We recently had the chance to talk with Pablo Villalba from Teambox about how he got started and what advice he has to pass onto new and budding entrepreneurs, better yet, Teambox is now inBloon’s project management solution. The trickle effects of Next Top Startup, but I digress.

So without further ado, the startup feature of : Teambox

How did you come up with the idea for your company?

On one hand, I was looking for something that would tie our team together as a group. We tried some online solutions, excel spreadsheets, blogs and Gantt planning, but nothing worked.

When a client asked to deploy a solution in his own server, I started some real research for a quality open-source project manager. There was not such a thing. So, with a little seed funding, we got started.

The first versions were merely proofs of concept, and were only available on Spanish. However, they taught us important lessons on software development and clients’ needs. All this made a difference for Teambox 2.

Any milestones that you’d like to share?

When Teambox 2 was launched, it was one of a kind. It was the first Twitter-style collaboration tool that grouped team communication and task management.

After exiting the beta period, we set up some pricing plans for users who needed more of what we were doing. So far, we have over 100 paid accounts for the online version and we’re starting to have our first corporate clients. This means a lot of new lessons to learn, and the need to adapt quickly.

We recently acquired an online group chat application in our space, and we have plans to integrate its functionality in Teambox while expanding its offerings. We’re very excited about the possibilities.

Can you tell us a bit about the team?

At the heart of Teambox, we’re very technically minded people with a passion for design.

We had endless discussions over little details, because we care about usability. You can spend months developing the coolest feature on Earth, but unless you make it simple nobody is going to use it.We’re currently 5 programmers and 3 mixed profiles for sales and marketing. We expect to keep things small and simple, scaling our service without a significant increase on staff.

For that, we only work with the best. Our open-source community has been a great talent pool, where people can learn our working style before joining the company.

Any difficulties you’ve experienced in the startup process of your company?

It’s been extremely hard to get funded during the hard times economy has been through. Nevertheless, we were lucky to find the right investors who trusted the startup and team and made it possible.

It has also been very disappointing to see how public grants have more to do with political reasons than real innovation and supporting research and development. Lessons learned from this: Private money is reasonable, and it’s always better to survive with your own money or customers than looking for money from others.

Any advice to pass on to budding entrepreneurs?

Just get started. Entrepreneurship is like a George Lucas film, where you meet your friends during a long journey to an uncertain destination

Back in May we asked Jose Mariano of In Bloon five questions about his startup, being that he entered the Next Top Startup competition we felt it unfair to feature him and not the others, however now with the first edition of the competition well behind us we feel it’s time to publish his answers to our 6 questions.

What is bloon?

It’s an experience by which you will see the Earth shining round and blue on the eyes of the person you love. All in a safe, clean, not requiring strenuous training manner. A flight beyond the blue skies into the starry blackness of the cosmos. And with zero emissions.

Here’s the official definition:

bloon |bəˈloōn|
noun

1. a sustainable, cost-effective, inspirational and elevating device that enables out of this world experiences to her passengers, including unparalleled views of their planet while helping preserve it in the process; to be enjoyed by individuals, families, and other groups worldwide: inside the bloon we were one with the Planet.

2. zero2infinity first project.
verb [ intrans. ]

1. to feel elevated, to raise to a new level, to transform yourdreams into reality: We are about to bloon… ORIGIN Barcelona, early 2009 (originally denoting a previous concept from 2000): from French ballon ‘large ball.’

How did you come up with the idea for bloon?

I grew up surrounded by rockets, telescopes, astronomy and balloons because of my dad’s job. After graduation in 2000 I started to think about the possibilities of Space Tourism and it seemed obvious to me that the view is the core element of the experience and that balloons are the safest means to achieve the altitudes where the view can be enjoyed. I made a publication, then a business plan, technical design, patent and finally a company.

Any milestones that you’d like to share?

We are happy we just received our first piece of investment from Ultramagic, the world’s second largest producer of hot air ballons. Their qualified endorsement along with their expertise in the ballooning market, certification rules and technical acumen bring us closer to our goal.

