A completely cloudless London. A rare event to see with sunglasses. You wake up surprised and very happy. Going to Hyde Park, you realize that in a few hours you have the TechCrunch London. Arrived at the Café de Paris, go down the stairs and… bye bye sun. So you begin to hate a little Mike Butcher ( ).

Welcome to the darkness. Few lights, a projector: 2 speeches, 12 pitches, and then 2 other speeches. Wil Harris (Channel Flip) was particularly funny with his doubts about the investment situation in UK. Can you imagine Italy?! So the winner of the pitch competition: Festbuzz. And … go! The hunt for investors! Everyone turned on Shiva-mode: four arms to deliver quickly as business cards as possible. While you’re looking for an investor to assault, you meet startup’s founders, exchanging advices. We also met SeedCamp finalists: among all the co-founder of VouChaCha.com, Ben Brown, is a very cool guy.

Now your elevator pitch is a tantra to repeat. In November Globepinners.com will be online and so we’re talking about it with “big fishes”. Good fishing: many of them expressed their interest. After 8 hours without eating, we decided to go back to the surface. It’s 11 p.m. and all around us is only darkness. We vampires can continue our investors hunting. Now London is done … next destination: San Francisco?

p.s.: Special thanks to Stefano (TheStartup.eu), who has published on facebook the photos of the event: in one of them, one of co-founders came out damned ugly. Thanks also to Johanna, Sebastian and Dario for the several drinks. Every meeting with investors is a hard proof for our liver.

Author: Alex Contarin

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Well,  it’s almost Thursday. The Judgement Day. It’s useless to say we strongly believe in this event. We want to come back home full of business cards, to meet bunches of people and have a stroke of luck, findind our “Big Kahuna”.

In the meantime we are waiting to know if we will display our project during the event. We are currently awaiting our 3 minutes of fame (1 \ 5 of what Warhol’s predicted ), in which we will expose our pitch.
The great thing is that TechCrunch London also gives us the opportunity to discuss with Mike Butcher (TechCrunch editor of Europe), Maz Nadjm (BSkyB), Barak Rabinowitz (Amuso.com), Wil Harris (Channel Flip) and Scott Rafer (Lookery / Mashery ). In addition to this we will deal with many other founders of startups and share with them our prospects , our fears… in one word our need of money … yes, we are venial … we need money!
In the afternoon there will be a series of seminars with the “big ones” that I listed before. Cool! Therefore a fundamental rule is: eat light and be active.
And about the evening? Mmmh very interesting: The informal party! This usually means free cocktails. And we’ll certainly need it. To celebrate or to console ourselves. Usually the best things happen just during these informal meetings. We will have the badge of Globepinners.com hanging on the coat. If you are in Coventry Street in London for the TechCrunch’s event, come in for a chat with us. We’ll be glad to offer you a cocktail (they’re free… I hope …  ).
ps: Warhol talked about 15 minutes of fame. If we pitch you, since we are 2, we take off 1.5 minutes each. So it’s 13.5 minutes left:  I have to find something really special to do!

Mesdames et Messieurs le liens utiles:

TechCrunch – www.techcrunch.com

TechCrunch Europe – uk.techcrunch.com

TechCrunch London (event) – http://bit.ly/3uHxY7

Andy Warhol Museum of Pittsburg – http://www.warhol.org/

Author: Alex Contarin

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Yesterday we were in Milan at the “Startup Night”, organized by Mikamai. It was A.w.e.s.o.m.e.: more than a hundred people from all over Italy…and you think “Wow, it’s great to feel part of this crowd!” (actually you’re only hoping to find an investor with an urgent need to invest right now and right on you). Anyway, as soon as we arrived we immediately realized that if you are a startup, to be in Milan really helps a lot (or at least to understand that if you want to find money, London is the right place, not Milan…some said so).
For the sake of honesty: activities like that create discussion, movement and excitement. We desperately need this in Italy! So, thanks Mikamai for this informal event. We hope in another one coming soon. We are happy we have met a bunch of people and interesting ideas (we’re also happy for the free beer).

Ah…other news: we have just bought 2 tickets for “Techcrunch London” of 24th sept.! So cool! See you there?

p.s.: we came back home at 3.00 a.m. and we went to bed. But unfortunately one of us couldn’t ‘cause a damned dog barked all night long, trying to stop a cats’ lustful gang bang. The result? At 8 a.m. one of the co-founders was reading every possible blog about earplugs and today he was “just a little bit” nervous (self-criticism?)

Author: Alex Contarin

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