I had the luck to be one of the participants of the DLD 2009 conference. It was my first time there and I can definitely say that the conference was amazing, so I would like to share with you what happened there.

Day 1:

After a short opening, the first panel (Global Challenges) came on stage and it was consisted mostly of CEO of very big companies: Nani Beccalli-Falco (CEO, GE), Stefan Oschmann (CEO, Merck & Co. Inc), James S. Turley (CEO, Ernst & Young), Kasper Rorsted (CEO, Henkel), Thierry Antinori (Executive Vice President, Lufthansa), Hermann Ude (CEO, DHL / Board member @ Deutsche Post), Patricia Szarvas as moderator of the panel (CNBC). I would say that this panel was the least interested since I didn’t feel I heard something new. But anyway it was really good to see all these people together!

The next panel (From ideas to reality) was very interesting since the was Philippe Pouletty on stage who is Founder and General Partner of Truffle Capital and he presented his company that develops an artificial heart which instead of what we have seen so far this heart mimics the movements of a real heart. He has still some way to go but he believes that in two years from now the first hearts will be used on the first 20 patients. Philippe has a view that people will be getting spare bio-parts in the near future and this is something that I also believe it will happen sooner or later. I will be blogging about this on a separate post soon. The panel was moderated by Jennifer Schenker who is a journalist covering technology for quite a long time (30 years!) and has now started a website called Informilo.

Just next, Dan Ariely came on stage and gave one of the most amazing speeches I have ever seen. He presented some illusions and some stats of how some really major decisions in our life are affected by simple and very minor things. You have to see the video of this presentation. Moreover I was very emotional touched by his story and how he created a whole new science due to his stay in hospital for 3 years. I will be definitelly following him from now on. You can check his website at (www.predictablyirrational.com).
Then Chris Weeks was on stage. Chris is the Director of Humanitarian Affairs for DHL/DPWN. He talked about how difficult is to get to help people in 3rd world countries and how complicated is to just be able to send them goods and medicine. It was pretty fascinating that one of the greatest technology that is being used to drop supplies from helicopters is the well known and commonly used red postal bag. He described us how it is stuffed and why it is so important.

The last panel for that day was “Philanthrocapitalish”. The panel consisted of Abigail Disney (Daphne Foundation), Sean Parker (Facebook Causes, co-Founder of Facebook, Plaxo, Napster), Matthew Bishop (The Economist), Arend Oetker (HERO), Edwin Moses (Laureus World Sports Academy). I was totally amazed with what Abigail told the audience. Abigail has made a documentary titled “Pray the Devil Back to Hell” about women in Liberia and their efforts to bring peace to their broken nation after decades of destructive civil war. The fact is that even is there have been already 3 years of such efforts, no media has ever covered these efforts. This can be a great example of how some very important facts of our world are very well hidden behind the scenes. I am really looking forward watching the documentary.

The first day ended with a blogging meet up at a Bavarian restaurant and we enjoyed some very good traditional food and lots of beers:)

Day 2:

The second day of DLD started very early (8:00) with the Social Networking Breakfast hosted by Jeff Pulver. While I arrived a little late, it was very fun since you had some stickers and after talking with anyone you would stick them a tag. A great networking idea:)

The first panel “On Leadership” was one of the most interesting panels I attended. The speakers were Peter Hirshberg (Technorati.com), Brad Anderson (CEO & Vice President, Best Buy), Michele Azar (Internet Growth Group, Best Buy), Don Tapscott (Author, moderator of the panel). Brad and Michele showed how they turned best buy to become a company that’s is totally driven by their employees. The presented their company wiki and showed how the employees are involved into daily operations and even advertisements of the company. I think that many companies should take this as an example and try to build up a similar business culture. After all it’s all about people who run the company to make it a success. Same time was the Internet Politics panel which I didn’t attend.

Afterward there were two panels. The one was called “100 Million uniques” and it was consisted of some of the most successful web entrepreneurs in the world: Chad Hurley (YouTube), Samir Arora (Glam Media), Mitchell Baker (Mozilla Foundation), Moderation: Yossi Vardi. Unfortunately I wanted to attend the other panel for Eastern Europe markets so I will be watching this one on video. The Eastern Europe panel was very interesting especially in terms of the numbers mentions. The speakers were Vuslat Dogan (CEO, Dogan Group), Zoltan Kovacs (Co-founder, ISOBAR), Andrew Paulson (co-founder, SUP / Livejournal), Lukasz Gadowski (Spreadshirt.com) and the moderator was a very good friend of mine, Andrej Nabergoj who runs Noovo.com. It was great to hear how big these companies got and the large number of acquisitions they did to grow faster.

I then enjoyed a pretty cool session about robots before attending the “Fashion Business” panel. During that panel it was great to hear Marc Ecko telling his story of how he rented a plane and painted like the Airforce one before getting to shoot a home made like video with people spraying the plane and writing “Still free” on it. Amazing how viral this video got and how this serves as a new way to advertise your company. I was also very amazed to hear Xavier Court from Vente-privee.com saying that the very same morning he sold about 70 apartments in Germany through his website. The panel was moderated by Susann Remke (Focus Magazine).