Can you tell us a bit about the team?

Full time there are 4 Aerospace Engineers (Master’s level), there are many part time collaborators and interns. We are looking for a Chief Technology Officer and a Chief Marketing Officer. Our adivsory board is highly committed and comprises senior leaders in key sectors for our business.

Any difficulties you’ve experienced in the startup process of your company?

The fact that I had worked on the concept for 9 years prior to incorporating the company had me well prepared. One important skill that I wish I had before, and only now I am starting to grasp is the ability to tell the people that just find your concept cool from the ones that can really help you. Generally in the EU there is a lot of talk about innovation and entrepreneurship as the best thing since bread came sliced, however there is very little real action in this topic. I think politics has distorted so much the landscape that it’s hard to find people driven by pure entrepreneurial spirit.

Any advice to pass on to budding entrepreneurs?

Be open minded and get as much high-quality advice as possible but don’t forget you know more about your business than anybody else.

If you have a startup and would like to have it featured, please write to info [at] f3fundit.com

I recently came across a commentary that goes along the lines of VCs know what to do with engineers but engineers don’t know how to deal with VCs. As with all good lists, and entrepreneurs like making lists, it centres around recurring issues for the inventor when dealing with a VC. Issues that are worth refreshing in this author’s opinion:

VC’s don’t sign non disclosure agreements – it affords them protection if they like your ideas, but they want to fund someone else to do them. How do you legislate against that when they have all the financial muscle and contatcts? The answer is it is not just about NDAs and patents but core competencies and brand, so approach with caution.

VC’s are sheep – they will either all fund something or none of them will, so if you have an idea that’s too new and too different you may struggle to find funding. Too right! It’s not just about self promotion, you have to promote your sector and hang a big sign over the exit..

VC’s aren’t technical – they dismiss what they don’t understand, your novel ideas, and they focus on what they know, usually irrelevant marketing terms or growth predictions. If your idea’s too new and different for the expert to understand then you may not get funding. BUT isn’t there much more to achieving commercial growth than building a great product? Have you considered treating your VC as your target customer? Maybe engineers should run the world but they don’t – Deepwater Horizon anyone?

VC’s don’t take risks – VC’s have a reputation as risk takers – they are not. They collect money from rich people to build investment funds. The rich investors take some risk, though their risk is spread across the fund’s investment and is often a tax benefit. Are they solely interested in making blockbusters and sequels? They certainly have a formula and like to stick with it, this is why you need to know A LOT about your investors and choose them carefully. You wouldn’t sell a Ferrarri in a Wal-mart, place your investment just as you place your product and pray you can find some like-minded people with influence and some discretion over the capital in play.

Venture funds are big – If your idea needs a lot of money, then you have a better chance of getting money than an idea that promises the same rate of return for much lower investment. This is because it’s easier for the VC to manage fewer big investments than many smaller ones. True, but most are transparent on deal size, the important thing isn’t how much your company is worth or how much you can spend, but that you spend it well and with purpose.

VCs collude – They price fix by discussing among themselves funding and pricing for candidate start-ups. They will probably between them only fund between two or three companies in an industry – this limits competition and makes success of the few more likely. Absolutely, they hate competition to fund good ideas and the worst thing is they are spoilt, so spoilt they invest next to nothing in enhancing dealflow, how many sponsor or educate & participate in conferences freely? Are they trying to innovate or harvest ideas?

With thanks to Nick Tredennick, Brian Shimamoto and Alan Barrell. To be continued…

Crowd-financing is a great tool to get your project off the ground, but it takes a lot of work and can often keep you from what you should need to, or are working on – the actual business.

There are of course other forms of crowd-financing, such as crowd financed managed seed/investment funds – but the legalities, specifically from the fund management side can get a bit tricky. That aside, company founders have a plethora of other options when it comes to raising capital – however often times these choices are only available to larger firms with positive income streams.

