Why I got kicked out of Seedcamp 2009

http://blog.crowdstorm.co.uk/why-i-got-kicked-out-of-seedcamp-2009

by madmotive • 17 years ago

64 57 17 years ago

blog.crowdstorm.co.uk

daleharvey7• 17 years ago

mentors arent allowed in the final sessions for logistical reasons, the line has to be drawn somewhere as to who can participate and the fund investors seems like an obvious line.

Firstly, I don’t see why mentors are invited at all.

Most to all of the mentors have a vested interest in the startup community thriving, lawyers, marketers, investors and angels who were not part of the main fund but still get direct access to the startup, a phone call isnt going to help until you figure out who you are calling, thats where seedcamp and such events help

jedc6• 17 years ago

According to Saul Klein, mentors are allowed in.

From: http://blog.seedcamp.com/2009/09/awaiting-moderation.html

"One quick factual point – of course mentors are able to attend the judging sessions, several did this year and have done every year. I think what happened yesterday was a pretty innocent misunderstanding – you came into the room mid-pitch and as you’d not been a mentor during the week, I guess that’s why Reshma asked very politely for you to not join the session."

crowdstorm4• 17 years ago

That's completely untrue. AS the pitch ended, I was asked to leave. Reshma asked me "are you an investor in seedcamp?" - I replied "no, do I have to be?". Reshma: "Yes, everybody else in this room has paid to be here"

fallentimes2• 17 years ago

>What I hadn’t seemed to realise (and I’m sure I’m not the only one), is that this fourth day is where angel funds and VC’s pay upwards of £50,000 to attend (no kidding!)

£50,000!? Can anyone else confirm this?

daleharvey7• 17 years ago

its a pretty disingenuous of phrasing it, the panel that sees the final pitches are limited to the people who have invested into seedcamp (or are part of the seedcamp team etc)

and while I am at it they dont pay for "exclusive access" to the startups plans either, there is an entire week at which you can ask the startup any questions you like.

whether having an open or closed investor day is the best solution I certainly dont know, but I am pretty sure the motives arent as insidious as implied

fallentimes2• 17 years ago

So it's like saying Sequoia paid $2 million to come to YCombinator's demo days?

stakent2• 17 years ago

50000 Euro actually.

Source: http://blog.seedcamp.com/2009/09/and-winners-areseedcamp-con...

daleharvey7• 17 years ago

he is referring to the amount the investors pay into the seedcamp fund, not the amount given to teams

plinkplonk4• 17 years ago

From http://uk.techcrunch.com/2009/09/21/seedcampweek09-recession...

"It’s worth pointing out also that the slight ambiguity of past Seedcamp years has now gone. Seedcamp T&Cs now state that a startup cannot go into the programme unless they will take the investment offered. To remind you, that’s 5-10% equity (stakes are flexible) for a 50,000 Euro investment. That’s totally fine. They’ve assembled an awesome network of mentors. It would be a huge waste of everyone’s time if a startup got all that great advice and then effectively threw it back in the faces of the organisers and didn’t take the investment."

WTF?

I read that as saying teams have to take investment if offered? Is that even legal? But why should "I just decided not to take investment" be " throwing it back in the faces of the organizers"?

Shouldn't each party enter a transaction because they think it is a good thing at the point of transacting? This looks like it is possible for a team to be saddled with investors they don't like.

( I could be completely off base. Please correct me. Thanks in advance)

borism2• 17 years ago

from seedcamp site:

"It is important that if you decide to accept the invitation for Seedcamp Week, that you participate with the intention to accept a Seedcamp investment. We have streamlined this week and process to help entrepreneurs and speed up a historically unnecessarily lengthy investment process. As such we believe teams should provide the same good faith and participate with the intention of bringing Seedcamp on board as an investor."

anamax• 17 years ago

How does one learn enough about the value of the seedcamp folks before seedcamp to know whether one would want their investment?

andrewparker2• 17 years ago

I don't know whether or not the Seedcamp T&Cs are legal.

But, they are logical IMHO. You get about 25 hours worth of advice from Saul's high-value network of entrepreneurs and investors. In exchange for this advice, Seedcamp gets an option to invest at a reasonable valuation given the stage of the companies that attend.

Rather than make this option a legal Security in your company, they take you at your word. Seems better than wasting everyone's time with legal fees to actually formalize this option.

FreeRadical• 17 years ago

Not many decent companies have come out of seedcamp. Mybuilder is the only success story.

jedc6• 17 years ago

Zemanta has done okay, getting funded by USV, at least.

adw• 17 years ago

Patients Know Best are going to be massive.

jedc6• 17 years ago

Saul Klein's response is here: http://blog.seedcamp.com/2009/09/awaiting-moderation.html

jeroen• 17 years ago

One big commercial with this content embedded in it:

which Philip Wilkinson then disputes:

"Reshma outright told me that I had to leave the judging session as I had not put money into seedcamp, as had all the others sitting in that room. She asked me to leave before the next pitch began too. Mentors were not allowed in full stop."

