On April 23rd – 26th, 2015, I was invited to facilitate the first StartupWeekend Education vertical event in Bergen. Jorgen Eriksson, a startup community leader in Norway, whom I had met on the Up Global Summit in Rio De Janeiro in 2012 convinced me to jump on board to the next plane and help him and his team out with the event. I didn’t know much about Bergen before I came, only that it was one of the bigger cities in Norway and that Kurt Nilsen, the famous world idol winner and his old band Fenrik Lane were from the area.
When arriving on Thursday Jorgen took me to a startup exhibition called Grundermessen. The exhibition showcased some of the key support organisations for startups in the local area. To mention a few it had a booth from StartupWeekend, an incubator called “Impact Hub” offering co-working space, a booth from a governmental entity Innovation Norway offering everything from direct consulting and grants of various sorts and finally a number of consultants offering their services such as support from senior developers, accountants and experienced public speakers. They also had a power keynote from a succesful entrepreneur encouraging participants to build their own businesses and a 60 second pitch competition from DNB bank.
During late-night Grundermessen some local startups were matched up with some of the hosts and senior people within the community. I was matched with a married couple, Ralph and Elisabet (a fellow Icelander), who were working on building a vetted process for corporations to verify their corporate responsibility processes. Ralph and Elisabet were extremely hospitable during the entire stay and ended up inviting me for an after party to their home where I also got to meet Christer Unneland the drummer from Fenrik Lane!
I visited a number of interesting places in Bergen before the StartupWeekend kicked off and also had the opportunity to do a few small breakouts during the weekend. One of the worthy mentions is the Impact-HUB co-working space located near the port area. The co-working space is based in a house called “Det Hanseatiske Kvarter”, a 300+ year old wooden house on three floors and and overall inspiring design for startups. They hosted an event on noon on Friday called “Waffle-Pitch” which occurs weekly. It’s an open event with a new topic every Friday. Startups can also use this opportunity to practice their pitch and have a bite of warm Norwegian waffles, the only item on the menu. During this Waffle-Pitch the discussion was about the “Cycle-Hack-Bergen” event on June 19-21st 2015, where participants work for a full weekend in improving Bergen as a cycling city.
The StartupWeekend event itself went smoothly. Since this was the 6th StartupWeekend in Bergen many attendees, judges, mentors and people on the organising team knew what StartupWeekend was all about so there was even less time spent on explaining and more on the execution and helping the teams building on top of their ideas. We had a good number of pitches and ended up with six good sized final teams working for 54 hours straight. I really liked some of the ideas and believe that with time they might become promising companies working on problems related to education. I want to underline that I personally believe that the biggest value of attending a StartupWeekend is the value of finding co-founders and building a strong team. In my opinion the value of an idea is only a multiplier of how well executed it is, hence an idea with no execution is worthless. If you find a great team with synergy, the likelihood of getting a brilliant execution is greatly enhanced. The winning team for example, SwapEdge, had five people on the team who had never met before the weekend. That idea might definitely become something promising in the future, but even if it doesn’t I have a good feeling that this group will work on something interesting in the upcoming years.
At the event I also had some interesting discussions with people from DNB bank who were key sponsors of the event. Apparently the bank has published a book called “OppStart” available for free for customers of the bank in all of its facilities. The book has various up-to-date checklists, tools and todos for Entrepreneurs thinking about starting their own business. I think it can be very powerful for any startup community to have a distribution channel through a partner like DNB bank advertising best practices to literally all of its customers and encouraging them to participate in best practice events like StartupWeekend. It makes sense for a bank to support these kinds of activities, not just because of its social responsibility but also to better know its future customers and adapt its own business models to service the future companies coming out of todays startup communities.
Finally I just want to thank everybody for a great event. Good job Jorgen and his team, Alessandra, Dinesh, Sonja, Lene, Jarl and all the other organisers, mentors, judges and of course all of the attendees that I didn’t mention in this post!
If you are going to Bergen, talk to Jorgen! (@upbergen, #upbergen)
