An entrepreneur since the age of 15, Patrick de Zeeuw, Co-founder of Startupbootcamp, has also had experience working for larger organisations.
From the age of 25, Patrick worked at what is the largest television production company in the world – Endemol Shine Group – as Managing Director, which he helped to grow from 2 countries to 26 when it sold to Telefonica in 2001 for €5.5bil, after which he started investing in early stage businesses and media companies.
Over the following years, Patrick helped to start a few start-ups and he exited the last one in 2009. He then travelled to the US where he met up with Techstars and Y Combinator and was inspired to start Startupbootcamp along with co-founders which has since extended to 11 countries.
Startupbootcamp is a start-up accelerator. Of 12,000 start-ups they see each year, they select 120. Selection occurs in collaboration with a large number of people who have expertise in a number of fields including technology, entrepreneurship and funding.
“Our claim to fame is that we do in three months what would normally take a start-up by itself 12 to 18 months.
“This is important, because the most valuable asset a start-up has is speed and if you lose speed or go to slow, it can actually kill the company.”
“Startupbootcamp operates on verticals and in this case the ecommerce vertical, and brings the best start-ups in the world that are in the ecommerce industry, including adtech, marketing tech, payments, security, platforms, etc to a programme in Amsterdam (soon to be extended to New York) and help them to grow within 3 months and accelerate their business on any topic that a start-up encounters from funding to legal to growth hacking to online and offline sales, user experience to anything that a start-up has to do to be successful.”
What inspired you to start the programme?
I’ve been an entrepreneur for most of my life. I’ve learned a lot, mostly from the mistakes that I’ve made. At a certain point I was wondering what I should do next. Start another company or share everything I’ve learned with the next generation of entrepreneurs.
I was already investing in and coaching start-ups and giving back to them, helping them had always given me a really good feeling which was really the biggest reason for beginning Startupbootcamp. I had already witnessed a number of start-ups fail because of miscalculations, mistakes or issues on the team and if these things can be avoided its super valuable to the start-up.
So I decided that it was time for me to give back. But I wanted to do it in an environment that is scalable and not just with 3 or 4 start-ups but with multiple start-ups.
Because of the Internet, entrepreneurship has been liberalised and it’s now way easier than it was 20 years ago to start a technology company. Nowadays you need less cash to start; you can launch a company immediate online and extend it to multiple countries, technology has become cheaper and there’s a lot of open source software. So there’s a whole entrepreneurial revolution going on and we’re basically riding the wave – there are a lot of start-ups out there that just need to be helped.
How have you built a network of investors and venture capitalists?
Currently we have over 10,000 investors in our network across the world and what we do is grow the network through the different operations that we have in Amsterdam, London, New York, Copenhagen, Barcelona, Singapore, Istanbul and we co-operate with local guys like me. So we find a team of … unfortunately, mostly men still (which is never a good thing, there should be way more women in tech which is also something that we’re working on). We work with these local entrepreneurs who have gone through the experience of setting up and starting their businesses and growing their companies. Normally all those entrepreneurs have raised funds themselves, so they already have a network of investors around them. We then organise the accelerator programmes and invite all types of investors – early-stage, seeding, mid-stage, strategic, late-stage and growth-stage to our programmes for start-ups to connect with them.
And they come. They have the opportunity to source deal flow and we’ve already de-risked a lot of the companies because those that we have selected have been looked at multiple times before they are invited to join us. We then give the investors the opportunity to work with these companies for two or three months to see if they are really a good fit because with start-ups it’s not only about the money, it’s mostly about getting the money from the right investors that will add the right value and really contributes.
Our programmes have become like platforms which attract like-minded people who are investors and mentors and large corporates who want to get access to the start-up scene and encourage innovation. And it just happens. We only facilitate it.
Touching on the issue of women in tech – in your opinion, what can we be doing to encourage them?
To me it starts with the lack of female entrepreneurs. You do see this in any sector but technology is becoming the core of any business. In my opinion, this is because by nature entrepreneurs are opportunistic optimistic and they don’t think too much about what could go wrong.
If I had thought about everything that could have gone wrong in the last 30 years, then I probably would have never started any of my businesses. But I didn’t, and I just did it, and I dealt with the problems afterwards.
I think a lot of women in general are way smarter and they think way further ahead than men do and when you start thinking about all these things, then there are plenty of reasons why not to do something. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t any great women entrepreneurs. There are plenty. But in general, women are more risk averse than men are. You can call men stupid or opportunistic, but it’s just a fact that there are many more entrepreneurial men than women.
