All posts by Banque du Liban Accelerate

Vitaly Golomb – CCC Fund – USA

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Vitaly-Golomb

Vitaly Golomb
Founding Partner, CCC Fund
San Francisco Bay Area, USA

Ukrainian-born Vitaly Golomb is a Silicon Valley-bred entrepreneur and investor. He is an award-winning designer who got his early start at 13, as an intern first, and then as the youngest employee in the history of Kinko’s. He is the founder and CEO of PrintMo.co, the local print marketplace. Vitaly is also a General Partner at CCC Fund, a startup ecosystem builder, venture capital fund focused on emerging startups in EMEA, and bridge to Silicon Valley.

During the Dot Com boom, Vitaly ran the User Interface design team at a fast-growing startup. He later founded a design and marketing firm that quickly grew to three offices, won several awards, and landed projects with numerous large brands. Vitaly holds a B.A. in Computer and Video Imaging from Cogswell College. He has guest lectured on design and the startup economy at Stanford and UC Berkeley and other universities. He is a mentor at 500 Startups, Happy Farm, ZIP, Tech Peaks, Etohum, and Innovation Nest accelerators. He’s also a keynote speaker on startups, design, and angel/venture capital in over 15 countries each year. Vitaly’s book “Accelerated Startup” coming out in 2015 and the 1st chapter is available to download.

Vitaly speaks and mentors on design, product, strategy, growth, and fundraising.  One of his popular topics is Design Driven Development in which he covers the principles of good design. He explains how a good product has to be both functional and aesthetic, how the interface is an important aspect in the design, how to design with the user in mind, etc. He also discusses how to create value with your products by solving problems as well as what to consider with hiring managers for your team. Other topics Vitaly speaks about are how to build startups, startup ecosystems and what their trends and business models are like. He also covers the topics of mobile commerce covering the trends, user experience, and marketing strategies.

As a consultant, Vitaly works closely with investors to help them build strong portfolios and improve their performance through private mentoring sessions on various topics, as well as technical due diligence, managed distanced outsource teams and more.  He also consults early stage startups from idea to IPO by advising them in many areas that include, but aren’t limited to product positioning, overall user experience, branding and visual design, funding strategies, etc.

Vitaly’s career and experience as an entrepreneur, investor and designer is an inspiration to anyone who want to make a difference. His in-depth knowledge and analysis of the startup industry is of great value to any entrepreneur and aspiring innovator.

Uber: The disruptive $17 billion idea

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UBER

In the past, when a person needed to get somewhere with a cab, the process was a nightmare. You either called a cab, frustratingly attempted to give the driver directions and then waited for the car to arrive; or you stood on the side of the road, in the heat, rain, or snow, and hoped a vacant cab would pass by and stop for you.  You had to make sure you were carrying enough cash on you to pay the fare, and not a large note, just in case the driver wasn’t carrying enough change.

When Garrett Camp and Travis Kalanick were hanging out in Paris on a cold winter night late in 2008, both entrepreneurs were discussing what was next for them.  Garret had just sold StumbleUpon to eBay and Travis had recently sold Red Swoosh to Akamai. Garrett had had enough of the frustrating cab experience and the horrible taxi problem in San Francisco and this lead them to discuss a limo timeshare service – the two of them splitting the costs of a driver, a car and a parking spot in a garage alone with an iPhone app.

A couple of months later the prototype was coming along and a beta version was soon released. The beta version was invite only which Garret and Travis started sharing with their friends. Those who tried it the app, loved it and told their friends about it who requested invites as well. On 31st May 2010, Uber launched in San Francisco and that’s when Uber started growing to a private car service currently available in over 200 cities in more than 40 countries, valued at $17 billion, and perceived as a disruptive innovation that has revolutionized ridesharing globally.

