Running on wheels at Pioneers

The fifth annual Pioneers Festival was held in Vienna, May 27-29 2015. The Festival provides networking opportunities for VCs, incubators, accelerators, entrepreneurs and CEOs from the CEE region and the Silicon Valley. Also there are a plenty of international business men and innovators who give presentations on interesting trends of the startup ecosystem from companies such as Google, Facebook, 500 Startups, Techstars, Fast Company, Speedinvest, Accel Partners. It is a privilige for DBH Group that Route4U the winner of Seed Star Battle was also represented in the event.

The festival was held in the beautiful and representative Hofburg Imperial Palace and they invited more than 1,600 startups from 90+ countries to meet over 400 investors. The Festival is limited to 2,500 participants who l learn from the best and get inspired by keynotes that will show what to expect in the years ahead.

Gil Penchina was part of Pioneers Festival who is a startup guy, entrepreneur, and one of the leading angel investors. He invested in companies like Paypal and Linkedin when they were startups and today he is is one of the top angel investors worldwide and largest investor on AngelList, where he runs 10 investment syndicates and is backed by over 2,000 other business angels. He gave tips on “How to Rock on AngelList”,

Steli Eli is CEO and Co-Founder of Close.io (a platform that makes calls, sends emails, and conveniently automatically tracks all activity) and ElasticSales, where he helps thousands of startups succeed in scaling their sales efforts. He is an alumni of Y Combinator (they helped making companies like Dropbox, Airbnb, 9gag, and more). His company has received funding from Spark Capital, SV Angel, Start Fund, and Omidyar Networks as well as several notable angel investors.

Besides firing half his team by singing Bye Bye Baby from ’N Sync, he held exciting talks at Pioneers Festival 2013 (“You Gotta Be A Hustler“) and 2014 (“Hustle Hard – Get your sales game to the next level“). The Pioneers loved him so much so they couldn’t resist inviting him again – this time for another hardcore sales session with the latest insights and stories. Steli’s 10 points a sales person should do:

• Show up
• Don’t f*?!% around
• Ask more questions
• Always quality first
• Ask for help
• Never accept the first NO
• Follow up relentlessly
• Create momentum in tiny steps
• Get over yourself
• Go for the close

Erik Bovee Co-founder and CEO of Speedinvest held an interactive presentation about their exit with Wikidocs which was acquired by Australia-based Atlassian. Wikidocs saw content being hidden in office documents and sent around offices in emails like “RE: RE: RE: document-v3-modified-HM.docx”. They wanted to help improve that situation and enable true content collaboration by offering real time co-editing for everybody and every app as an API. Real time collaborative editing for WYSIWYG HTML content is a really hard technical problem what Wikidocs solved. The technology, which could improve Atlassian’s Jira issue-tracking application and Confluence team-collaboration tool, could also be broadly applied to make the web a much more collaborative place.

One of the best presentations was held by Dávid Lakatos, a Boston based Hungarian programmer who is building his second startup after Sold sold to Dropbox. His current project called Formlabs designs and manufactures the Form 1+ SLA 3D Printer, the first high-resolution, professional desktop stereolithographic 3D printer and it has finished a campaign on Kickstarter with 3 Million $.

The winner of Seed Star Battle Route4U wheelchair navigation system won Design Terminal’s Smart City Lab competition and they were represented in the Hungarian Embassy in Vienna. The event called „INTERURBAN: Budapest – Vienna” was the first where decision makers and entrepreneurs had the opportunity to meet and network. Péter Bodo and his team participated in the mini-expo and they won a stand in the Pioneers Showroom as part of this prize. There was no shortage of leads such as the Swiss Railways, HP, the largest media company in the Czech Republic who were showed openness to partnership with the Hungarian startup. In addition, several investors and incubators also saw an opportunity int he team so they had a lot of disscussion at their kisok and in the Tech Salon.

All in all, Pioneers Festival was a very well-organized event with full of interesting startup showcasing performances so it was quite a show that everyone who is active in the startup ecosystem should see once.

More about Pioneers Festival: pioneers.io