Iratel Ventures Breakfast Series #9
Despite the snow, an amazing group of entrepreneurs and ecosystem players attended the Iratel Ventures Breakfast Series #9 last Thursday. These events are usually open to RSVPs a week before the event.
The format was based on Lean Coffee, an agenda less but structured one where everyone got to introduce themselves, nominate a topic to be discussed and then vote for the most popular ones by the group.
These two topics were selected for discussion:
What are the strategies to be able to establish hi-tech startups in Iran?
What are the challenges of community building in Iranian startup ecosystem?
Group started by listing strategic core competencies (geo-policy, young population, access to immediate neighboring markets) of Iran and how these should be leveraged to create competitive advantage.
The cloning phenomena, the role of diaspora and policy uncertainties were discussed and the group agreed that we must start with we can control, start small and then grow to full potential.
Discussion continued to the second topic on how ecosystem players (entrepreneurs, angel investors, VCs) should work more closely to create a highly cooperative atmosphere that eventually will lead to a more robust collective conscience. It was also suggested that social figures and maybe even celebrities should step in and support the entrepreneurial cause.
We believe the more open the dialogue, the better it will allow innovation and bringing different disciplines including the investors together. These series were started to increase the dialogue opportunities among ecosystem players and especially to bridge the gap between those who are willing to know more about Iranian startup environment and meet up with miscellaneous ecosystem players. This will increase openness and transparency.
We’re thankful that our guests constantly help us improve these events by the feedback they provide:
Make more of the procedure online to save time like polling for ideas you may also like to make it available online for those who are in wait-list and later for everyone.
I think would be nice to have a paper with all the names of the participants and their startups/occupations, so we can remember the names of each individual, get connected over linked-in for future potential collaborations.
We’ve received good amount of feedback that the participants would like to stay in touch after the events. Two suggestions are: 1) Bring business cards and brochures about your startup with you and make sure you exchange contact details 2) Join the Facebook group. We will re-activate this group once we reach 100 members.
Finally, if you’d like to be added to the breakfast mailing list, please sign up or follow us on LinkedIn.
This is the tenth in a series of posts about Iratel Ventures Events. We’d love to hear from teams with crazy (but commercial) startups. Get in touch or attend our breakfast series. Finally, don’t forget to get your IV Score or talk to ourFundingBot to prepare for your next VC meeting.
Thanks to Hamidreza Sarabadani and Mahyar Khattak for their contribution.