The main key to Uber’s success is that it enhanced consumer experience by reinventing the entire experience of getting private transportation.  The app is integrated with Google maps on, which you can pinpoint your location, see where the nearest cabs are, and watch as the cab gets closer to you.  Additionally, you can see the driver’s information, which also includes ratings from previous passengers. The car arrives within minutes so you end up waiting less and once you reach your destination, the app charges your credit card so you don’t have to carry cash on you.  The result? A great product that provides a real seamless solution to the millions of people frustrated with the old process of getting a cab.

Because Uber enhanced the entire experience and not just one element, they created a deep change in the industry, which sparked word of mouth and press coverage. The cab riders became Uber’s advocates, who shared their experience with their friends and on social media, leading to a growth of passionate customers.

Another contributing factor to Uber’s success is that they acknowledged that if they were to expand in other cities, they required local efforts tailored to each new location. Team launchers, described as a SEAL team, are responsible to get business running in new cities by being logistically savvy, getting a grasp of the city’s transportation ecosystem and using marketing creativity to encourage user adoption and market penetration.  They often operationalize a new Uber city within 8 weeks and then recruit a team of local talented staff to run the business locally and sustain long-term growth. The company supports the new launches by utilizing industry partnerships, local events, and more; fueling word of mouth and local growth.

Uber has truly disrupted and revolutionized the ridesharing experience and has potential of doing so much more in the future to sustain its growth.  How this company reinvented an experience that has been there for so long is a great example for startups and entrepreneurs to gain from. It is proof that every industry has room for growth and innovation, regardless of how old it is.

Sridhar Solur – Next Gen Computing, HP – USA

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Sridhar-Solur

Sridhar Solur
Managing Director Next Gen Computing, HP
Palo Alto, California

Serial intrapreneur and business leader Sridhar Solur has a consistent track record of incubating, building, growing and managing new businesses in large organizations with a worldwide capacity. He is a technologist and a product creator with a razor sharp focus on user experience. Lover of all things mobile, Sridhar has significant international experience having lived and worked in various environments. As founding partner of HP’s Incubator he enables early stage companies/startups to work with HP and he has led the strategy, creation and implementation of new ventures, solutions and Cloud services. Sridhar is also responsible for all contextual services integration for existing products.

Sridhar also heads the Next Gen computing initiative at HP that includes IOT and Wearables, which he founded while leading the creation and launch of the first HP wearable, the MB Chronowing smartwatch. It goes on sale this Friday exclusively on Gilt for the first month.  The watch was designed in collaboration with Michael Bastian and looks like a traditional yet fashionable accessory rather than a futuristic watch.

The design of the MB Chronowing smartwatch combines aesthetic beauty with accessibility, a great medium for the style conscious and tech savvy consumer. The design has the potential to compete with the traditional watch industry and not just the smartwatches on the market today. It appeals to the consumer who wants a nice, stylish, traditional watch with the essential notifications and alerts, rather than a device that packs many features.

The beautiful water resistant smartwatch includes 3 wristbands, has a battery life of 7 days and works with both iOS and Android phones.  It allows you to read emails or texts and receive updates on stocks, sports, weather and more. Aside from that, the MB Chronowing allows you to control music and sync with a calendar or alarm.

Unlike what most people expect from smartwatches, the MB Chronowing does not come with a touchscreen and instead has a black and white LCD including a clock dial. The side of the phone has 3 buttons to navigate the watch’s menus including a retro-like built-in light.

The MB Chronowing is a product created for the non-geeks, a market that has yet to be tapped into and the HP Michael Bastian collaboration led by Sridhar is one to keep an eye on!

Gary Stewart – Wayra – UK

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gary-stewart

Gary Stewart
Director, Wayra
London, UL

Gary Stewart is the Director of Wayra UK and founder of nuroa.es, a Barcelona-based startup. He graduated magna cum laude from Yale University and was the executive editor of The Yale Journal at the university’s Law School before working at Simpson Thatcher & Bartlett in London, and Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer in Spain.

