and advice by some of our collaborators. We profile our colaborators to ensure these are people with experience in the startup world (they have acquired an investment through their own entrepreneurial activities or are themselves a VC).
Second part
The second phase of the project is going to take place between July and September 2012. It’s going to be focused specifically on preparing for trip to Silicon Valley and your meetings with potential investors and partners. Main activities will be trough weekly events and individual coaching. The conclusion of this phase will lead you into the belly of the beast, well on your way to secure an investment.
Second part will be focused on our trip to Silicon Valley and your meetings with potential investors and partners.
What about the money?
The contribution is 950 EUR for the first part of the program and additional 1.950 EUR for the second part, which in addition to workshops, includes individual coaching. Hekovnik will sponsor the entire educational program for the top 3 most promising teams (decision to be made after demo day). The payment must be completed within a month after the program starts. Information day and the first workshop are free of charge.
You can apply until 10.5 23:59 CET at “APPLY“. It is time.
Silicon Valley has changed us forever. We grew as a community, we grew as entrepreneurs and we grew as people. Most importantly, however, we can safely say our teams have been infected with the Silicon Valley virus and are already spreading it around. Here are some of their impressions.
Sportifiq: “I’ve always wanted to go to Hollywood and now I got to go to Hollywood for entrepreneurs.”
Pllop: “We made it to the finals of Founder’s showcase in which we were able to get some invaluable feedback and managed to get to know a couple of people that were willing and able to help us along our way.”
Appoteka with their project Shopamine: “We traveled to Silicon Valley to gather feedback about our product in the ‘mecca’ of internet solutions. The experience was unfathomably awesome. For instance: you can attend up to 10 events every day at which startups present their projects. To be honest, we were quite surprised with the high level of these presentations. It’s a cultural shock! Even if our stay was short, we still managed to catch a case of Silicon Valley Fever. The feedback that we got was so valuable, that we changed our service on the spot and iterated throughout the stay. We’re returning with experience, new energy, and crazy ideas. Just wait and see. :)”
This year’s presentation of BoundBreaker companies will be held 7. November 2011. It will be broadcast live from San Francisco to Ljubljana, Slovenia. The event will include a short discussion offering a first hand insight into the minds of Silicon Valley investors to see what they are currently interested in and what the trends to watch out for are.
We invite you to come see the event with us on Monday, 7th November, starting at 20:30 CET in Hotel Mons, Ljubljana, Slovenia or if you are in San Francisco at 12:00 PCT in I/O Ventures, Valencia Street.
Tentative schedule: (CET)
20:50 Direct line from Silicon Valley opens
21:00 Guests’ welcome from Silicon Valley
21:10 Pitches and discussion
Pitches from San Francisco: Yata.me, Pllop, Sportifiq, Esponce, Stress Angel, BeeSmart, Shopamine
Pitches from Slovenia: Optilab, Visionect, Viidea
22:30 End
The event will be held in English and it is supported from Slovene Enterprise Fund and under Go:Global program.
… is the title on the HBO flyer which awaited us in our rooms when we checked in our motel. This is more than appropriate guideline to be part of the Silicon Valley flow. It is here where new technologies are born which shape the future of our world. It is here, where we are all days long conceptualizing, planning, drawing, sketching, pivoting, analyzing, hacking, organizing, visualizing, learning new things, meeting likeminded people, looking for fresh and tasty fruits and occasionally jump in motel’s pool. It is here where we dream big and have fun doing it.
We expect many connections, presentations and fruitful meetings with investors and strategic partners.
In the next week 3 other teams (Pllop, StresAngel & BeeSmart) will arrive to Silicon Valley as part of the project as well.
All these teams went through a 2 month (some of them 4 month) preparation program in Slovenia. BoundBreaker team helped them with presentations, pitches and executive summaries.
BoundBreaker companies are preparing for their visit of Silicon Valley coming up this end of October! Three of our teams have applied to Foundershowcase. We wish them all the best, and if you’re ready to give a shout out of support for them, here are their pitches.
A couple of days ago we had our second annual geek-barbeque. Yes, you are right, it was awesome, and you can feel bad for not coming. We had some great food, played a couple of very unattractive volleyball matches, hung out, talked, discussed and even managed to get some work done. We pitched ideas we are working on to each other and got some very valuable feedback.
This was the last leisurely activity we took part in before we head off to Silicon Valley. It is hard work from now on, but soon it will be time for us to wrap what we’ve been showing for the past year.
