Talk at MIT Sloan

It was great to be back in Boston after so many years and fun to take a trip down memory lane across the road from Firefly.

Some of these slides relating to opportunities outside of the US will be familiar from Nextweb and other thoughts around 3 Os and 5 Cs I've aired in part before - especially last year at Second Chance Tuesday.

Big day for Seedcamp

from the Seedcamp blog:

We've been thrilled at the interest Seedcamp has generated in such a short time since we announced it a few weeks ago. In the spirit of the new web, we've had some great guest blogs , our forums are slowly getting more active and even our Facebook group is growing like crazy - we're just crossed 600 members :)

We want Seedcamp to really help stimulate a community and conversation around European startups - so please join in, online or physically at your local Opencoffee Club. So if you're an entrepreneur with an idea, a developer with a killer app - there's no excuse to feel alone anymore.

You have until midnight August 12th to submit your completed application, we've already had nearly 100 from all over Europe including France, Germany, Sweden, Holland, Portugal, Spain, Italy and the UK. We've also had applications from India, Israel, Russia, South Africa and Latin America - keep them coming.

Seedcamp is completely focussed on supporting the entrepreneur. So we're thrilled that we seemed to have tapped into something that seems relevant and valuable to you. In fact, one of the things which has excited me the most is that people are recognizing that although capital is key, Seedcamp is more about the contacts, coverage and connections successful applicants will receive both in the week of September 3-7 in London and in the 3 months afterwards.

With this in mind, I'm really excited today to announce the first wave of Seedcamp supporters, who are really stepping up to play a major role not just in Seedcamp 2007 but for the years ahead. These are all people and organizations who have played a critical role in putting European entrepreneurship on the map and I'm thrilled to have them on board.

The cast in order of appearance so far are: Index Ventures, Niklas Zennstrom and Mattias Ljungman's Atomico Investments , Atlas Venture, Balderton Capital (formerly Benchmark Europe), TAG, Forsyth Group and Brown Rudnick. We are also thrilled to have FT.com and Techcrunch as media partners and the NextWeb Conference as an event partner.

We look forward to act two and announcing our new cast of characters in the coming weeks.

Nextweb in Amsterdam

I know I've been slow in posting but wanted to share the slides from the talk I gave a few weeks back in Amsterdam at the really enjoyable NextWeb conference.



The theme was about stimulating more great European entrepreneurship - something which is close to my heart and I've posted about at length before.

In the last few weeks we have seen more great news for European startups - including the great team at Last.fm's fabulous exit to CBS and also Joost attracting Mike Volpi, one of the killer executives from Silicon Valley, to come to London to build what promises to be a company ready to redefine TV.

Who says Europe isn't at the cutting edge?