Startup Europe Week in Minsk!

For the first time Startup Europe Week took place in Belarus!

Startup Europe Week is an initiative implemented by SEW and promoted by the European Commission and Startup Europe.

These are some of the SEW goals:

To showcase the best local initiatives promoted to support entrepreneurs.
To inform the local startup ecosystem about what already exists to help them now.
To provide live consulting sessions on how to build innovative businesses.
To connect regional officers, investors and corporates to create stronger local ecosystems.

Startup Europe Week - Minsk!

So this year Rocket DAO team took the initiative to organize a meetup within SEW-2019 in Minsk, Belarus.

And it was great! Our event was dedicated to discussions of the key startup evaluation parameters and perfect acceleration technologies, as well as of the criteria that investors pay special attention to while making their investing decisions.

Speakers

The first speaker of the event was our Head of Experts Andrew Miroshnichenko. The topic he highlighted was named ‘Public Due Diligence for a successful fundraising campaign’.

About the speaker. Andrew is Head of Experts, Rocket DAO, co-founder and partner of Minsk Knowledge Office, business coach, knowledge and competencies management consultant, professional ICU coach, the author of more than 100 articles dedicated to the business development issues.

What our attendees learned from it:

Traditional and most effective ways of fundraising.
Existing alternative investing platforms and the functionality they provide to customers.
Approaches to business plans development.
Role of the Due Diligence procedure for a fundraising campaign.
Advantages that decentralization brings to startup evaluation procedure.

The second speaker was one of our Rocket DAO Experts, TRIZ-trainer in EPAM Systems Andrew Kuryan.

About the speaker. Expert in the spheres of inventions, innovations, product management and business model development. TRIZ Trainer in EPAM Global. Business Analyst, Problem Solver (TRIZ) & Product Owner in several software projects such as ERP system development for shipping, telecom, radio-electronic components wholesale. Business Analyst in several projects on Quality Management System (QMS) deployment Worked in IMLab (Inventive Machine Laboratory). Has experience of work as a TRIZ business-analyst as a Freelancer.

Besides Andrew is the author of two startup evaluation methodologies developed especially for Rocket DAO:

for Product parameter: https://bit.ly/2VY2O28
for Business model parameter: https://bit.ly/2VZP72L

Consequently, the topic of his speech was ‘How to evaluate startup’s product?’. The key points the speech are as follows:

Business for public good creation
Jobs-to-be-done concept, determination of the real customers’ problems.
Product’ usefulness evaluation scale.
Analysis of the number of product’s users.

For the final part of the event, we decided to organize a panel discussion with our experts and to debate on the key startup metrics and the practical instruments to their acceleration. Moderator of the discussion was Andrew Miroshnichenko.

Belarusian startup ecosystem representatives and their great involvement in the discussion, active post-event networking, numerous curious question raised during those 3 hours of the event demonstrated that we do have all the resources to build a strong community in Belarus. And we believe that these changes are not far off.