So what’s an entrepreneur to do in this world? Well the good news is that there has recently been some innovation on the field, and it’s a concept that fundamentally crowd-sources start-ups and invests in 100-200 of them per year, so at a minimum, you’re seeing 2investments per week. Compare that to your traditional model of 5-10 annually and you’ll see why this is financially innovative.

So who’s ballsy enough to lead the way on this – it’s a group out of California called Right Side Capital Management. And if you think about it, it makes a lot of sense.

You’re basically taking the roulette table approach, if you spread your money across the table, one will eventually hit, the difference here is, that in this start-up version of the popular Vegas classis, more than one may hit, in fact 2-3-4 may hit, and one of those will hit big – and then there’s your flip.

While there may be problems involved in startup corporate governance, and especially with the way they’ve got their logistics set up, the concept as a whole is absolutely brilliant when it comes to getting money out to those companies that need it.

But how do you go about making investments into 100+ companies, clearly aside from having to increase your deal flow by a substantial amount, you need to employ a very different project valuation methodology rather than the traditional VC model.

From the RSCM website, and specifically the application page, it seems that they are very heavily focusing on the team makeup, and those individuals cash position or personal financial health. Meaning, good credit, probably some money saved up in the bank, or similar – so that you as an entrepreneur can maintain yourself while developing said product and going to market.

After all, an entrepreneur that has no money is one that isn’t going to devote his/her full time to the project. So if we’re right, I bet the assessment criteria would be 1. Team 2. Project 3. Progress.

Any thoughts on this? Let us know.

Suzana Moreira is the founder of moWoza, a social enterprise adopting mobile phone technologies to aid food distribution in Africa.  Suzana has travelled extensively across Africa, and has developed significant insights into sustainability at the Bottom of the Pyramid.  It is from conversations with grass-root communities across Africa that moWoza was born.  Food security, nutrition, literacy, female empowerment and climate change are issues that Suzana is addressing through her work in social enterprise and community development.  Suzana regularly contributes research and articles to academia, NGOs and business institutions on the topics of innovations leapfrogging in emerging markets, social enterprise and sustainability.  Prior to setting up moWoza, Suzana worked on several large infrastructure development programmes in Europe and in the manufacturing industry in South Africa.  Suzana holds a MBA from the Imperial College London Business School.

BY SUZANA MOREIRA

On March 14th, the NY Times reported that the Washington Post was not using Twitter, YouTube or Foursquare to map road blockages and resource availability during the disruptive snow storm, but rather Ushahidi, an IT platform built in Kenya.  Because Ushahidi originated in crisis from a bedroom, no one tried to patent and monopolize it.  Because Kenya is poor, with computer systems out of the reach for many, Ushahidi made its system work on cellphones.  Because Ushahidi had no venture-capital backing, it used open-source software and was thus free to let others remix its tool for new projects.”  Ushahidi today is used all around the world in crisis and crowd situations.

Ushahidi, is an African start-up that has attracted the world’s attention, likewise, M-Pesa, African inspired Kiva and Integr8 are world renowned business models that were conceived in Africa and have overcome the usual African challenges of poverty, corruption and inadequate policies.  Each of these challenges should be viewed as creative catalysts in the knowledge that the resulting model will be at least innovative and at most disruptive.  It is the processes and systems that are adopted to overcome these challenges that turn the African start-up into the success stories we hear about in the developed world.

Africa is becoming a business destination and many start-ups are positioning themselves to become part of this growing business trend.  As Vijay Mahajan points out in ‘Africa Rising’, 300 million of the 900 million consumers are tirelessly working their way out of extreme poverty to become lower middle class citizens. The World Bank says the percentage of Africans living on $1.25 a day or less dropped from 59% to 51% from 1996 to 2005 and has decreased further since.  The Development Policy Forum (DPF) estimates that by mid-century, the greatest population concentration will be in neither China nor India but in sub-Saharan Africa. The region is expected to gain a billion inhabitants – from 900 million today to 1.8 billion in 2050. The urban population alone will triple from 300 million to over a billion in 2050.  Africa offers huge business potential in the upcoming years.

