Easy Investment April 23, 2008
Posted by Jussi Huotari in : startup , add a comment
Regards from the sunny Barcelona! The European early stage investment forum (Easy) was organized in Barcelona this time and I was here representing TripSay. The forum aims at matching startups with business angels around the Europe to create cross-border investment opportunities. Sounds complicated, huh? In reality the event worked quite well. The organizers had invited a number of investors (mainly angels) and selected 17 companies who were given an 8 minute slot to give their pitch on the stage. Good stuff!
There was also an excellent keynote speaker. Nelson Gray shared his experiences as a business angel in a very unusual way: he used concrete examples of companies and real numbers! It was very refreshing to listen. For example, his first investment had gone bad and he draw some guidelines from the experience. In retrospect he could say that the entrepreneur was not good, the business model was poor and there were no barriers to entry for the competitors. Then why did he invest? He gave an answer and said that he learnt from the mistake. And that afterwards he hasn’t done the same mistake again. Instead he has done 11 other mistakes. 
Well, he can afford to do mistakes as there are more successes than mistakes in his portfolio. If you have a chance, Nelson’s presentation is worth seeing.
An Emerging Start-up Pattern March 30, 2008
Posted by Jussi Huotari in : startup, web2 , add a commentAs you probably know, we changed the name of our online travel service from Vailoma to TripSay. The rationale behind the name change was to get a name that’s easier to remember and that gets associated with travel also by people who don’t speak fluent finnish.
Anyway, it seems that an other travel start-up changed their name at almost the same day. This coincidence is clearly a sign of an emerging pattern in start-up space. As Tim Hughes of The BOOT puts it:
A new start up pattern is emerging overnight in the content space. First you form a team, then you get a little funding, put out a beta site and generate some buzz. Then, naturally, you change your name. Within days of each other we had news that community and guide content player Vailoma is now called TripSay (announcement) and content/review aggregaor Kango is now called UpTake (announcement).
Yes, naturally. Have to agree with Tim’s analysis. As I wrote in the comments, I wonder if we’ll get more followers to this pattern…