Like most entrepreneurs, Gary never thought he would be where he is today.  While attending Yale, he thought he would become a litigator for a company similar to Microsoft, however, he later decided he didn’t want to live in the U.S. anymore. Gary settled in London where he worked in Mergers and Acquisitions at Simpson Thatcher & Bartlett before moving to Madrid.  The turning point for him came 4 years after his move; when he was told the terms of his contract would have to change in ways he wasn’t comfortable with. It was then that Gary decided to become an entrepreneur.

However, he did not instantly succeed in his endeavors. His first creation was an offline real estate company, which flopped.  Determined to make his mark, Gary later founded nuroa.es, an online property search company where he stayed for 5 years, and raised £4 Million in funding.  He was also an associate professor and the entrepreneur-in-residence at IE Business School. Gary learned a lot from this position, as he spent two years redesigning and re-launching IE Business School‘s accelerator for MBA students. After that, he joined the British branch of Telefónica’s start up accelerator, Wayra. Since then, he’s been helping entrepreneurs grow and build successful businesses by providing them with a physical working space, funding, and resources to mentors, investors, and all round support. They even fly their entrepreneurs to Silicon Valley to learn from the world’s largest tech hub.

Gary Stewart’s passion for entrepreneurship perseverance have led him to the core of his business. Today, he seeds and mentors promising startups to get them to pitch in front of British investor panels thus gaining exposure, reputation, and a chance to get larger funding.

 

Scott Miller – Dragon Innovation – USA

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Scott-Miller

Scott Miller
Co-Founder & CEO, Dragon Innovation
San Francisco, USA

Scott Miller, Co-Founder and CEO of Dragon Innovation, has been fascinated with hardware since he was old enough to hold a screwdriver. He received his Bachelors from Dartmouth and Masters from MIT. Scott has worked on a robotic tuna fish, life size robotic dinosaurs for Disney Imagineering, and robotic baby dolls with Hasbro before joining iRobot where he was responsible for leading the Roomba team to scale the functional prototype to high volume production of the first 3 million units. Since founding Dragon Innovation, Scott has enjoyed working with hundreds of companies to provide expertise from DFM to factory selection, through project management and sustained engineering.

Scott picked up the skills and connections that truly affected his career during his 10 years at iRobot working his way up to Vice President. His time working with the team that built the functional prototype of a robotic vacuum called the Roomba at iRobot played a vital role in his career. Scott was dealing with the manufacturing and supply process, at first flying back and forth to Hong Kong and later setting up an office there to run things.

His experience at iRobot led him to start Dragon Innovation along with Herman Pang, also an iRobot veteran who previously worked with Scott in Hong Kong.  Using the knowledge and experiences gained with the Roomba, Dragon Innovation works as a consultant to help hardware setups get their functional prototype to product shelves at the right cost, on quality, and on schedule a lot more efficiently.  Since its founding, Dragon Innovation has worked with an impressive list of hardware startup clients such as Pebble, Rethink Robotics, FormLabs, and several more.

With Dragon Innovation, Scott has simplified the journey for product designers by providing them with a route to get from powerful ideas to hitting the shelves paving the way for innovative hardware startups to exist.

Ivan Hernandez – The Digital Loop – Poland

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ivan_hernandez

Ivan Hernandez 
Co-Founder, The Digital Loop 
Warsaw, Poland

Ivan Hernandez is a Digital Marketing Strategist and Business Development Consultant to early stage startups with several years of international experience in strategic consulting, advertising, marketing and media sectors. He is the Co-Founder of The Digital Loop, an organization that provides advisory services in the areas of Digital Marketing and Strategy.

Additionally, Ivan co-hosts The Digital Loop weekly video series about the opportunities and challenges of the digital era. He has recently joined D-RAFT, to lead the company’s Digital Commerce program. D-RAFT is a new corporate accelerator focused on helping both corporations and startups in the CEE region grow.

Ivan is an internationally recognized keynote speaker. He mainly speaks to organizations and in conferences about the impact that digital technologies, mobile and social media can have on business performance. He also speaks of other topics related to Innovation, Collaboration and Business Development.

