Arcada participants team representing in the finals.
Markus and Mathias are attending the Entrepreneurship Festivals 2013, 4-6.9 in Manchester. Here in Arcada’s Entrepreneurship blog they let us in on their experiences and thoughts about the event.
Hello again!
So last night was awesome, me and Markus had agreat time! Today I am going to go through with you what happened.
We woke up and had breakfast with our team to finalize our pitches. The first session after breakfast was about raising funds, there was three experts telling about different kind of funding, there was a venture capitalist – and a business angel – they both told us what they wanted when they invest and how they see start-ups usually works.
Once we finished with the session we went straight back to finalize our pitches, we rehearsed like crazy and we finally got it! Out of 24 teams they randomly pick the order to pitch in the first round, we were last in so we got some extra time to work on our pitch, even though me and Markus would have wanted to go first.
After the first round of pitches there was a transport to a “mystery location” which apparently also was a surprise for the festival team. So we arrive at Manchester Uniteds stadion Old Trafford by busses and they took us around on a guided tour and Manchester Uniteds Director of Communications Phil Townsend told a little about the team and the history. Check out the picture with our Go Waste team!
Here they also announced the final four, and we are really happy to say that out of 200 participants and 24 teams we got to the final pitching round consisting of four teams! Now we knew that we would have to pitch for all of the participants, festival team, judges and special guests during the next event at the Museum of Science and Engineering.
When we arrived at the museum there is some champagne in the museum and just a big hangout for everyone to relax and have a drink and do some networking.
Once we had our drinks it is straight on to the gala dinner which was the main event with the final pitches and some special speakers.
In the middle of the dinner there is the final pitches and the audience is the one who are going to vote for the winner. Me, Markus and Mayo are the guys on our team who does the pitching Markus starts by introducing the idea, what is the problem, how are we going to solve it, how are we going to enter the market and how our product really works. Then I go on to the financials and the business model, how are we going to make money, what do we want from an investor, what is the market and how are we going to find our customers. Last up is Mayo he introduces the team and what skills we have and the networks we know, we were a range of people from Mexico, Chile, Finland and Nigeria and we have degrees from bachelors all the way to three PhDs.
Once we got the pitch done everyone feels relaxed and we can begin having some wine that the Barclays bank provided us and the IT-Officer of Barclays was actually sitting at our table which was really nice that we got to talk with him.
So then there was the awards, they gave away some prices for different categories like social enterprise and best pitch and couple more. So then they announced who the winner was, unfortunately it was not us and they didn’t give away 2nd, 3rd and 4th places s we were all runner ups, but we are still really proud of our team and really happy of the result! So we sincerely want to thank UK Trade & Investment for this opportunity and Mervi at Arcada who told us about this festival and sent us on a journey that really changed how we see on entrepreneurship today! Tomorrow we are going to wrap up the whole festival so stay tuned.
Mathias / Markus