What seems somewhat unclear is whether Wilkinson was a mentor or not.

crowdstorm4• 17 years ago

I can tell you for a fact that mentors were not allowed in that final day of presentation - only vc's and angels who had paid a large amount (50k+) into the "seedcamp fund" - whatever that meant. What you have is a project that is pitching as being a transparent ecosystem to help startups - when in fact it's just an investment vehicle milking the goodwill of advisors and mentors to serve the aims of those funds.

c3o4• 17 years ago

The Seedcamp fund is obviously where the money for the EUR 50k investments comes from. It seems logical to me that the people contributing the money are the audience of the final pitching round, upon which they then decide who to fund.

There are multiple other pitches (at the start of Seedcamp week, at investor day in December, etc) that are meant for a more public audience.

jacquesm3• 17 years ago

To put 50K into ANY fund is not a large amount, that's the little league (from an investors point of view).

From a startup point of view it is reasonably serious but for a single investor 50K is small, very small.

If a fund had an entry ticket that low I would definitely look elsewhere, I would be very worried about small time investors coming on board with very little experience and a risk profile that does not belong in the venture capital world, especially not the seed world.

jedc6• 17 years ago

The whole point is that there are a number of solid VCs with small stakes involved.

If it was operated by large investments by a small number of VC's, the model could provide problematic signals. Specifically, if those VC's get early and in-depth looks at these companies and choose NOT to invest, it would be a negative signal to other investors. By spreading this across a large number of VC's, this potential is diluted.

The investors in Seedcamp are well known and respected investors... they're not "small time" with "very little experience". And many of them are long-time seed investors.

jedc6• 17 years ago

Saul says mentors are allowed in:

http://blog.seedcamp.com/2009/09/awaiting-moderation.html

Is it possible that Reshma said what she did as a quick shorthand for letting people in? If she knew all the mentors from 2009 (which I understand wasn't you this year), the only other people allowed in were investors.

In other words, she didn't recognize you as a mentor, so asked if you were an investor (the only other group allowed in). And for people she didn't recognize, she provided a sensible shorthand answer for why they couldn't attend. If you're trying to keep the trains run on time, you don't necessarily have the opportunity for a more complete Q&A.

I don't really have a stake in this argument, but just really like what Saul and Reshma have done with Seedcamp.

zaidf3• 17 years ago

Hey I care less about whether mentors were allowed. I care more about what expectations mentors had from Seedcamp. Were their specifics you guys were promised? If not, why such drama?

crowdstorm4• 17 years ago

Reshma outright told me that I had to leave the judging session as I had not put money into seedcamp, as had all the others sitting in that room. She asked me to leave before the next pitch began too. Mentors were not allowed in full stop.

andrewparker2• 17 years ago

According to Saul's post, you were not a mentor and you said yourself you were not an investor, so I don't understand the misunderstanding... Why were you there?

Is Saul's post true? Where's the ambiguity?

Harj2• 17 years ago

this kind of thing was why i moved from the UK to SV. the british culture is closed, there's a constant search for ways to exclude the majority for the benefit of an 'elite' minority. i found SV had no concept of the elite. could you ever imagine this kind of scene happening at YC?

there have been huge strides in the Uk scene since I left in '07 and it saddens me to see something like this happen.

daleharvey7• 17 years ago

this is exactly what happens at YC, I dont think anyone has demanded that they be allowed to sit in the yc interviews and participate in choosing the yc teams.

I think the confusion is over what the last seedcamp day is about, it isnt demo day, it is the interview process, seedcamp have just made the interview process more transparent and open to help others and not just the teams that get funded, which has obviously introduced some confusion.

Seedcamp holds 2 more open demo days along the same lines of YC, one at the middle and one at the end of the cycle

Harj2• 17 years ago

this is exactly what happens at YC, I dont think anyone has demanded that they be allowed to sit in the yc interviews and participate in choosing the yc teams.

so you're saying that there's no selection process before the companies stand up and pitch on this day? so then, in theory, anyone who wants to do a startup could turn up and pitch? unless that's the case, then the comparison to yc doesn't stand up.

wavesplash• 17 years ago

From what I understand, that's not the YC model at all. YC takes a bet on the team w/ zero prior coaching and the company can turn down YC - no obligation. If the company says yes, then dinners, coaching, etc. commence.

Clean, simple, no misalignment.

It seems that Seedcamp is goofy by front loading the deliverables but won't commit to the investment. That's awkward for the mentors and the companies that are accepted/obliged to take whatever deal is given to them.