In love with disruptive ideas, Ivan consults early stage startups to make them change the way they think about their business, industry and competitors. He strongly encourages them to be curious, experiment and start doing things differently.

The world is rapidly changing and companies have to embrace and react swiftly. Ivan believes that adaptation is essential for companies to survive. He encourages them to be empathetic and put themselves in the user’s shoes, to understand their behavior and add value to them through human-centered designs.

Ivan’s immeasurable expertise has helped many organizations understand how the digital era impacts their business. This prepares clients for the challenges they might face and pushes them to grasp the opportunities they find, moving up to that next step.

Charlie Graham-Brown – Switzerland – Seedstars

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Charlie-Graham-Brown

Charlie Graham-Brown
CFO, Seedstars World
Geneva, Switzerland

Seedstars World CFO, Charlie Graham-Brown, has six years of investment and analytical investment experience in innovative financial institutions primarily focused on developing countries.  He studied at The University of Leeds (UK) with a year at the Georgia Institute of Technology (USA), where he secured a Master of Engineering First Class Honors degree. He later got an MBA at the  Collège des Ingénieurs in Paris then became a CFA charter holder. Now working at Seedstars World, Charlie manages business development and the investment fund.

Seedstars, the parent venture firm, is a business development and investment fund management for startups and investors focused on emerging markets. They wanted to identity startups in emerging markets that they could invest in and started the Seedstars World Competition, as a method to scout out startups from around the world.

Seedstars World is a global startup competition being held in 35 emerging cities around the world this year, and is crucial since they also offer startups from different areas exposure to European and U.S. investors. It is a great way for venture capitalists to scout for potential investments from emerging markets. The 35 winning startups will make it to the global competition in Geneva, Switzerland where they will spend 3 days at a workshop to work on their pitch, then compete for a $500k investment from Seedstars.

The final showdown happens in front of a panel of European investors, which earned last year’s laureates an additional $6M investment.

Seedstars has truly been uplifting startups in emerging markets, providing them with global exposure, the opportunity to find financiers on a global scale, and a real chance to compete in much larger markets. For the entrepreneurs, the risks are a lot higher, but so are the potential rewards!

All in all, Charlie has spent most of his post-academic life empowering the global startup ecosystem and is far from done. Seedstars is expanding every year and has just made its way into Lebanon for the first time.

 

Rand Hindi – Snips – France

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Rand-Hindi

Rand Hindi
Founder & CEO of Snips
Paris, France

The founder and CEO of Snips, Rand Hindi, started coding at the age of 10, founded his first startup and the age of 14, created a web development agency at 15, and all before starting his PhD at the age of 21!

He is an entrepreneur, bioinformatician and algorithm architect who founded Snips, specializing in predictive modeling for smart cities. Rand is most particularly interested and passionate about how data can make city life more efficient. His vision is to manage the cities with fast-growing populations by predicting what will happen. Existing cities are unable to handle the growing population because they do not have the capacity to add more public transportation or space, which could negatively impact the inhabitants.

Snips collects and analyzes all the data a city and its population produce. The collected data could be anything you could think of – parking spots, crimes, flows in public transportation, traffic jams, waste management, energy consumption, and so forth. This huge amount of data is collected in real time and analyzed in real time offering solutions. The aim is for the city to learn from what its citizens are doing and adapt to them, thus ensuring they are not constrained and could get a better quality of life not matter how much the density y increases.

For example, to predict crime, Rand’s approach is not to simply look at historical data since crime patterns change.  His approach is to also look at other factors, such as what caused the crimes. As a result, this allows the police to dispatch in places where crimes are more likely to happen and prevent the crime from occurring, hence predictive policing.

Another example, already in use in Paris, is the flow in public transportation. In partnership with the French National Railway SNCF, Snips released an app called Tranquilien that provides commuters an indication of how crowded different trains will be up to 3 days in advance. In other words, if you want to take the train, you can check the app for when is the best time to find seats and take that option instead of taking a train where you will be standing and squeezed between other commuters. The information is gathered from an analysis that factors the weather information, historical passenger counts, if any major events are taking place, and real-time check-ins from the app users. As a result, the app diffuses the load of commuters and increases the efficiency of the railway network.

