The Portuguese Who Inspired the Creation of the EU Innovation Award

by maria | Jul 29, 2015 | Uncategorized

Diogo Vasconcelos was the Portuguese politician who inspired the creation of the European Commission Innovation Competition back in 2012, only a year after his death. He dedicated his work to innovation (including helping in Beta-i’s early stage) and the support of decentralized models to address some of the major global social challenges. The European Social Innovation Competition is now already on its 3rd edition, organized by the UE and supported by NESTA, Kennisland, Shipyard, Impact Hub and Matter&Co.

Yesterday, 28th of July, 30 projects were selected semi-finalists from a list of over 1400 candidates applying for the 50k prize with ideas related to New Ways to Grow, the sustainable value and inclusive society projects requested by the jury in this 2015 edition. One of the short-listed projects is the Portuguese Padaria Pão com História, focused on education and youth through the implementation of a bakery located in a vulnerable district. The bakery intends to create lasting jobs and reduce school drop-out and absenteeism. Know more about it here.

Over 40 countries contributed with applications on social matters which are considered great concerns for the Europeans. Ideas on how to promote inclusion, education and youth, employment, health and aging population, climate change, food waste and environment were the most approached ones.

In November, 10 finalists will be selected, 3 of which will each be awarded a €50,000 prize at the awards ceremony in Brussels. You can follow the competition for the latest semi-finalist profile updates and competition news on Twitter  #diogochallenge.

Want to be the next Portuguese idea selected for the European Award?

Do you have an idea on one of these above mentioned topics or any other? Would you like to apply to future editions of the European Competition? Start working on your idea now by applying to the national wide reference in pre-acceleration, Beta-start. Applications are open until the 31^st of July.

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Top 14 moments of the Lisbon Investment Summit

by maria | Jun 9, 2015 | Uncategorized

It’s been a few days since the Lisbon Investment Summit ended and guess what? It’s time to celebrate it. With this in mind, we have decided to make one last list, the list of the big moments. From the winner of the Caixa Capital Award to the best talks and workshops we have summarized #LIS15 in 10 big moments. Because these moments deserved to be shared with the world and sometimes writing it down is just the best way to do it.

1. Our own Ricardo Marvão inventing the energizer to absorb energy from the audience

Ricardo was the host of the main stage but just before he got started he spoke of an interesting idea that he came up with on the way to the Palace. He thought of creating something he called the energizer. This invention of his would absorb the energy from people and inspire those who need inspiring. He then conducted his first experiment on stage by facing his hand palms to the audience while asking for people to show a little more enthusiasm so that he absorb it and get #LIS15 started.

2. Getting to know startups who have rebuilt Lisbon

Many startups are coming out of Portugal and that’s what we wanted to show to the world. However, we had some of the pioneers on stage. We had Uniplaces, Talkdesk, Feedzai and Seedrs talking about how they grew their companies into successful businesses and how they’re planning to expand globally. When most of these startups first started most people in Portugal had no idea what a startup was… Things have changed over the last few years and most of the entrepreneurs who were at #LIS15 prove it.

3. Alex Barrera ironically saying to investors: “your time is up!” 

Well, we knew the reversed pitches would be interesting because we love turning the tables… But Alex Barrera raised our expectations. The man with the hat and also a journalist at Tech.eu took the stage with the energy and enthusiasm to make everyone laugh. All the investors had 3 minutes to pitch their VCs and when the time was up, Alex just said: “Your time is up – it actually feels good to say this to an investor…”.

4. Stephan Morais saying that Lisbon is right after Berlin and London as a startup city

Stephan Morais, Executive Director at Caixa Capital, considers Lisbon as a top startup city in Europe right after Berlin and London… Who knows what comes next?

5. The Jazz concert in the garden

The garden had a grove and that grove asked for something more than just a regular coffee break with drinks and finger food. There’s was a Jazz band setting up the mood for networking and we honestly hope it inspired many deals.

6. The Lisbon Challenge Startup Pitches

Yes, we’re a bit biased on this but to see the progress of the Lisbon Challenge startups was memorable. Great pitches and presentations from the entrepreneurs in the house. All the videos are coming soon… Stay tuned!

7. Those workshops and discussions in the attic

Some people say attics are haunted. Well, this one most certainly was. Haunted with new trends, interesting discussions, and wild crazy ideas. We talked about the Digital Single Market, the importance of failure and success, lean innovation, growth hacking and much more. It felt good to pull up our sleeves and get things done at a tech conference.

8. The One on One meetings in the garden

The garden was full of benches and sofas so that the more than 170 one on one meetings could take place. The entrepreneurs had mentoring sessions with the speakers while enjoying the breeze. We bet this helped ideas flow…

9. Everything happening on Twitter and Periscope

During these 2 days, we had over 2000 tweets and some people had loads of fun using Periscope. From videos to photos, from quotes to jokes you could follow all the action on Twitter through the hashtag #LIS15.

