A packed CPHFTW Town Hall

The 7th CPHFTW Town Hall was held last week. This time the format had gotten a tweak – one longer session instead of multiple smaller. The evening contained two keynotes, by Peter Holten Mühlmann from Trustpilot and Lars Fjeldsoe-Nielsen from Balderton Capital. Besides that a session of startup pitches, and quick presentations of community initiatives and exciting meetups.

As the last couple of times the Town Hall was held at KPH Volume – a rough and atmospheric venue. Even if very cold this particular day – the room was still packed and the audience listened vividly.

“Always be sober when talking to journalists”

Both keynotes held at the event contained a lot of stories and experiences. Especially Peter Holten Mühlmanns humorist but honest and insightful talk contained many gems, on everything from how Trustpilot got started, what value PR and being on the national front-page gives you, how to recruit smart and how to manage scaling a startup from 1 to 500+.

Lars Fjeldsoe-Nielsen from Balderton Capital shared his past, how it came he worked at Dropbox and Uber, and his outlook of the European and especially Danish startup scene from his current position with Balderton.

Lars Fjeldsoe-Nielsen talking on stage

Startups and community

As previously a part of the event was focused at highlighting startups that are of interest, as well as community events. The startups presenting on stage where:

Linkfire – Ricki Mae Melchior
Sponsta – Philip Bock
Peakon – Kasper Hulthin (who also just announced a large early funding)
Vivino – Theis Søndergaard

One the community side, the following initiatives / meetups / events got some time in the spotligt:

Codher – A tech meetup aiming at getting more women to code
Startup Weekend – was presented by Aleksander Bordvik
Nordic Startup Award – Kim Balle talked about the upcoming awards
Nordic Startup Conference – the conference is to return, and date and location announced
Startup Europe Week – a lot of things happening the week of 1-5th february
Singularity U Copenhagen & Danske Ideer – Henrik Føhns presented the upcoming session with Singularity University in Copenhagen

You can see further details on the videos below. Apart from these initiatives, there where also mini sessions afterwards where people could go to focus on certain topics. These were: AIESEC, Nordic Growth Hackers, Capital2Grow, LEO Ventures, CPH Coworking Council, Startup Weekend. This gave rise to a lot of discussions and people getting to know each other.

Overall a really great meetup. Great work by Christoffer and the dedicated team organising this high value event. Only drawback with the entire event was that it was kind of (very) cold – but as Nick Hawtin put it on twitter:

You gotta know your event rocks, if people are willing to sit wearing coats, hats, and mittens to hear your speakers #cphftw Town Hall.

— Nicholas Hawtin (@RiskContainment) January 21, 2016