So what is Rockstart Accelerator?

Rockstart is a European accelerator based in Amsterdam that comes with a great offer. Attending teams will have access to seed investment of €15k, 6 months of office space, a lineup of 99 mentors and coaching by entrepreneurs in house. The startups will also be going on a 3-week trip to Silicon Valley where they will meet serial entrepreneurs, pitch to investors and VCs, visit 500startups’ hub and co-work at Google campus for several days.

Back to the mentors…

Great names on the advisors and mentors list! You can check out the whole list for yourselves, but let’s just name a few:
- Werner Vogels – CTO and VP at Amazon.com and the visionary behind Amazon Web Services
- Dave Kochbeck – Former CTO of Friendster; CTO and founder of AtomicPass
- Arthur A. van Hoff – CTO at Flipboard
- Dees Chinniah – Firestarter at Mozilla, the makers of Firefox
- Patrick Vlaskovits – Entrepreneur and author of The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development: A Cheat Sheet to the Four Steps to the Epiphan
- Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten – Serial entrepreneur & Founder of The Next Web

Applications for Rockstart accelerator are open for teams from all over Europe, until January 31st. Check out the full agenda of the program. So, European awesome startups, if you were looking for a great accelerator not that far away from home, Rockstart accelerator is definitely an option for you!

So, are you an entrepreneur, a startup or an investor in Eastern Europe? Give us a shout!

Tell us a bit about you, let us know when you have an announcement to make, when you’re in need of feedback or looking for a collaboration. We’d love to know you better and let everyone interested know you too!

Whenever you have something to share, hit an email to news@wembrio.com. Cross our hearts, we will reply! And keep coming back on our blog for latest news and information on the Eastern European startups scene.

So let’s go back in time a little and watch the course the Summify team took, from day – let’s call it – zero, when they started in Romania with an idea, up to the moment of selling their company to one of the biggest tech companies in the world. I started tracing their steps following past Summify blog posts. Here’s how the story went:

Starting ReadFu

A blog post dating December 15th, 2009, announces the launch of ReadFu – a service meant to help its users rapidly surf through web pages that contained lots of links. The app would do that by creating a contextual summary and stats of the target page every time a link was clicked, thus helping the user decide which links were relevant before opening a whole bunch of new pages. At the moment, the service hadn’t gone public – and as the future would show, it would never get to that point – and the team was made up by Cristian Strat, Mircea Pasoi and Silviu Ganceanu.

The same month, a post on the blog of Bootup Labs (dated December 18th) was announcing ReadFu’s acceptance for the Bootup Labs program for January 2010. Thus, in January 2010, the guys moved to Vancouver to join Bootup Labs with ReadFu.

The Bootup Labs experience

After the mentoring sessions and the feedback recieved there, they realized that they had “a really good solution for the wrong problem”, as they state in one post. So they pivoted and started building Summify, as it would be announced in March.

In an interview for the How to Web blog, in the summer of 2011, Mircea was describing the Vancouver experience: “We need help from people who have actually done this startup thing before for real, because you can’t do it by reading TechCrunch and imagining things. There’s no shame in this – experience matters, people matter, the network you have matters.. and for the moment we have to go somewhere else (Vancouver, London, Silicon Valley, etc.) to get this knowledge and experience. But let’s hope that in a few generations that experience will be available in Romania and we’ll start having a real ecosystem that can create international-level companies.”.

Now, in the moment of the acquisition, Danny Robinson of Bootup Labs remembers the moment the guys joined the accelerator: “I wasn’t a fan of the idea that they were presenting, but then Boris reminded me of our own rule. ”We don’t back ideas, we back PEOPLE”. After a few more conversations with Cristian and Mircea, I was sold.”

ReadFu pivots and becomes Summify

The announcement that ReadFu became Summify is released on March 19th, 2010. Summify is at that moment in private beta, delivering “insightful summaries for any link on the web”, aggregating the links from the user’s social feeds and curating them based on the user’s social and interest graph.

In May 2010, Silviu leaves the Summify team and joins Google as Software Engineer. After Mircea and Cristian moved back to Vancouver, in August 2010 Summify was starting to roll out invitations to people who had earlier subscribed to the waiting list of their service. At the time, they had support for Twitter and Google Reader, stating the Facebook and Google Buzz( heh, Buzz ) was on the way. The app was then described as a “social news reader”.