Silicon Valley is the largest high-tech capital market and meeting place of high-tech companies in the world. Constantly giving birth to new stars, young entrepreneurs and capital cross paths at every step in the valley, from San Francisco to San Jose. Set on presenting to investors and strategic partners, and with a burning desire for knowing what is happening globally and what the trends are, this Autumn the BoundBreaker team is embarking on our second trip to Silicon Valley.
For more info and application form for trip click HERE.
BoundBreaker’s goal is to establish a permanent base in Silicon Valley to bridge the gap between the Balkans and SV. As a proof of concept we’ve decided to rent a house from September 2011 until November 2011 in Palo Alto or San Francisco. In case of not enough companies we will go in a motel.
The house will host the following people and activities:
- Startups (our main population): BoundBreaker organizes events for them, provides individual mentoring and coaching and connects them to investors and strategic partners.
- Academia: BoundBreaker organizes meetings with professors and startups from Stanford and Berkeley, for them to experience how knowledge commercialization works in that environment.
- Big established companies: BoundBreaker organizes events and personal meetings with bigger companies from Silicon Valley.
- Students: BoundBreaker will provide resources for job acquisition in Silicon Valley and organize and take them to networking events that best suit them.
(sample pics)
Our goal is for participants to taste the spirit of Silicon Valley and bring it back to Slovenia/Croatia. However, the primary goal is for startups and companies to succeed with help/connections/capital from Silicon Valley.
You can see the full program on this link: Startup House (in Slovenian).
On Tuesday, 5 April 2011, at 16.00 in Hekovnik meeting room (“Čajnica”) we have special guest. Our BoundBreaker partner in Silicon Valley, Vlado de Franceschi.
He explains the trends and current hot stuff in Silicon Valley. He also share wit us experience in the work carried and a legal frameworks, which is good to know if you go in Silicon Valley.
We’d like to invite you on “Startup Srjeda”, the 13th April at 17h in Zagreb, Croatia.
At the next Startup Srijeda we will make a presentation about BoundBreaker, following a talk by the SLO VC FUND: RSG Capital.
Startup Srijeda will be held on Wednesday 13th April at 17 o’clock at Heinzelova 69, a business center Almeria, entrance B, II. floor, near Fly Bar.
The BoundBreaker team will discuss opportunities to prepare and present your startup in Silicon Valley - United States by participation in BoundBreaker’s program. We will share with you the experience from previous years and key factors for success in Silicon Valley.
The presentations will be followed by a question and answer session.
He is a lawyer, a graduate of Stanford, who lives in Palo Alto, otherwise is a native of Croatia. Over the past years, its scope of work consists mainly of legal areas in investment in startups. In some of them he is personally involved. He collaborates with managing partners in world-class funds: KPCB, Draper Fisher Jurvetson (DFJ) - a personal friend of Bill Draper, Sequoe Capital and many others.
The meeting will also be a short lecture, where he will present his experience in the work carried and a legal frameworks, which is good to know if you go in Silicon Valley.
After a one-hour lecture will be followed by networking, where you can even personally know him.
Meeting is organized by Hekovnik on Tuesday, 5 April 2011, at 16.00 in Hekovnik meeting room (“Čajnica”).
After detaild scan and individual talk three more teams join the winners of BoundBreaker generation 2011: TMG-BMC, Infinitus and DigiVista.
These teams will work with others in the program to prepare themselves for Silicon Valley visit in September 2011.
From 26 teams we chose 11 for the presentation in front of commission. And the winners are: Appoteka, Suplea, Sportifiq, Virtu. With 4 teams we have additional brainstorming and conversations: Infinitus, Digi-Vista, Oglaševalček and TMG-BMC. If they passed it, they will join the winners.
We’d like to announce that presentation day will be 16.2.2011 in Technology park Ljubljana (Building B) at 6PM.
There you can meet generation 2010 and winners of 2011.
We have received a 26 applications over the last few weeks. The applications were from very different areas: web, mobile, hardware and also some medicine apps. Right now are in deep scanning and they will go trough first scanner. We decide around 12 best to present the ideas in front of commission.
BoundBreaker in the coming weeks organized workshops across Slovenia. The first two workshops will be in Ljubljana and Koper.
Ljubljana, 17.01.2011 at 11 am in the Technology Park Ljubljana, Brdo, conference room, Building B. Technology park Ljubljana is also partner of the project BoundBreaker.
More about workshop HERE.
Koper, 19.1.2011 at 9 University Incubator Primorska, Ferrarska street 8, Koper.
On workshop you will learn all about the growth of high-tech company with venture capital and penetrate the global market in Silicon Valley.