I then watched the hot deep earth session which has been very inspiring especially when I saw the world record man Herbert Nitsch describing how he managed to dive to more than 200 meters deep. It was also a pleasure to meet Fabien Cousteau who is the grandson of the very famous Jacques Cousteau. The photographs of Sebastian Copeland were fantastic and I wish I will get a chance in my life to visit Antarctica. The panel finished with the presentation of Pangaea which offers a chance for young people to discover the unseen world of Antarctica. The man behind this is Mike Horn.

NextI did some networking and then attended the Software session which was quite fun since Marissa Mayer is was a great moderator. The speakers were Max Levchin (Slide.com), Joel Spolsky (Fog Creek Software), Daniel Ek (Spotify), Suhas Gopinath (Globals Inc) and Hendrik Speck (University of Applied Sciences Kaiserslautern). There was a good discussion on which software can move to web.

Some networking following again and I left to get prepared for the great party. I was told that the DLD party is one of the biggest events in Germany since Hubert Burda is a big publisher in Germany with several magazines and newspapers. And so it was; the party was amazing. Maybe this is what happens when you combine people from social magazines like woman fashion or Playboy with people from the internet industry:) There were many German celebrities which I unfortunately didn’t know and lots of media coverage. Everyone had really great time there!

Day 3:

On the third day of the conference I focused more on networking so I only attended two sessions. The first one was the most enjoyable session since among the speaker were Julia Allison which is a very popular blogger in the US through her website nonsociety.com and has a great style of describing facts but also Loic Le Meur who has a great sense of humour. The session was called “Telling stories” and there were also Ora-Ito (Designer) and documentary maker Fernando Sulichin. It was moderated by Constantin Bjerke. The last session I watched was the best of the conference. The speakers were Daniel Kahneman and Nassim Taleb and it was moderated by John Brockman. The subject was “Reflection on a crisis” and I won’t write anything more about this because I strongly recommend to view the video on the DLD website.

The surprise of the day was Mark Zuckerberg, who came to DLD and spoke about facebook and its plans on expansion. He mentioned that his focus is on creating a platform that will eventually reach everyone in the world and also to build a very good product which I believe his already does. Facebook is growing like crazy and Mark preferred not to reveal any income statistics since he said that is not the top priority for the company (of course it’s a private company so he had no obligation to tell everybody the revenue insights). There was a part of the conversation were privacy issues were discussed, especially the fact that people can upload photos of others without their permission and without them being able to remove them. Of course facebook reflects the real world so practically everything that happens inside is quite similar with the real world. On the other hand, it was highly suggested that users should play around with their privacy settings and also create friend relationships only with trusted people who already know. This use of facebook makes it a great and possibly “safe” tool for social networking.

During the event, Ester Dyson was awarded the “Aenne Burda Award” Ester is now training to become a cosmonaut and travel to space. I really admire her.

Finally the last day I had the chance to meet with people Hyve.de which is a great company behind many innovative product designs and has also created a web innovation platform were people can submit their ideas to companies for evaluation or for the purpose of an innovation contest.

There is a huge number of photos from DLD on flickr and a dedicated area on the DLD conference website for video sessions.

Since Friday I participate in the Athens Startup Weekend event. I am on a team with Stefanos Vasdekis and Dimitris Theodorakis. Stefanos is my best friend for 23 years and business partner for the last 10 years. We have done several successful (and unsuccessful) startups in the past together. Dimitris is still an undergraduate student at the National Technical University of Athens and definitely has the startup spirit. While we do believe that we are working on a great idea during the weekend, our main reason for participating in the event was to share our passion for making ideas a reality with others.

During the event, there are a lot of people asking us how we made it to have a website and a working product within 1.5 days. What’s even more amazing is that we see many people having great ideas but no development team to create them. Everyone is seeking for developers!! And that is where I want to share a story:

Back in 2001 we had an idea of creating a software that would allow merchants create their own shops. An ecommerce software. We had little idea of how development was done and we agreed that we won’t become developers since there are other priorities to take care as well. We managed to create a product called “Siteowners ecommerce software”. We even got the first few customers using it. However the era of SaaS was to come and we believed that we should re-create our software as a web based software as a service application. And we did it. The product is called Magnet Commerce, it’s running and many customers depend on us to run their stores. During that time though, we experienced exactly what most of the people experience today: Developers shortage:)! I can feel the frustration and desperation when you have a great idea and you can’t do it because you have no developers.

I still remember the day back in 2005 when we were drinking coffee at Starbucks and decided to start writing code to expand our software. Even when we decided to do so, we really though that it was the worst idea we ever had. But it proved to be one of the best. Don’t misunderstand the message. We did not ever become developers. We learned how to develop and we currently develop less than 10% of our time (even 5% I would say). The more we learn about development the better we succeed in finding and guiding people from India, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, etc. to develop for us and the less we develop ourselves. In the last year, we have developed (from scratch) a greek social network called Zuni.gr which now has 50K members, 5 facebook applications which are being used by 450.000 people, expanded our Magnet commerce and also did some experimental projects. And I can guarantee that the development was only 10% of our time and we really work almost 24 hours a day (we love it:)).