That feels like a poor place to negotiate vaulation from, and a major misalignment for the non-investing mentors.

marklittlewood3• 17 years ago

Bleating is easier than building.

It feels to me that there is something strangely self serving about this whole 'debate'.

Seedcamp was great and has done a huge amount to catalyse an early stage ecosystem across Europe. It takes a huge amount of energy to put something like that together. I think Reshma should get some slack here.

Someone got the hump because they were somewhere they shoudln't be then bleats bitterly about it and says their rules should change. If people feel that strongly about it, go and do your own thing and make up your own rules. The entrepreneurial community as a whole should benefit as a result.

numair• 17 years ago

Gripe-blogging seems to be reaching epic levels as of late.

crowdstorm4• 17 years ago

You're missing the point - my post states that it is confused about whether it is an early stage open ecosystem to benefit everyone or actually just a way to benefit a closed network of investors with their "seedcamp" fund.

As a small note, I'm a serial entrepreneur with successful exits and an avid advisor, mentor, and investor in a range of UK startups.

marklittlewood3• 17 years ago

I respect our achievments and don't doubt you meant well by being there although I am not clear what RIGHT you feel you had to attend. If you have such a big problem with what happened, perhaps it would have been better to speak to Resham privately after the event when she was less stressed and had more time to discuss. Instead, you started Tweeting to the world about the injustice and then blog about it thus stirring up a shitstorm totally out of proportion to the incident. By offering people a right to reply when they are actually running an event seems to demonstrate an inflated sense of importance.

I stand by my point that if you feel this is so wrong, and are no doubt an accomplished entrepreneur, then set up an alternative. I would be equally happy to support yours, or other quality activities that support the growth of the entrepreneurial ecosystem. http://thebln.com By making this such an issue, you run the risk of alienating some of the people and organisations that would be inclined to help.

maxniederhofer2• 17 years ago

/popcorn

hoggle• 17 years ago

Uninteresting! Financially oriented issues like these don't bother me at all. Who needs so much money these days when everything (services, hard- and software) is so damn cheap. I don't need anybody investing in our venture. I've got a part time day job which supports me at least up to the RMS standard of living. Who cares about all this bloated so called financial infrastructure. This is just distracting and I don't get it. Create something you love first - if you need some money beyond that for investing in your infrastructure or the likes then do the good old credit card bootstrapping. Should be enough. Don't hire people do it together with some capable people you trust and like to be with. I thought this place would be more about hacking than plain old "dirty" money. P.S. sorry for OT ranting but I couldn't resist, pipe to /dev/null if you please

maxniederhofer2• 17 years ago

To squarely address the concern about transparency: I think the model is highly transparent and has previously been well communicated.

The issue he raises, i.e. that the investors in Seedcamp are the ones choosing the winners on the final day of Seedcamp week, seems a fair arrangement: these investors have invested money in Seedcamp to provide capital for the winning startups. Hence they should have an input on where their money goes.

Note that investors do not pay to have exclusive access to Seedcamp companies on the final day. Seedcamp does not sell its services as a "gatekeeper". Instead, the investors have put equity into Seedcamp and Seedcamp invests in the winning startups. The amounts invested in Seedcamp are about 50K for individuals and 200K for institutions. Everyone is free to invest in Seedcamp (he should talk to them!).

Saul's point that the final day is closed except for the investors and invited mentors/advisers makes sense to me. It's a special day where the winners of Seedcamp are chosen, i.e. Seedcamp makes its investment decision. This needs to be a small session and behind closed doors.

Finally, any mentor or investor is absolutely free to invest in any company accepted to Seedcamp week or part of the final 6 - or indeed those that have been rejected by Seedcamp. You can invest before, during or after Seedcamp week. Everyone is totally free to choose where to put their money. The one exception is that as part of the selection process, Seedcamp does not want companies in Seedcamp week that already know they don't want investment from Seedcamp. Seems sensible.

So I guess this whole thing was just somehow handled badly or he was invited on another day and it wasn't really clear when that was. I am sure no one meant to "kick him out of Seedcamp". Part of the reason Seedcamp thrives is that there is this awesome network of mentors and advisers who aren't investors in Seedcamp and see the non-financial benefit of donating their time - for the ecosystem, for karma, for encouraging entrepreneurs, for improving startups. This is a completely voluntary process and mentors do it because it's fun. I think startups can benefit immensely from the advice, but I also find it hard to believe that any individual advice from a mentor can be measured in a potential equity return to Seedcamp and the Seedcamp investors down the road. The companies that deal best with mentors' advice are the ones that would probably have been successful anyway.

Disclaimer: I unfortunately wasn't at Seedcamp this year, so I also wasn't in the room when this happened. My employer, Atlas Venture, is an investor at Seedcamp. Usual disclaimer on personal opinion and the like.

Why I got kicked out of Seedcamp 2009

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