Reflecta is one of the companies that attended BoundBreaker training and visited Silicon Valley as part of BoundBreaker generation 2010.
Their statement about the project:
Hine Alex Vrtačnik: “BountBreaker has helped us to start thinking about global approach, which has consequently changed our strategy and company structure. We added the possibility to derive the expansion through a strategic partner to the route of penetration to the global equity markets.”
Applications to the project BoundBreaker opened today and will remain open until February 1st 2011.
Welcome are all who are considering or already have a team/company and high-tech idea with which they wish to penetrate to the global market. If you are not sure whether this is for you or feel you need more detailed information about the project, please contact tomaz@brezmejnik.si.
We will organise a workshop in January 2011 to present the project and provide you with more information. Accurate presentation schedules will be announced later.
We’re back from Silicon Valley, slowly adjusting to cold weather and the ever present jet lag, so we decided to spend some time reflecting on what happened. All in all, we are more than satisfied: we had a great time, gathered some very important friends, partners and contacts. One of our companies got a serious offer (that’s 25% success rate :)), others got important business partners, advice and perspective on how to continue.
What did we learn? Many things, to say the least. We made new mistakes, learned from them. We now realized that it is not so much a community that we’re building but more of an ecosystem that needs to expand beyond the community itself. The network itself needs to be leveraged and knowledge and experience shared. The question of where to set up your base once in Silicon Valley is much more important than we thought at first. There are benefits and disadvantages to both San Francisco and the valley itself. Future entrepreneurial travelers – be wary of that choice!
What remains in the end are memories, impressions and lessons learned. Now it’s time to digest these and change our plans and actions accordingly. It is time to learn, to make new mistakes. After all, a new generation awaits!
Thank you all for your support, advice and thanks to all the teams for their endless supplies of energy and ambition. As they say in the movies: This – is just the beginning!
Company Svetloba (Highly Efficient Heavy Duty Industrial Lighting Systems REFLECTA) decided to visit Silicon Valley with a purpose of finding strategic partners, potential investors and executing the preliminary market research. We’re planning a global expansion, among other also to the US market. Our first pitches at Opinno, US Market Access Center and PlugAndPlay have raised a lot of interest and led to numerous follow ups of investors and strategic partners. KPCB, one of the world’s biggest investors, among others also a shareholder of Google, invited us to a meeting promising further co-operation.
We’re sitting at a Starbucks establishment in San Jose waiting for our tour of AT&T. We’re pretty tired by now and we’re moving to San Francisco later today. But as the title boasts, it’s been a busy week for us. We’ve had a networking event with US MAC on monday and then a panel discussion with field experts on tuesday. All in all, we are pretty satisfied with how it went. One of our startups (Preona) got some serious traction at yesterday’s event, but that’s all we’re allowed to say for now. Stay tuned for more!
P.S.: Don’t forget to check in at our Flickr stream at LINK
We don’t want to brag but our open barbecue was a great success in spite of us hitting the first rainy day since April. We managed chased the clouds away soon and the party was ready to start. The food was great, the company exquisite. Slovenians living in the Silicon Valley joined and it felt like a kind of family reunion. We shared laughter, war stories and important advice, learned a lot and are already planning our next barbecue. For those of you who came, thank you and we hope you had as much fun as we did. And for those of you who didn’t – better luck next time.
We are very happy with the success of our Thursday’s event at Open Innovation Center. Six startups from Slovenia: Flowr, Svetloba, Preona, Visionect, Elaphe pitched their ideas to investors Saad Khan, Jim Chu, Jamien McCullum, Yasi Baiana, Kevin Braithwaite and peers. We heard a lot of good feedback and even got to test one of the younger startup ideas in front of VCs! We are very thankful to all those who attended. To those of you we somehow didn’t get to talk to, thank you for coming and we hope it was as nice of an experience as it was for us. Stay tuned for more!
We just realized (very much to our amazement) that our event at Opinno is already sold out! And that’s two days before registrations closed! We are very excited about this event and hope you are as well. We are currently working on getting more spots available for the event. We’ll post any news on our page’s blog and on twitter, so make sure you press that follow button. In the meantime, you can check for changes at Eventbride.
Saturday, the 9th of October was great day to meet some Slovenians, that work and live here in Silicon Valley.
First was Almir Karič, who has been living and working here for 1 year. Right now he is in his second start-up and he’s planning to start third one. The idea is Grupon for weed:) We are know him trough Andraž Tori from Zemanta who helps us a lot with connections and also recommend us a loot of useful events. Thank you Andraž!
