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Events

2013 Young Entrepreneur from Wall-Street.ro

By Bobby Voicu

wall-street-elvis

I’m away from Bucharest for business along with one of my co-founders, Cristi, so it was only fitting that Elvis (the 3rd cofounder of MavenHut) went on and picked up a prize I won at Wall-Street.ro Gala for The Entrepreneur of 2013 (Younger Generation). It was great that Elvis picked it up because it’s a team effort (really, we are 3 co-founders, MavenHut exists because we all got together and created something great).

Even better was that one of the people I really admire, Radu Georgescu, was picked as the Entrepreneur for 2013 (Older Generation :D ).

Here is the article with all the winners, in Romanian.

Photo from the article on Wall-Street.ro

Speaking at How To Web

By Bobby Voicu

Me and one of my co-founders are speaking at How To Web on Wednesday :) We are gonna talk about the lessons we learned taking MavenHut from 0 to 5 million users in one year.

If you are around, let me know :)

Ah, we speak from 3pm on Wednesday, ok? >:)

Going Offline When Doing Business Online

By Bobby Voicu

Going_Offline_while_doing_Business_Online

Today I’ve been invited to talk to “Zilele Biz”, an event about business and innovation. I talked about the importance of being present offline, as well as online.

Here is the presentation, below, with some advice, at the end, on how to prepare for events you go to outside of your country. Since I rarely use a lot of words in my public presentation, I’ve modified it a little bit, but it might still not make too much sense without the story :) Sorry for that :D

I would advise you, though, to look at least at the last 4-5 slides, on how to prepare an event. It might make all the difference.

Oh, and an image with me talking on the stage, taken from Roxana, below:

zilele-biz-bobbyvoicu

[Slides] 10 Secrets I Wish I Knew While Raising Money

By Bobby Voicu

10_secrets_I_wish_I_knew_before_I_starting_raising_capital

My co-founder, Cristi, had a great presentation today at Venture Connect on things he learned while raising money. Since the list is quite similar to what I would say (we raised together, after all), albeit with different spots for specific things, I thought it would be interesting to put it on my blog and present each point during the next 2-3 weeks :)

#10 Time – it takes longer than expected
#9 Network – use your network (or grow one if you don’t have it)
#8 Aggressive – be agressive in contacting people
#7 Numbers – investors know numbers, so be prepared to explain yours
#6 Explain – explain what you do
#5 Follow-up – always follow up
#4 Diplomacy – pointing mistakes to investors is not really smart
#3 Angels – get ex-executives in VC backed businesses as angels
#2 ABC – always be careful: do your Due Dilligence on the people you meet
#1 Love – avoid investors that fall in love with your strategy, plans aso.

Saturday Video: Talk About Entrepreneurship at TechHub

By Bobby Voicu

techhub-meeting

Last Thursday, the guys at TechHub had an interesting guest from MIT (Bill Aulet) to talk about entrepreneurship. Along with two Romanian entrepreneurs (Marius Ursache and Andrei Marinescu), they talked about the issues you could have if you do not start in a “beach head” market, how to bootstrap, where would you get cofounders (great idea: going to a Hackaton – Google is organizing one soon in Bucharest).

Here are some ideas from the talk:

In Bill’s perspective:

  • entrepreneurship needs to be regarded as a profession
  • the supply of quality entrepreneurship education today is very limited
  • entrepreneurial education is contextual, so it’s difficult to teach
  • entrepreneurship is experiential, it’s mentor-intensive
  • the objective of education is to teach people how to fish, not how to catch a fish
  • it’s easy to fail at doing education in entrepreneurship (Donald Trump has an entrepreneurship institute – storytelling and shark-tanking – now he’s being sued for that)
  • you have to have the right spirit, to think differently, to be motivated
  • you need to foster an environment of creative irreverence, like they do at MIT (hacking)
  • hacking is about taking on Goliath, about swimming against the current
  • we need not to make entrepreneurship sound easy
  • we need the execution skills of a navy seal and incredible self discipline
  • you can’t just have practitioners in an entrepreneurship education program; you also need researchers and hard date people
  • if we want to make this a profession, we need the data to back it up.

Unfortunately I cannot embed it on my blog, so you can go here and look over it. It’s worth listening for 50 minutes (though they had some issues with the mic at some point and it was a little annoying, but the info is so interesting, it’s worth getting over it).

Of course, there is a short review of the talk here, on the TechHub blog (this is where the quote is coming from)

Indie Games: Questions?

By Bobby Voicu

delevoping-games-the-indie-way

The team at TechHub Bucharest is hosting a new gaming meetup on Thursday, October 10th: Developing games – The indie way. As I am really interested in gaming (duh!) and I have an unnatural attraction for indie gaming, the guys thought I would be the one to moderate the panel.

The panel consists of:

Robert Muresan, Owner and Founder of Exosyphen studios, Dragos Inoan, Creative Director at Dream Builder Studios (Strikewing) and Dan Dimitrescu, Game designer and co-founder at Killhouse Games (you can read more about them here, where you can also register).

It’s an interesting mix, with PC games sold through Steam and mobile games distributed through a publisher.

I have two things to say to you, the reader:

1. If you are in Bucharest and you are interested in gaming, you should be at TechHub on Thursday evening. Again, you should register here.

2. Questions! Are you interested in something in particular? Do you want to ask them something? Fire away in the comments. Otherwise, don’t complain if I ask dumb questions, ok? :)