10. The suspense of the awards… 

We had several awards to give, together with our partners. But better than the awards is just the suspense and opening of the envelope. But don’t worry if you missed it, we’ll do a recap of the awards pretty soon on the Lisbon Challenge blog 🙂

11. Understand how can big corporations help startups succeed

We had big names on stage from companies such as NASA, Airbus, Ogilvy and Cisco to talk about how they can help startups grow. It’s important to have strong startup ecosystems and big corporations are interested.

12. Taking off to the sunset cocktail on a classic Beetle

We wanted to surprise our guests and speakers and so we took them for a ride. We had sunset cocktail prepared but other than crossing the city in a regular car we decided to go for a more classical approach. Great way to see the city and enjoy the great weather.

13. “I’m on a boat”” – The Sunset Cocktail  

We wanted to be different this time so we took some inspiration from our ancestors who took off on caravels to discover a whole new world. We rented a catamaran for the Sunset Cocktail and we had a couple of drinks aboard with our speakers, partners, and guest. It was pretty memorable to drink that gin and tonic with a gorgeous view over Lisbon and the bridge (yes it looks like the Golden Gate bridge in San Francisco but our is actually prettier).

14. The true Portuguese Party

The Lisbon Investment Summit had to end with a bang… And so there was a traditional Portuguese party with sardines and popular Portuguese music, that some of the speakers actually thought was German. Oh well, the complexity of the Portuguese language strikes again…

Thank you all for coming and see you next year!

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Storyo and The Future of Content

by maria | Jun 3, 2015 | Uncategorized

To say content is evolving would be an understatement.

As technology is making it not only possible, but easy to stay connected with the world 24/7, everyone can now be a content creator, anytime, anywhere. The results have been nothing short of spectacular: around 2 billion photos are shared everyday, and growing fast. So the challenge becomes: How can we make what we have to say stands out from the crowd?

Storyo is a Portuguese start up that believes the future of content lies in making storytelling as quick and easy as any other content out there, by using our data. A free mobile app, available for iOS and Android, it uses data embedded in the photos we take to automatically create a narrative of events, fetches elements from the web to enrich the story, and delivers it in beautiful videos. And at #LIS15, Storyo and Beta-i are partnering up to invite attendants to create their own #LIS15 stories, and experience both a new way of sharing their experience of the main seed & early stage investment event in Portugal, and a glimpse of what contextual storytelling might bring to the future of content.

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Nuno Sebastião – How to Raise Money With American VCs

by maria | Jun 2, 2015 | Uncategorized

We had a chat with Nuno Sebastião, founder and CEO of Feedzai, the Portuguese startup working on fraud protection who has just raised 17.5 million dollars! Nuno will be one of our speakers at #LIS15 – Lisbon Investment Summit so here’s sneak peek of what you can expect from his talk… From moving to San Francisco and reaching American VCs to scaling a startup, Nuno shares bits and pieces of the story behind Feedzai to all those who are currently building a startup. We’re pretty sure that after reading this you’ll definitely want to talk to him at #LIS15 this Thursday, so don’t let this chance go to waste…

Feedzai was born in Portugal and since the beginning you’ve had people working remotely, in different cities and now countries. How and why did that happen?

Feedzai started off in Coimbra at IPN, but I actually stayed in Lisbon because I had one requirement: I had to be 30 minutes away from an airport. So our team kind of learned how to work remotely since the very beginning. It’s easier for hiring purposes too, you have people who don’t want to leave their cities so we have to adapt. We currently have people in Porto, Coimbra, Lisbon and in the US: in the Bay Area and also in the East Coast because our customers from the financial sector are mostly in the East Coast. For us, this makes total sense to have the team spread out. We basically live in HipChat and honestly working remotely it’s a matter of habit.

You have recently raised a round of 17.5 million dollars. Have you got any advice for other startups who are currently raising investment?

Honestly, it’s pure hard work. This investment is the result of really hard work from our team, otherwise none of it would be possible. It doesn’t matter if you’re Portuguese, Spanish or American, that’s irrelevant, what really matters is to get moving and leave the comfort zone. In our case, we had to sell our product and technology in the US. We had a disruptive technology and a cool product, but none of it would have the same impact if you had not moved to the US. Yes, we were a bit naive initially but we set out to sell this technology to the largest banks and corporations in the US.

When you’re abroad and especially here in the US if you’re confident and if you believe in what you do people will talk to you and give you a shot. You might only have 30 minutes, but they give you an opportunity. For this reason, you need to prepare your pitch so that you can prove you’ll add value to that company in just 30 minutes. It should be fact based and not just a conversation. It takes some time, but you’ll get there. For us, it was almost 2 years until we had customers that paid us millions of dollars per year, but we made it. And for all this to happen you need to be persistent.