While we would always welcome a full time developer in our team, we were never forced NOT to build an idea because we had no developers. There is no such excuse. If you believe in your idea a lot, you can learn to develop in a very short amount of time; days I would say. And once you get the overall idea, learn how to outsource your development and your idea will expand. Then you will get angel investors and maybe VCs and build a very strong team of many people. But first make sure that you and the rest of your startup team can do everything without any external help!

Time for some sleep:) 2:20 and the event continues at 9:00:)

That link along brought me mamy memories of the past.

My first serious and successful internet startup was back in 1999, called Usfaz.com (view the non-graphic version of archive.org) which was a free web hosting service that paid free members a share out of the revenue generated from the banners on their websites. The idea was totally unique at that time and it got pretty viral through the web.

The whole history of that startup can really provide content for a whole book. Me and Stefanos were in our 18s, having just entered the university. We had already done several attempts to make money on the web through some websites and most of them were successfull. So we were thinking what our “big thing” could be. One day while we were brainstorming at a cafe, the idea dropped on to the table. We knew that free hosting services were pretty popular and there was no chance to become a competitor. So we decided to offer a good incentive to our members to get their free website with us. That was when we introduced “revenue sharing” to the free web hosting industry by creating Usfaz.com which was described as “Free web hosting that pays you”.

Being in Greece it was extremmely difficult to do anything back then. We had to send wire transfer payments (which costed $40 per transaction) in order to pay just for the hosting of the server each month. Hosting was expensive and we also had to pay for software and then customize it to our needs. We managed to do everything almost right. I say almost because once we reached to about 40.000 members, our website was hacked and hackers deleted everything. Till now I still believe that the hosting company itself deleted the whole server since traffic was very expensive and web hosting companies did not expect customers with that amount of traffic as ours. (p.s. for those who wonder, it was impossible to download a backup to Greece since we first got a DSL connection in 2001!! We made all this startup possible with just a 56K modem, not even ISDN).

Even after this unfortunate event we got the site back and running. We received great support from our members since everyone wanted to get their website up on our service again. It was a great time and we worked almost 20 hours a day for a week to get everything back on.

But the difficulties were not technical ones only. I remember what happened when we went to Citibank (in Greece) for the first time to issue 400 checks in united state dollars to pay our members. They laughed, didn’t believe it and said it was impossible. Well, we managed to figure a way out but it was really hard.

There had been legal issues as well. One time we almost made it to jail because a member had uploaded “password-protected illegal material” on their website hosted on our service. It’s fun to talk about it now but back then it was one of the most unpleasant experience of our lives:)

Finally the company was sold for an amount that didn’t make us millionaires but it was worth the time, work, experience and fun we had that time!

If you enjoyed this post just leave me a comment and I will definitelly write about the next startups I have been involved since back then:)

If you are visiting leweb3 as well I will be happy to meet you. Be sure to add yourself to the wiki so we can meet with others before the conference as well: http://www.eu.socialtext.net/leweb3/index.cgi?get_togethers_before_and_during_the_conference

The common mistake that most entrepreneurs make is to think that everybody wants to be like them. Being an entrepreneur is a way of life. A way that you have to choose and believe in by all means. Especially in start-ups, which are a position that almost all entrepreneurs are in at least once in their life, you have to make many sacrifices in your life, work hard, and be always motivated and much focused on fulfilling your idea. You need to be able to accept failure and find out how you can benefit from it. I have failed so many times I can’t remember but each failure was just another experience which changed the way I am thinking. Moreover, an entrepreneur has to be able to adjust the way he thinks all the time. Nothing is to be taken for granted when you deal with business. What I have learned so far from talking to other entrepreneurs is that successful entrepreneurs think in a way that no other people can consider as logical thinking. However, not all people have all this motivation and courage to live this way. There is nothing wrong with that though. Not being an entrepreneur doesn’t mean you won’t have success in your life. However, you can’t be pushed, not even educated to become one.

So here comes the education. Education should help all students that want to become entrepreneurs and supply them with all the tools and advice they will need. The most important tool for an entrepreneur is the “networking”. Education should allow successful entrepreneurs to become mentors for young ones. This shall not be restricted to conferences and meetings. It should be combined with real life situations, in the meaning of working together. When I started my first company, no one could advice me on how to develop it. I had to find the information myself along with my partner. I am sure we have lost both time and money because of this. There is nothing better for an entrepreneur than to be able to do some networking and meet others to exchange experiences and ideas. Even a 5 minute discussion can save an entrepreneur from making wrong decisions. This networking is even more important than raising money for your company. That is why it should start at young ages.

As a conclusion I believe that education should first make the students understand if they really want to become entrepreneurs. Then it should play a role of getting young entrepreneurs and successful ones together. The older and successful ones should help those young entrepreneurs who are full of energy. And they will be both rewarded for sure.