The principles of doing business in Africa are the same as doing business in any developed country in the world.  Emphasis however lies on conducting extensive due diligence, understanding that decisions take time and that access to capital is best sought internationally.  Depending on the scale and nature of the business, corruption can be an issue to be offset but as most Africans will attest to – there are options and an entrepreneur can proceed without being involved in these somewhat complicated and thwarting business practices.

Although Africa is not as connected offering the hi-tech wizardry of the developed world, Africans are overcoming electricity shortages and lack of internet connections by applying unique mobile phone technologies that deliver services which range from connecting farmers to agricultural cooperatives to mobile phone education aimed at youth, and, interestingly corporate companies are rolling out mobile phone training programmes for their staff.  As with any start-up, on the ground market research will expose countless opportunities.

Success in many African countries is in engaging and developing relationships with village elders or with church and health leaders in particular communities.  These are the people who can endorse the offering that you are taking to market.  This is familiar to the business ways of the developed world, where business success is associated with brand leaders and strong sponsors.  Village and community leaders are also useful in negotiating premises, recommending resources and providing the bridge between a start-up and the local authorities.

Perhaps most challenging in Africa, depending on the industry, is infrastructure capacity.  Whereby e-commerce and sophisticated distribution models are taken for granted in the developed world, logistics and distribution can turn the viability of a great start-up concept into a failure.  Start-ups need to carefully analyse supply chain complexities and the constraints of accessing marketplaces.

Many innovative start-ups are piloting there innovative technologies in Africa.  moWoza is a social endeavour that is emblematic of a new generation of African start-ups that have recognised the pressing need for transformation and empowerment amongst the people of Africa.   Initially operating between South Africa and Mozambique, moWoza, is servicing the low income economic migrant who regularly remits goods back to their dependants in the home country.

Most African migrant workers are extremely price sensitive and prefer to shop in South Africa where there exists a larger competitively priced product selection than in their home countries.  However, sending these goods across borders is costly and by relying on informal distributors to transport the goods across the South African borders to their home countries they are risking confiscation at the border crossing, extremely late deliveries and the dependant receiving damaged goods.

moWoza provides a unique mobile phone powered cash-to-goods, end –to-end service that guarantees the migrant worker that the dependant will receive the goods in the dispatched condition on a confirmed date. By committing the time and resources to conduct extensive market research across various African countries, forming focus groups and understanding what situations migrant workers faced, moWoza was able to develop a value proposition that delivers a superior offering to its target market.

Illiteracy and malnutrition are high on moWoza’s agenda.  The World Bank has set targets to reduce illiteracy and relapse into illiteracy – this has spurred moWoza, whose low-income migrant target market are predominantly illiterate, to design and deliver literacy programmes through its agent network.   In addition, most Mozambican migrants in South Africa originate from rural areas where malnutrition amongst children is acute.  By offering food packages that conform to the World Health Organisation basic food basket standards, moWoza is ensuring that its economic migrant workers’ dependants are consuming nutritional food.

There are many possibilities and with a good service offering, it is only a matter time before moWoza will pursue secondary revenue streams. Community leaders are opening doors and suggesting other services that can be commercialised.  This is Africa.  A new era has begun, and for start-ups that are willing to commit themselves to the development of Africa there are endless opportunities.

BY JACEK GREBSKI

This may be largely dependent on industry but, if you have the possibility to actually test out a concept before going into full scale business plan writing, development, quitting your job, do so.

Clearly if you hold in your possession intellectual property (IP) that will cost a few hundred grand to develop, then by all means start writing that business plan, get that executive summary ready, and go put a team together, but in the event your idea is something niche, has a specific market segment, is a B2C business then start testing the waters.