Was going to the US the turning point for Feedzai?

Yes. I think that the turning point was when we closed the round of investment in 2013 with Sapphire Ventures. They gave us 2 million dollars but under the condition that I had to go and sell it in the US. At the time, I didn’t know anyone in the financial sector but I had to do something about it. My advice is for entrepreneurs to knock on people’s doors, go to events and learn all about it. In less than 2 years, we went from not knowing any events to being invited to talk at these events. But it’s a lot of work. Sometimes I spend 2 nights a week in an airplane, I’m always traveling around. But in the end If you have the right attitude and work really hard the results will come.

Pretty much, all your customers in the financial sector are in the East Coast but you spend a lot of time in San Francisco. Why is that?

Well, because we need to be in the Bay Area. Even though most of our customers are in the East Coast they all come to the Bay Area. We’re not yet known so for us to reach these big companies we usually go through the technology approach. All these big corporations and banks have startup labs and innovation centers in San Francisco. So we need to balance it. We sell in the East Coast, but we have the Silicon Valley DNA. However, during this past year things have changed a bit. We now have a much stronger startup ecosystem in New York for example. Nonetheless, it’s important to be in San Francisco for all the tech talent. You have people here with years of experience in product management and development while in the East Coast you have more business and sales.

How were you able to raise with international investors? How did you get to them?

For the previous round, I met the managing partner of Foundation Capital at an event and he really liked our story. In the end he said: ’I like your story so I’m going to do something for you, give me your email and a sentence describing what your company does and I’ll help you’. He ended up sending more than 20 emails to VCs in the Bay Area. This was awesome because with this intro I was able to schedule several meetings with VCs. It was really tough to attend all these meetings. I got several No’s for obvious reasons. First of all I wasn’t American and then I had no customers in the US. But in the end, from the 20 VCs I spoke to, 2 of them said yes and that was it, we closed the deal.

It was really fast because here in the US there’s a lot of competition between VCs. Getting the intro from an important player was crucial because all of the VCs knew that he sent that email to several investors so they had to act upon it.

What about the Series B you just closed? Was it a similar process?

Oh no, that was completely different. For this round of investment, we had several offers on the table from top VCs but we had to think strategically. It was more than just the money, we needed investors to advise and help us. So for our sector, which is Fintech, OAK HC/FT was the best possible match. We initially spoke to Jonathan Weiner, who is a Venture Partner at Oak, because he had a connection to Espírito Santo Ventures. Jonathan sold his company to Google for a large amount of money, that is not officially disclosed, but it’s on the top ten of Google’s acquisitions so you can imagine the numbers. He’s also the organizer of the biggest fintech event in the US called Money2020, so no wonder that this was a perfect match for us.

So basically what you’re saying is that you shouldn’t just take the first offer on table, right?

Yes and that is a common thought amongst entrepreneurs. There’s so much pressure to raise investment that your instinct is to take the first offer you get. However, it’s really important to choose the right partner. Especially when it’s later stage, when you’re scaling and growing. For us the goal was to choose the partner who could offer us the experience and insights we needed. So from October until March all I did was work on fundraising, meet the VCs by talking to everyone, seeing how they work and what they could do for us. We were putting them to work, basically. When you reach a certain level this is what you need to do. The VCs need to prove they’re the right fit for you because we’re giving away part of your company and that is a big cost. So in the end our conclusion was that these guys from Oak were really good in the financial sector and I knew Jonathan already which was also a big advantage. With Oak we knew we had the connection to key players we needed in Fintech.

And now what’s next? What are your future plans for Feedzai?

Well, we end up wearing different hats as the company grows. Until now it was just hustling, hustling, hustling, so that we could close as many deals as possible. Now, our focus is much more on setting up operations. We now have huge companies working with us so we need to provide the support and customer care they need. So in the end this round of investment is for us to be able to guarantee this kind of support. It’s not just about the technology anymore, it’s about having a support that is 24/7 and about cracking the machine. We have found the repeatable sales model so now we need to build the team and set up the structure. It’s not just about the technological challenge anymore, it’s more sales and business. We need to sell this in different countries.

Just to give you an idea from the 50 people we now have in our team, only 2 of them are sales. So it’s pretty clear that we need to ramp this up.

As for the long term, if the markets remain positive and if we keep working hard there’s a clear, but obviously long, path to take Feedzai to the public markets. But regardless of our final goal, there’s still a very long way to go.

Did this story caught your attention? Then, don’t miss the chance of talking to Nuno Sebastião and many other interesting entrepreneurs and investors at #LIS15 – Lisbon Investment Summit this Thursday and Friday. Get your ticket here before they sell out!
                       

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