The number of women in tech is growing. Every year we keep statistics of how many women are on the applications. When we started in 2010, less than 5% had a woman named as one of the founders of the start-up and now it’s over 12%, while although not very high, it’s definitely growing.
Here at Startupbootcamp over 50% of team members I have working for us out of 250 people are women. They are just great at things that men suck. And the other way around!
Going back to the ecommerce accelerator, is there a correlation between the growth of the industry and the number of applications you get?
Ecommerce is by now almost 20 years old. So within the tech industry it’s an established or old industry. What we are seeing now is a third wave of start-ups coming with tech that’s disrupting technology that was built in the last 10 years.
We also cover Smart Cities and Smart Living here in Amsterdam and that industry is only two or three years old with the likes of Internet of Things, civic tech, smart energy, all those kinds of solutions are pretty new if you compare them to ecommerce which is already quite established and with established business models. So we see way more applications for ecommerce than most tech industries. With ecommerce the market is already there and it’s still growing.
Sub-verticals which are particularly popular within ecommerce start-ups are adtech solutions, marketing solutions, platforms and demand and supply platforms moving more and more into B2B and not just B2C, we see a lot of different payment solutions where block chain solutions are now stepping in. We see all kinds of CRM solutions, logistics solutions targeting the last mile getting online products delivered to your house cheaply and effectively. We’re also still seeing a lot of social marketing solutions to optimise ecommerce – these are the trends that we are seeing.
Are there any sub-verticals that you feel are being neglected or lacking in innovation?
For the last programme we had over 700 applications which includes a big long tail. What I am expecting to see are a few in the block chain area which I think will grow rapidly over the next couple of years – so those solutions that allow secure, very-low cost, or no-cost transactions – I think that’s going to be a very interesting theme.
What about delivery?
Yes, delivery is a hard nut to crack. We’ve invested in a few delivery start-ups ourselves and what we’ve learned is that it’s very capital intensive and it also depends on density within cities. For example, Uber is trying to crack that nut by leveraging the capacities of all types of cars that are out there. It’s an interesting theme, but I’m not seeing any start-ups that are seeing any scalable success. There are a few solutions in San Francisco that seem to be working but only in San Francisco and nowhere else in the US. Delivery remains a big challenge.
I can’t see a sky full of drones …
No, me neither – I hope not!
What are your top tips to help start-ups get noticed?
Start-ups have the opportunity to pitch at every event that comes their way. I suggest they don’t do that. It’s important to be particular about where you go and pitch and where you decide to pitch, make sure that you win.
So make sure that you are fully prepared and you’re able to pitch in the most credible and exciting way. Eventually pitching becomes about storytelling and being passionate. If there are 10 start-ups you have to make sure that your audience is able to relate to the problem that you are solving for them in the first 30 seconds.
I see a lot of start-up begin by pitching their solution. But you should always begin with the problem first and you should make me feel that there is a serious problem out there. And once you have built up the tension of the problem and I really feel that problem then you present your brilliant solution. And then you go to the team and explain why the team is personally driven to find a solution. So I think clarity and passion are two of the most important things which are highly underestimated by a lot of start-ups.
In all your experience, is there a particular start-up which really stands out?
[Laughs] We see a LOT of start-ups, that’s kind of an unfair question … Let me see … in ecommerce one company that I really like that we invested in a few years ago that’s doing very well is Alive Shoes. Alive Shoes was launched by Mr Luca Botticelli (the Botticelli, the Italian shoe manufacturing family). He told us that there are two valleys in the world.
“There is Silicon Valley and there’s Shoe Valley, and I’m from the Shoe Valley and I want to give the key to Show Valley to the whole world to enable anybody who wants to develop their own show brand.” With his co-founders he developed a platform that allows anyone to create their own shoe brand, design their own shoes and sell them online through social media activities.
Shoe Alive is a very big success. At the moment they have more than 40,000 shoe developers online and once you sell 7 pairs of shoes that you have designed yourself, they will be produced in Italy and the people who bought them will get your shoes in your own branded packaging.
This is an amazing example. Uber has empowered anyone to be a taxi driver. Shoe Alive is empowering anyone to be their own shoe designer.
Get ready for 10 of the most innovative start-ups who will all be taking part in a special boot camp competition (in association with Startupbootcamp) at eCommerce Expo 2015. Find out more here.
The post Startupbootcamp, Women in Tech, Innovation Trends: An Interview with the Indefatigable Patrick de Zeeuw appeared first on eCommerce Insights.