The best way to go about doing this, is to simply involve yourself in the community for your business subject online, whatever it is. We, for example at f3fundit.com, started looking around the startup scene here in Europe, and we noticed that there was nothing that really brought it together, there was an old expired EU initiative that was now defunct, there were tons of resources, but they were hard to find. Simply put we thought there may be a market for a site that brings all this info together, so we thought about putting up a database of all relevant information, a Wiki of sorts, but that’s just boring. At this time, I was working on another project, and started collecting information and writing basic articles for my own – now defunct – blog, that for lack of time, just never saw the light of day.

Put one and two together, and the next thing that we know we’ve got a blog, with some info on it in the resource area. Now time to see if this thing is going to even make an internet blip – seems it did, this site’s been growing, and best of all organically, no marketing, no adwords, so now we’re actually working on a few things behind the scenes that should bring added value to our visitors and likewise the European Entrepreneurship scene.

What I’m getting here at is, it costs us a total of what, a domain name, and hosting that we already had to see if there was any viability behind f3fundit.com. And there evidently seems there is – then I recall another project I was a part of back in 2002, no market research, no feelers sent out, the idea was launch now because someone’s going to do what we’re doing. The thing was rushed out the door, we ordered volumes of the stuff that just sat in inventory for god knows how long, and could have saved a lot of money and made a lot more money later by not learning form our mistakes and instead preparing ourselves adequately.

Remember, entrepreneurship is not just about the idea, it’s also about “smart” execution, an intelligent strategy where you, your team, and your product are ready to launch, and I mean truly ready to launch.

Remember the saying 1st impressions last a lifetime, the same more or less holds true for products. If you launch something which will be received as crap,your company will be seen as just that. Image may not be everything, but it’s a lot. Test the waters before you hop in, make sure that there exists a need before you start planning for the whole thing.

Thoughts?

How do you start a Biotech Company? Good question, for the most part it’s like anything else, you have a good idea, you write a business plan using a well defined guide, and then proceed to get things off the ground.

But we’ll let someone explain it better than we could, this podcast comes from Absolute Science and Welltopia.com where Mignon Fogarty interviews her husband Patrick Fogarty a post-doc at Stanford who in the 90’s started his own Biotech Firm with next to no knowledge of business. However you’ll notice a lot of the same trends we’ve been discussing here, engaging executive summary, a hook for the VC, scalability, market size and identification, thus further pinning the belief that a majority of entrepreneurial concepts are transferable between industries.

->> Listen to the podcast <<-

Biotech is dead, long live biotech.

The Wall Street Journal claimed in 2009 that it was a dire time for the biotech industry. New firms had little cash, and the outlook was grim indeed, then come January 2010 and we see a report indicating that the industry raised a record breaking $55.8 bn, yes billion, despite unfriendly capital markets. Why, we’ll cover that later on today but for now, we’d like to introduce you to the Invisible Revolution of Biotechnology.

It’s no big surprise that what you tend to see on a daily basis in the realm of startup blogs, sites and otherwise material focuses on the mobile / the web / and new tech, this is simply due to the fact that these types of products are the most readily accessible by the consumer and therefore have the most mass media appeal.

Notwithstanding this invisible technological revolution is taking place at the same time as the ordinary tech one we see, hear about feel and touch on a daily basis; yet we deal with the invisible as well, where it affects us in ways unseen, it makes our lives better, makes us live longer, and helps not only us, but the environment.

This is Biotechnology. It’s unlike most anything else, not only because it’s “under the hood” of the media spotlight, nor because it can be anything from a geno-engineered microbe to a new form of high ethanol producing crops. It’s in its business model. You see, the web startup, or the software company can get a product to the shelf fairly quickly, with the web, if you have a good idea and some chips time to market can be as little as a few months if that, with biotech however, product development can take years, and oftentimes it will be a decade or more before the firm sees its first customer.

The biotech startup model is a complexly woven web which more than deserves its own analysis, and at the same time, and from the point of view of startup aficionados as ourselves it’s something breathtakingly beautiful.

So in the event you’re familiar with the industry, have a watch and enjoy, and if not, then welcome to the world which is Biotechnology. And a big thanks to the people at Europa Bio for putting this video together.