startupmania

Yesterday, StartUpMania had the opportunity to sit in as a guest at OLIMI, an interesting initiative founded by Hagai Stern and Einat Bar-On. Its purpose is to start-upists and venture capital investors all in one room together.

The event, held at Tel-Aviv’s Brener House (a building historically famous for being the headquarters of Tel Aviv’s workers’ council), offered a speed-dating round for the entrepreneurs who circled from table to table, each housing a potential investor, trying to pique the investor’s curiosity in their product. The standard speed-dating 7-minute time limit was enforced, and at the end of the allotted time, investors would remain at the table, and the entrepreneur would move on to the next blitz-meeting, where he or she would have to start all over again.

Among dozens of hopeful idea-slingers attending the the event were Manny Ventura and Avi Tadmor, who are the men behind the Wintone project (a service that seeks to turn that dreaded dialing tone to a commercial jingle). Also attending were Ilan Carmeli, Yaron Gur Arye and Oz Forman, who were shopping around arena4talent, an internet platform for connecting talent scouts and athletes, fashion designers, musicians, dancers, actors and other talented individuals. Even entrepreneurs who have already seen success raising funds were at hand, such as Gil Raff and Ilan Rot, whose product bTendo, a miniaturized projector meant for installation inside handheld devices, already secured a sum from the large venture capital fund Carmel, must have attended seeking to raise more funds for their project. Yonatan Meisel, who had previous success with his product, Inverness, revealed his next initiative – Amion, a product that handles home network malfunctions intended for large-scale operators in the U.S.

Among the investors were Yaakov Engel, owner of real-estate company Engelinvest, Shlomo Gredman – CEO of ASG, Moti Elmalich – CEO of Eurocom Digital, Eitan Zinger – CEO of Zap of the Yellow Pages Group as well as representatives of IBI Investment, Jerusalem-based venture capital fun JVP and the Gemini Fund from Hertzeliya.

Whether any success was had at the event is something we can’t know yet, but watching all the quick talking and marketing pushes from the sidelines, it seems that everyone took things very seriously. The entrepreneurs tried to make the most out of their seven minutes, and investors tried to truly understand the type of project they were being pitched and whether it fits in to their portfolio.

Even if the entrepreneurs do not walk away with money in their pocket, both them and the investors walk away with tools and information well worth the invested time and effort. Each entrepreneur should strive to get through as many short interviews as possible, as each serves as an opportunity to “polish” their sales-pitch and test it on an experienced and critical audience. Improving presentational skills and the ability to focus on the key points that work for the product could help the future of the project and the entrepreneur’s ability to raise funds and eventually (hopefully) sell the product to clients in the future.

The investors, who are bombarded with strange new investment opportunities on a daily basis, do not walk away empty handed either. They can cram dozens of meetings into one evening, and get an up to date overhead view of the market, the developing trends and even a first hand glimpse at the uniqueness of some new idea they seemed to like, in comparison to all the other project running around the venture capital arena at the time.

Translated by Itai Rosenbaum