Finally! The moment all Startup Challenge participants have been waiting for. We had tens of applicants who have sent us their elevator pitch and business description till the 20th of October and there was a lot of pondering and analyzing on our side ever since then. Luckily we had an awesome jury to help us choose the 10 finalists of the finalists. These 10 finalists will get Read on →
Past articles
Here are the 10 lucky Startup Challenge finalists
Eastern Europe’s Got Web Talent!
Web innovation is global nowadays. It has never been easier for web innovators and entrepreneurs all over the world to get out in the open. I would dare say that nowadays web truly is a global language. However, Eastern Europe’s focus on this area is unexpectedly low and very few EE startups are launched eevery year. Nevertheless, the few international success stories seem to be proving that inspite of this small numbers of daring EE entrepreneurs, Eastern Europe’s got the web talent it needs.
The Slovenian Httpool, the Estonian Skype, the Romanian Interakt and Gecad, the Czech NetBeans and GoodData are all good examples of Eastern Europe’s web know-how. Zemanta, Codility, Erply, UberVU, Brainient are also a wonderful proof of Eastern Europe’s drive and energy.
According to Reshma Sohoni, CEO Seedcamp the EE entrepreneurs are: “Very talented from a technical standpoint. I find Eastern Europe’s entrepreneurs really driven and dream big. Many of them display the sense of urgency that is really critical for a startup entrepreneur to have“.
As a matter of fact this is exactly what the Seedcamp competition is all about. Seedcamp believes that Europe has the talent, the role models, and the capital founders it needs to succeed. That’s why Seedcamp is trying and, based on the success stories, it is also succeeding to empower web entrepreneurs all over Europe, including EE.
So, Eastern Europe has got the energy, the skills and the opportunities to make web things happen. But it no longer has any excuses.
According to Loic Le Meur, founder and CEO of Seesmic.com and LeWeb Europe tech event, “the fact that the largest investor in Facebook this year is a Russian company says a lot about the Internet industry in eastern europe, I am expecting entrepreneurs from the east to build more international leaders very soon“.
Alex van Someren, UK IT Entrepreneur, states the exactly main idea: “I’ve met a lot of exciting and imaginative entrepreneurs and technology businesses from Eastern Europe recently, and I think How to Web looks like a great opportunity to meet and spend time with even more of them!“.
So… do you speak web? Then, what are you waiting for?
GoodData – $7 mil funding for Czech start-up
GoodData is a data analytics web solution, founded in the Czech Republic in 2007 by the serial entrepreneur Roman Stanek, which raised a total of $7 million funding up to the moment. If GoodData will be successful, this will mean the disruption of a billion dollar market: the data analytics.
Moving business intelligence and data analytics to the cloud
GoodData is a software-as-a-service complete business intelligence application, delivering a reporting tool, an on-demand analytics platform and a place to collaborate around data, all at the same time. In other words, GoodData is meant to be a new way of interacting with business data, helping business owners handle the day by day challenges of reporting and analysing business data.
From the beginning, GoodData has intended to do for dashboarding and data analytics what Amazon Web Services does for storage and compute resources. In other words, Stanek, who previously founded and sold NetBeans Inc. and Systinet Inc., is now aiming at the multi-billion dollar market of data analytics dominated by big players like SAP, IBM and Oracle. In comparison to the expensive solutions that these companies have to offer, GoodData is offered for free for the moment and it will probably come up with a usage fee in the near future, which will anyway be much lower that those of their competitors.
GoodData boasts to keeping their fixed costs down to a mininum as the application is using cloud computing entirely and running on Amazon web services.
Roman’s track record = a guarantee for GoodData’s success
GoodData raised a total of $2 million seed funding in july 2008 from Esther Dyson (chairman of EDVenture Holdings, third time investing in Roman Stanek’s businesses), Tim O’Reilly (CEO of O’Reilly Media) and Windcrest Partners. The business has closed a second round of financing of $2.5 million from Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, OATV and General Catalyst in april 2009 and a Series C funding of another $2.5 million from Andreessen Horowitz (a $300 million venture fund that was launched on July 2009) General Catalyst Partners and other undisclosed investors in october 2009. The Czech company has now raised a total of $7 million in capital.
The success GoodData has had with investors is in no way a surprise. Roman Stanek is what we could call “highly fundable” due to his serial entrepreneurship track record. Stanek sold NetBeans to Sun for $10 million and Systinet to Mercury Interactive/HP for $105 million.
NetBeans – bringing together 800 000 developers
NetBeans, the open-source Java IDE, was started in Prague in 1996 under the guidance of the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics at Charles University. It was later on bought by Sun Microsystems for $10 million and gradually turned into the successful open-source integrated development environment and community.
From Xelfi to NetBeans
NetBeans was originally called Xelfi and it started as a student project in the Czech Republic in 1996. Xelfi was the first Java IDE (Integrated Development Environment) written in Java a
nd it was released in 1997. The serial entrepreneur Roman Stanek discovered Xelfi while he was looking for a good idea to invest in.
In 1999, Sun Microsystems was searching for better Java development tools, became interested in buying NetBeans and bought NetBeans from Stanek for $10 million to Sun.
In June 2000, NetBeans became the current open-source IDE netbeans.org. Today NetBeans IDE is an open-soruce project providing support for several languages (PHP, JavaFX, C/C++, JavaScript, etc.) and frameworks, with over 18 million downloads of the NetBeans IDE to date and a community of over 800 000 participating developers.