Agenda: Ukraine Tech Gem conference

With almost 10,000 km behind us, our big and friendly group – this time it's 25 people from 13 teams – successfully landed at San Francisco airport. Taking the first breath you can tell that the ocean is close by. The gusty wind refreshes a body tired after a long flight and queues at passport control. However, not everyone can yet sense that it's the wind of change.

There is almost no time to look around. Ukraine Tech Gem conference at Hyatt Regency San Francisco is ahead, which means – a lot of useful information and new contacts. The time has come to meet potential clients, mentors and investors, give out your business cards and test out your pitches, previously prepared in Kyiv, on American audience. No buildup and no postponing «for later». Full speed ahead!

Венчурные капиталисты не привыкли рисковать, особенно, если дело касается Европы. Они изначально хотят видеть доходы и рабочий продукт.

Об этом шла речь на одной из панелей, которая проходила в рамках конференции StartupIstanbul в Стамбуле, Турция.

Бизнес-акселератор Happy Farm совместно с венчурной инвестиционной компанией Imperious Group запустил акселерационную программу для ИТ-стартапов pre-seed стадии.

Для участия в программе было отобрано 11 стартап-команд, 9 из них - из Украины, одна из Азербайджана, одна из Белоруссии

Бизнес-акселератор Happy Farm совместно с новым партнером, венчурной инвестиционной компанией Imperious Group открывает набор на новый цикл акселерационной программы для ИТ-стартапов pre-seed стадии из стран СНГ, Европы и Азии.

LION FARM is an 6 week long acceleration program for pre-seed IT startups organized by Imperius Group venture fund and Happy Farm business accelerator.

LION FARM is:

• An individual development program for your startup project – from verification to entering the US market strategy

• Workshops, coach sessions, individual consultations by entrepreneurship and venture gurus

• 6 weeks of intensive and interactive work

• 80 hours working with 30 “rockstar” mentors from Europe and the US

• Internship at the Silicon Valley

• Investments of 30k or more

After breakfast we drove to San Mateo to meet Vitaly Golomb at the Keen offices. He introduced himself and explained what Keen does: it is the first cloud-based services that allow companies to build and deploy an e-commerce driven web presence.

He talked about raising angel and seed investments and then raising Series A. He also talked a bit about investments and funds in Europe and about the lack of angel investments and seed investments.

On Day 4 we drive down to San Mateo where will have our next two meetings. 

The first meeting is with Pavel Cherkashin, one of the leading business angels and early-stage private investors in Russia. In the past he has started and exited three companies in Russia: Actis Systems, a web design company; AdWatch, an online ad agency and Sputnik Labs, a provider of CRM in Russia. He also worked as a general manager for Adobe Systems, Siebel Systems and Microsoft Online Services.

On day three, we drove down to the famous Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, well known for its concentration of venture capital companies. We were there to meet Jim Smith, General Partner at Mohr Davidow, an early stage VC fund. MD does seed, series A and series B investments, sometimes also later rounds. They are especially interested in consumer and enterprise software.

We met for breakfast at Le Boulange, a very nice place, and after breakfast we drove to Happy Farm Chairman of the Board Igor Shoifot's office for a meeting with Julian Zegelman. Julian is a lawyer and partner at Velton Zegelman. He works with startups and investors (both venture investors and angel investors). He talked about all the legal issues around registering a company in the United States.  He explained where you can set up your company and what the differences are. He also took some time to answer the questions the investors had.

The first day of our Business Safari tour for investors! There was a short welcome meeting the day before, we also bought phone numbers and had a dinner in a Japanese restaurant. But Monday morning we had the first meeting of the tour.