Didn´t have time to attend the stage show at “Start up Live!”, or couldn’t go at all? Don´t worry, we gathered some quotes and wisdom we learned during the night.
Start up Live! is organised by Malmö Startups and is the biggest start up event in southern of Sweden with over 800 people attending. Overall the stage show held by Jeremie Poirier, Managing Director at Malmö Startups, was both informative and fun with interesting insights, and some Zumba.
Panel discussion
During the expert panel where the audience got insights from experts in Deep Tech/Computer Vision, CleanTech, eHealth, and eCommerce. The experts were Kalle Åström, Sara Sterner, Magnus Fredin, and Ebba Fåhraeus.
When asked “what is important learnings if you want to be an entrepreneur?”, the answers were:
“What if all the geniuses spent their brain capacity on saving the world instead of developing the new FIFA, world of war craft or smurfs?” – Sara Sterner, CMO Orbital Systems
“Have a lot of good examples” – Kalle Åström, Professor and Computer Vision Expert
“Finding the right person to employ is one of the biggest struggles for a start up. You need to use your network. Skip the people who aren’t as smart as you and don´t have the same ambition. Have a mentor who can recommend and vouch for you and also help you find good people” – Ebba Fåhraeus, CEO, Smile Incubator
“A threat for startups is that the entrepreneurs are so focused on product development instead of finding their first customer. Spend more time on marketing and sales” – Magnus Fredin, CEO, Cdon.com
The next panel was an investor discussion with Björn Bergström from Industrifonden and Seth Bannon from Fifty Years. The two investors got to predict which industry would be the biggest in B2B and B2C within the next 10 years. According to Seth Bannon it will probably be synthetical biology and Björn Bergström said that “anything that can help us save time”, within the B2B market.
On B2C, on the other hand, Seth Bannon focused on blockchain technology and personal genomics. Björn Bergström said:
“I think we will focus on serving the underserved. Too many services being built by white guys for white guys”.
This started a discussion about gender, society, and sustainability within start ups in the panel.
“Studies shows that if you don’t have gender diversity when your company are 13 people you will do permanent damage to it. Another study also shows that VCs that have a teenage daughter makes better investments”– Seth Bannon
“Business is now more than making money. It is both making money and making the world better” – Seth Bannon
One last quote before this events report ends:
“Shout out to this region. We have invested in 10 companies here in the region which completely outperformed the rest in the nordics” – Björn Bergström