August 2010 is also the month that Summify closes its second seed funding round, with W Media Ventures, following the first seed investment received from the Bootup Labs in March.

Summify also gathers multiple angel investments in March 2011, from Stewart Butterfield, Boris Wertz, Steve Olechowski, Rob Glaser, Mike Edwards, Jim Fletcher, Brent Holliday and, Accel Partners, according to CrunchBase.

Sold to the company with the birdy logo!

One year and a half after the launch of the Summify product in its final form, January 19th 2012, comes the big news: Summify is acquired by Twitter. As the guys announce, they will be “joining Twitter’s Growth team and will continue to explore ways to help people connect and engage with relevant, timely news.” According to their announcement, some features will be removed immediately, new registrations have already been stopped and, in a matter of weeks, the current Summfy product will be shut down.

“As hundreds of millions of people worldwide are signing up and consuming Twitter, we realized it’s the best platform to execute our vision at a truly global scale. Since Twitter shared this vision with us, joining the company made perfect sense.”

We hope to soon discover the Summify app neatly integrated into a new Twitter feature. Or maybe its technology will be used to improve the recently added Discover feature, as TheNextWeb guesses.

Whatever the future holds for Cristian and Mircea, we’ve got our fingers crossed and we’re keeping an eye on you guys!

We reached out to Mircea Pasoi, Summify co-founder, to get a few more details. While he’s out celebrating the deal and we’re in waiting for his answers, check out what Mircea was saying about Summify in a previous interview, about half a year ago. Indeed, things are happening with quite the speed in startups world!

We also had the pleasure of asking them a few questions regarding the School for Startups program and their experience so far with the entrepreneurs attending. You could read how the conversation with Doug Richard went in a previous article, here’s the interesting talk we had at the end of last year with Marius Ghenea.

How to Web: How did you get to be part of the School for Startups program?
Marius Ghenea: I met with Doug Richard a couple of years ago, I knew of him from the Dragons’ Den business show in the UK, as he was one of the original Dragons there. I thought it was an interesting coincidence, as a “Dragon” met a “Lion”: I am one of the “lions” in the same Sony Pictures business show in Romania, called “The Lions Arena”. He told me about his entrepreneurial school from the UK, Schoolforstartups, that they were running for a few years as a social program, with huge success. Together with Peter Barta, the Executive Director from FPP (a fund investing in entrepreneurial development in Romania), we thought this would be an excellent opportunity to bring Schoolforstartups to Romania and to expand it regionally in the SEE: for the next year, we are opening the participation to participants from Bulgaria, Serbia, Moldova, Ukraine, etc.

How to Web: What does S4S bring new to the Romanian startups scene?
Marius Ghenea: The great thing about S4S is that it brings a solid British curriculum together with Romania (and South-East European) localization and customization, for the specific needs of the entrepreneurship in the region, topped with real, practical, serial experience from Doug and myself, and the other lectors from the course. I believe it is the only program of this kind in all countries in SEE.

How to Web: How is your interaction with the startups attending the program? Were there any past participants that you chose to continue working with after the program ended?
Marius Ghenea: The first year of the program in Romania was 2011, we have only finalized it at the end of November, so it is too early to talk about follow-up for the participants, but what I can say is that quite a few participants stayed in touch throughout the program, even outside the classes and mentor-calls, and I tried to help them with advice, contacts, feedback.

How to Web: What do you look for when you’re first evaluating a startup? What draws your attention?
Marius Ghenea: I am first looking at the people: entrepreneurs and their teams. With an excellent team, one can surely improve on an imperfect business plan, but with a team without merit, even the best business planning will fail in delivering a successful entrepreneurial project. Secondly, I look at the market opportunities: is this a growing market or a sluggish, stagnant one, is there a lot of competition or it’s just beginning to emerge, is the product better, more competitive: cheaper, faster, better quality? Finally, I look where the project is and if the entrepreneurs did their best to develop it even in the absence of financing. My opinion is, if you cannot start an entrepreneurial project without financing and take it to a certain level, better not start it at all.

How to Web: What’s the biggest mistake Romanian entrepreneurs do, while in the early stages of starting a business?
Marius Ghenea: The biggest mistake I have seen is not recognizing the importance of an excellent team. We are now in an era when businesses are getting ever more complex and competitive and no one single entrepreneur could possibly master well enough all important aspects of a business. So he needs to bring together other people that will cover for this necessary experience, and if there are entrepreneurial or management gaps, they need to be recognized, as a first step to address them.

