I was fortunate enough to meet Dan Feld when I organized Startup Weekend Bucharest last year. He is definitely a person to follow if you’re in the Internet industry and I’m happy to say that he’s going to be visit Bucharest again.

Dan is giving a keynote presentation about Cycle of innovation, Industry standards and Building new IT products at the Polytechnics University of Bucharest on Friday 13.05 at 17:00, in amphitheater EC004.

Dan Feld is the Regional Sales Manager EEMEA for Amazon Web Services and has a background of CTO positions working with US corporations and startups.

If you’re in Bucharest you should definitely stop by and see Dan’s talk. See you there!

For those new to the Startup Weekend concept (is there anyone who doesn’t know it? ) Startup Weekend is a 54 hour event. Everything starts on Friday evening, with the participants pitching ideas in front of the audience. Teams are formed on spot, based on the personal preference of every participant. Building the businesses continues on Saturday and Sunday, with the help of a hand-picked group of mentors. The event ends on Sunday evening, when the jury decides the winning project.

Expect to see in the room during the weekend some of the promising Romanian entrepreneurs doing their magic in creating great Internet startups. The group of speakers, mentors and jury is formed of both local and foreign entrepreneurs, advisors and investors.

The winning team is going to be in the books for getting a seed investment from Seedmoney. On top of that my startup consulting company, Cronian Labs, it going to help the winning project with customer development and marketing strategy.

Register now on http://bucharest.startupweekend.org/!

Related posts:

1. Dan Feld from Amazon Web Services speaking in Bucharest

I’ve been invited to give a presentation on networking and entrepreneurship in three cities in Romania (Bucharest, Timisoara and Cluj).

Main points of the presentation was that for Romania to grow more successful global startups we first need to grow a solid entrepreneurial ecosystem, formed of people who have the network and the money to help others succeed and grow at a rapid pace. The other thing necessary to grow an ecosystem is to strong network of connections in all major entrepreneurship hubs (San Francisco/Silicon Valley, New York, London, etc.)

Direct links to the networks/communities in the slideshow are:

• Sandbox Network
• Startup School
• Cofounder Network

I was invited to keep a presentation about lean startups and lessons learned implementing this set of processes in my startups. The presentation took place at Bucharest Hubb which is the HQ for the first and only seed fund for IT startup in Romania. I am also an advisor the seed fund and it was nice to talk to the teams about my area of expertise and what I can help them with.

Embedded above are the slides I used to support the presentation.

Related posts:

1. Dan Feld from Amazon Web Services speaking in Bucharest

The organizers did a great job at inviting some of the people that were part of the Agile movement from the very beginning and this definitely made a difference in the level of experience and expertise showed by the speakers.

With the organizers being domain experts as well (experienced agile practitioners and coaches), they very well understood the need to have the talks focused on answering questions as opposed to raising new ones. All the talks were focused on practical approaches to improving Agile methodologies as well as methods to implement Agile in organizations just getting started. Not a single talk was focused on theory or theoretic approaches to methodologies or frameworks.

I’m sure that most if not all of the attendees left the conference with a clear view on how to improve on their company’s Agile approach. There were talks on coaching, writing user stories, testing, product ownership as well as other topics, but the most important aspect was the general openness of the speakers to give advice and discuss about problems one might have with implementing Agile to their organization.

More info on the conference talks and speakers can be found at http://openagile.ro/talks/. From what I understood from the organizers, sooner than later they will publish on the website the talks along with interviews with the speakers.

Photo made by Lucian Daniliuc

I was invited to be a mentor on a local entrepreneurship event called Arena Ursilor. The idea for the event was to put 10 promising entrepreneurs and their projects in front of the best mentors and business angels Romania has to offer and help them push their projects forward by advice and possibly financing.

The level of the projects was surprisingly high as the vast majority of the entrepreneurs pitched project with some level of technical implementation, at least at proof of concept stage. The others were domain experts, having worked in their line of expertise for many years and having the necessary experience to move to stating a business on their own.

The projects with the greatest potential to make a difference in the near future from the ones pitched at the event, in my opinion, are (in no particular order):

• VideoGuide.ro is a built to order video tour platform. Emanoil Serban, the project’s founder and CEO came to the event to raise money to develop the project further. He was asking for 60.000€ for 20%, giving the project a 300.000€ valuation. Currently they have 150 clients for their video tour filming and publishing service at a revenue of 300-600€ / client / year. The company is operational for around 2 years now and Emanoil plans to raise money to expand the sales effort to more cities in Romania.
• Tjobs.ro is a job platform with a twist. The twist comes from the fact its co-founders are domain experts in recruiting romanian employees for foreign employers and they formed a union of local recruiting companies. Those over 300 companies then submit their open job positions to Tjobs, while Tjobs makes sure that the end-users submit CVs only to verified companies that have a proven track record. This makes for a great win-win relationship for both the end-user and the employment agencies, with Tjobs being more like a trust partner for both than a usual recruiting platform. The Tjobs founders came to the event to raise money, asking for 150.000€ for 5% at a 3.000.000€ valuation.
• Fantasy Accelerator is an animated comic project. The project, in the idea state at the moment, is started by a young ambitious romanian guy who studied in the UK for all his university years. He came back with an idea of how to make online comics more interactive. Guy’s name is Claudiu Revnic and you can find him on Facebook.

The event went really well, with both the investors and mentors getting to know about new projects and the mentees and participants getting to interact with a group of experienced and successful local technology people.

Some of the entrepreneurs joining the event include (in no particular order):

• Mircea Pasoi – Ex-Google Intern, Co-Founder at Balaur.ro, Software Engineer at uverVU
• Cristina Scheau - Google Summer of Code Student
• Cristian Strat – Ex-Google Intern, Co-Founder at Balaur.ro, IT Consultant
• Adrian Zamfira - CEO at KuBu Stream
• Marius Sigheti - Managing Partner at Sigheti & Sigheti
• Viorel Spinu - Managing partner at Sety
• Iulia Spinu - .NET Developer at TeamNet
• Petronela Serban – Co-Founder at BloggerWork
• Mihai Mafteianu - Founder at eWiki.ro, Co-Founder at TwiMarket.com, IT Consultant

Looking forward for the next event in the OpenGrill series.

The main reason for starting this is to help provide an unbiased information source for people looking into the local entrepreneurship effort.

Topics featured into the wiki will include, but not limited to, who the entrepreneurs are, what projects are they working on, who are the local investors and advisors, who are the non-core business professionals with experience in working with entrepreneurs (lawyers, accountants, etc.). Also an entrepreneurship guidebook will be featured with articles about various processes an entrepreneur encounters in his activity (raise capital, make a partnership, hire the right people, etc.).

Anyone will be able to edit, as long as their submitted content is correct and unbiased.

Attached below is the Keynote I have used to support my speech. It is not very self-explanatory, but will offer you a general view of what today’s OpenCoffee was about.

If you want to know more about the project or how you can help please use the comment section or the about page.

Video clip from the Net Start-up event held at CERF this year to which I was invited to preview TwiMarket.com. The aim was to make a pitch similar to the one at Mini Seedcamp and improving it with the help of the feedback panel. In the end I ended up pitching differently compared to this clip based on the feedback I received privately from some people.

Now I must complete the final details and make a great Keynote presentation.