What Rand would ultimately like to accomplish is what he calls “Algorithmic Urbanism,” a new way to design cities integrating all the predictions together and modeling an entire city and how it interacts with its citizens. A real solution to how cities can sustain population growth and dramatically increase their quality of life!

Seedstars World Coming to Lebanon For The First Time

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Seedstars

Seedstars World is an exclusive worldwide startup competition traveling to over 30 cities in 2014 and taking place in Beirut on November 20-21.

The competition aims at finding the best young entrepreneurs in emerging and fast-growing startup scenes such as Lebanon.  The pitching event is exclusively sponsored by Banque du Liban and hosted by Lebanon’s first international startup conference, Banque du Liban Accelerate 2014. The bank has been supporting startups in Lebanon for the past couple of years, providing them with a boost and turning Beirut into a strategic hub for them.

Up to 50 startups will be selected to participate in the competition. Each one will have an exhibition stand at the conference, and will conduct a 1 Minute Lightning Round Pitch on the main stage on November 20.  The top 10 startups will then enter the Finalists Round on November 21, from which the winner will be selected.

The winning startup will be crowned “Seedstars Beirut Regional Winner“ and flown to Geneva, Switzerland for a 3-day boot camp and the Seedstars Final Event. They will represent Lebanon and compete for the prestigious title of “Seedstars World Best Startup”, which will grant them a $500,000 investment as well as the opportunity to pitch in front of a wide panel of European investors. Last year’s winner was able to raise $6M thanks to this final pitch.The winner will also receive $20,000 worth of hosting services from Softlayer and $60,000 worth of prizes from our global partners. The 2nd and 3rd runners-up will get $50,000 worth of prizes.

The 50 competing startups will receive regional media coverage and have the opportunity to meet with potential partners and peers. The startups can come from any field but have to be for-profit and prepared to pitch in public, in English.  The company must have been founded less than 2 years prior to the competition, and have a maximum funding of $500,000.  If your startup fits the criteria, you have until November 14th to apply; Seedstars World will inform you if you have been selected 5 days before the event.

Seedstars World is after the next big thing and is willing to push it as far as it can through training and pitching opportunities. This is a rare opening that can change the future of your startup.

Apply here

 

 

 

 

 

Paul Bragiel – i/o Ventures – USA

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Paul-Bragiel

Paul Bragiel
Co-Founder and Managing Partner, i/o Ventures
San Francisco, California, USA

Paul Bragiel is a superstar in the tech industry. Entrepreneur, investor, speaker and aspiring athlete, Paul is also Co-Founder and Managing Partner of i/o Ventures, his fourth company. His first three creations were Lefora, a product that revolutionized online forums; Meetro, the first location-based social network; and Paragon Five, a game development studio.

i/o Ventures is a three-month accelerator program for tech startups in Silicon Valley. It invests up to $25K per startup and only focuses on five of them at a time, with a total of ten to twelve investments every year. This means that they get to work very closely with the selected startups that want to move to the next level, need to raise funds, and need guidance.

During the three months, partners (from companies like MySpace and BitTorrent) and mentors (from companies like OpenDNS, Yelp, and Digg) coach the startups. Stationed in i/o Ventures offices, the young enterprises focus on their product’s market readiness, and meet other entrepreneurs. At the end of the 3 months, angel investors and venture capitalists come in and listen to what the company offers.

Besides his entrepreneurial and investing skills, Paul has competed in the 2014 Winter Olympics on the Colombian Cross Country Ski team (a childhood dream of his), canoed the entire Mississippi River and bicycled across the United States.

From entrepreneur to accelerator, Paul has become a staple in the field and has gathered immense insight on the startup world. His dedication to making his dreams – and the ones of younger entrepreneurs – a reality is an inspiration to take risks and just go for it.