And in the evening we met professor Jure Leskovec and two students Tim Jausovec and Sara Kališnik. They are a professor and two students at Stanford University respectively. We met them in the University caffe on University street in Palo Alto witch is one of the famous streets in Silicon valley as a meeting place for the people from Stanford and some importuned investors in the Valley. During the day you can see how entrepreneurs pitch to them in cafes and restaurants on University street. Great experience.
On the final day of Plug and Play University the following members of the Boundbreaker community “graduated”: Davorin Gabrovec, Rok Zalar, Matej Zalar, Gorazd Lampič, Matic Franko, Hine Alex Vrtačnik, Aljoša Huber and Tomaž Frelih.
In the name of the entire Boundbreaker community and our sponsor Slovene Enterprise Fund we congratulate them.
Opinno is an open innovation network of entrepreneurs, investors, and ideas based in San Francisco. The event will take place on the 14th of October and will be based around members of the BoundBreaker community presenting their products to representatives of the Silicon Valley community of investors and entrepreneurs.
The third day of Plug and Play University presented our team with experience of successful entrepreneurs. Christian Koestler shared what he achieved in his time here with his company LIXTO, having just finished one o Plug and Play’s programs. Following him was a very successful serial entrepreneur Kamran Elahian, who touched also on his life outside business and his philanthropy.
After lunch Doug Solomon, an experienced CTO (Apple, Palm, IDEO), explained his way of working in his current company IDEO, that works in a wide variety of fields. After that we attended a corporate panel, featuring representatives from PayPal, Intel, Oracle, Verizon and IBM
On the second day of Plug and Play University, members of the Boundbreaker community (Tomaž Frelih and Founders of Svetloba, Visionect, Flowr and Elaphe) started the day with a lecture from Nathan Gold from TheDemoCoach. He told all the do’s and don’t’s of making a good presentation. Shai Goldman from SVB Accelerator followed him with his experience with venture debt and how it differs from venture funding.Larry Adkinson From Greenberg Traurig explained what to look for in a term sheet and how to avoid the traps a VC might try to sneak in.
After lunch representatives from three large funds (General catalyst, NVP, Intel capital) explained how they do business and their opinion of the current state of the market. After that we were lucky enough to be able to sit in on three presentations of actual startups to a VC, to get a feeling of what to expect when we get our first meeting.
Founders of four companies from the BoundBreaker community, Flowr, Elaphe, Svetloba and Visionect, as well as Tomaž Frelih, a representative for the community attended the first day of Plug and Play University today.
They heard lectures on topics ranging from immigration to the USA, taxes for different incorporation options, interim CEOs and the pitfalls of getting funded. The speakers, Jonathan Storper, Emmanuel Carraud, Bill Barhydt, Tom Bondi, Alireza Masrour, Hank Sprintz, Gary Gerttula, Tom Rice and Luciano Dalle Ore, came form different backgrounds and represented the range of knowledge a startup must posses. Everything was proficiently planned and executed by JT Buffmire.
The Plug and Play University will continue until thursday an everyone hopes to come out even better prepared for the world of entrepreneurship.
The first representatives of the BoundBreaker community have already landed in Silicon Valley. On their first day they attended Plug and Play Expo and presented themselves to many investors and industry representatives. The rest of the team will follow them shortly and together they hope to begin establishing a permanent connection between Slovenia and Silicon Valley.
BoundBreaker will (co)organize the following events in october:
We are proud to announce that in the CleanTech Invest 2010 competition in Vienna, two companies from the BoundBreaker community have been awarded in the the chance to present themselves on the European Venture Summit on 6. and 7. december in Düsseldorf. Our congratulations go to Svetloba and Elaphe and we wish them the best of luck in december.
BoundBreaker and Hacker community Hekovnik sign the strategic alliance with Opinno.
Opinno will be helping BoundBreaker and their teams useful knowledge and relationships with local entrepreneurs and investors. This way, they will understand and assimilate the innovative culture of the Valley, allowing them to transfer it to their region of influence.
Slovenian start-ups wil join on program in Plug&Play Center from 4th till 7th October 2010.
The program will compile an intensive course that will give insight on how startups are operated and created in Silicon Valley. The 4 day program provides an exclusive opportunity to meet close to 50 Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and study closely 20 startup cases.
Slovenian companies will visit Silicon Valley in October 2010. We will visit Plug & Play Center, Opinno, US Market Access Center and many others institutions. The teams will present their ideas to global investors and strategic partners.
If you would like to join us, please apply to the trip on the right side.
