There is a late night food dispensary near King’s Cross who pride themselves both on the greasiness of their chips as well as the redundancy of both words in a beverage they serve called “hot chocolate”. Even so, it is a fine place to write out presentation cue cards in the small hours of the morning.
I can also bear witness to a strange, late night congregation of dozens of DayGlo-clad workmen outside Kings Cross train station in what can I can only surmise is the midnight summit of the country’s most work-averse foremen. Even so, they seem to have enough phantom work to occupy themselves so as not to mind a strange person with cue cards walking back and forth, rehearsing a presentation and ranting about “semantic” this and “learning system” that.
Thus, the preparation was complete for our ominous ‘first up’ slot on the Monday morning introductory presentations. I’ll spare you the details of our presentation, suffice to say it was greeted with attention for the most part. Indeed if you want to see it for yourself (with the actual visual portion of the presentation out of frame) you can do so by clicking here.
Seedcamp itself is a mixture of networking, seminars, mentoring sessions, parties, foods of varying quality and coffee of one, less distinguished quality. The mentoring sessions were particularly intense with feedback ranging from the baffled and skeptical to the thrilled and enthused. Luckily our proportion of the latter outnumbered the former and, with the “are you a platform or a destination” point, formed the bulk of opinion. But the mentoring was much more than just feedback; each session had half a dozen people who had been there and done it. Or funded, advised and cajoled people who had. Every area of experience you could wish to draw on from last years finalists and serial entrepreneurs to VCs and Silicon Valley’s Geeks on a Plane, were there eagre to pass on their opinions, constructive criticisms and passion.
Our key learnings were:
- Being forced to explaining what you do, twenty or thirty times over the course of three days is draining and very useful
- Everyone sees things differently – as long as you’re not deluding yourself you’ll be able to discern the good advice from the bad
- Almost everyone likes to help, all you have to do is ask
(a future post will address, in depth what we learned from the actual three days of seminars and mentor sessions)
Next up: Part 6 – The Finale
Were you part of the mysterious midnight gathering of foremen at Kings Cross? Or maybe a discussion about Seedcamp is more appropriate… either way, get commenting below!