How to Web: Is there a certain domain Romanians are better at than others? Is there any specific type of business that would be more suited to start in Romania, because of the cultural background?
Marius Ghenea: One thing I appreciate about Romanian entrepreneurs is their creativity; they can come up with very creative business concepts and find creative solutions to most of the problems they face. On the flip side, excessive creativity could harm a streamlined approach in developing a startup: if an entrepreneur is throwing too many ideas on the table at the same time, chances are none of them will be satisfactorily executed, so the business won’t fly.
In terms of the better startups to try in Romania, I would consider IT projects as the most suitable for Romanian entrepreneurs: we have a large IT talent pool in this country (like in a few other EE countries, but maybe given the size of the population, proportionally larger talent pool); we have excellent IT and Internet infrastructure in Romania (the country ranks second in the world today in terms of broadband speed in large urban areas, only after South Korea); the cost of labor is still relatively affordable and certainly much lower than in Western countries and even some New Europe countries; the time zone, language proficiency and European membership are also arguments in favor of developing IT startups in Romania. On the top of it, now we even have great entrepreneurial education programs, such as Schoolforstartups, matchmaking platforms for IT entrepreneurs wanting to meet early-stage investors, such as VentureConnect, or large-scale well organized IT and Internet events such as How-to-Web.

Brainient develops products destined to make video adds more effective, by making the video content interactive. The company was founded in 2009, is a Seedcamp winner and has raised $850k in two previous rounds. They are currently developing three products: BrainAds - the first video retargeting platform in the world, BrainRolls - an in-video rich media unit that generates higher CTR, more brand engagement and better overall results for campaigns and BrainStudio - an online video editor.

“Last year was a very strong year for Brainient and gaining investors with local insight and knowledge from the world’s largest video markets – the US, UK and Germany – will be extremely valuable to us as we scale the company globally” said Emi Gal, Brainient’s co-founder and CEO.

“We believe that Brainient’s products will help advertisers increase the effectiveness of their video advertising campaigns while improving the viewing experience for consumers. It’s an exciting company in the world’s fastest growing advertising medium and we’re thrilled to be part of it” explained Ondrej Bartos, Partner at Credo Ventures, who has also joined Brainient’s board of directors.

One of North America’s top angel investors, Boris Wertz, is hosting an event in effort to get to know the Bucharest start-up community and meet its many talented entrepreneurs and engineers.

Time has been reserved for 20 entrepreneurs to give a 1-minute pitch and receive invaluable feedback. If you aren’t among the selected 20 start-ups, no worries! There will be plenty of networking time to meet Boris afterwards.

Boris Wertz is the Founder & CEO at wmediaventures and a venture partner of Munich-based Acton Capital Partners. His portfolio encompasses over 25 early-stage consumer internet and mobile companies. Most recently he co-founded GrowLab.

GrowLab is one of the top start-up accelerators that supports the world’s best entrepreneurs through seed funding, office space, as well as intensive mentorship and programming in Vancouver and Silicon Valley. Romanian start-up, Sunnytrail, just recently graduated from GrowLab’s 2011 Fall Program.

Event outline
- Brief presentation about GrowLab
- Start-up pitches
- Drinks and networking

Date: January 26, 2012
Time: 19:00 – 21:30
Location: Bucharest Hubb
Address: Str. Stelea Spatarul 21, 030212 Bucharest

We have limited seats available, so please RSVP for the event. Meet you there!

If you have a startup, you can start the year by applying to one of Europe’s most important accelerators. Springboard applications for the April programme are open until the 29th of January. If accepted, you will have access to top mentors to help you shape and build your startup and you will get the chance to meet with angel investors and venture capitalists at the end of the programme.

For more info, visit the Springboard website. And also, if you’ve missed this year’s How to Web conference, maybe you’d like to watch the talk held by Jon Bradford, Springboard’s managing director. Jon also participated in the panel about European Incubators.

So have a great year! And act on your wishes, that’s the only way they’ll get the chance of becoming realities!

Watch the full video of the panel for some nice insights from incubator people regarding what incubators are looking for, what sets one incubator apart from others and other interesting insights.