My Startup Istanbul Experience
This article is written by Jeremiah Uke, a Contributor Author at Startup Istanbul.
Startup Istanbul gathered techies, investors, venture capitalists, journalists, industry experts, startups, corporate organizations and more from 80 countries all over the world to the beautiful city of Istanbul, Turkey to witness a convergence of 5000 people to learn and discuss technology and startup concepts which will encourage the growth and development of the technology ecosystem, apart from this,100 startups will pitched to win the grand prize in funding and go through an incubator.
Startup Istanbul 2018 was graced by a number of venture capitalists and startups, Eamonn Carey, the managing director of Techstars London is one of them, Techstars was founded in Boulder, Colorado in 2006. The firm is an accelerator, investing between $6,000 and $18,000 on average in seed funding to tech startups and providing mentorship to entrepreneurs. Less than 1% of applicants are accepted, but Techstars has accepted over 1000 startups to its various programs.
Eamonn Carey watched startups pitch and also delivered a talk on “scaling your product”, he mentions that’s he has been able to meet startups and entrepreneurs from all over the world, which has given him the avenue to network and share ideas coming from other countries, sometimes with events in London, New York and Hong Kong, you only meet pebble to meet a people and startups from that region alone, but upon the arrival at Startup Istanbul, he was able to meet startups from Kenya, Niggeria and Turkey, this allows you to get a more global picture of what is happening in technology.
Five or 10 years ago, this was definitely not a startup friendly ecosystem, as at then the startup hierarchy started by American Startups, European startups and startups from other regions in the world, in the world today, startups from other regions have been able to close the gap with new startups springing up and modern technologies. American and European funding networks and initiatives are now interested in funding startups from all over the world. Eamonn is excited to see these opportunities coming up and is eager to see the startups grow.
Eamonn met a fintech startup which he is interested in funding through Techstars, he was impressed by the traction and the team of the startup. Eamonn mentions enjoying a few things including meeting startups from all over the world and seeing where and what innovation are coming, also he enjoyed that the event was open for all kinds of people present, so there was no need to put the investors in a special section. Eamonn mentioned that Istanbul is one of the world’s best cities and would love a chance to come back.
https://vimeo.com/243128452