What happens to startups after conferences in Silicon Valley? Startup Experience from SVOD Conference

It is no secret that Silicon Valley is replete with a huge number of various thematic events and conferences. They can not only hear a lot of new and interesting things from the lips of famous speakers, and even legends, but also show your startup, get acquainted with various useful people, share experiences, and even raise investments.

You can find any useful startups, events at Meetup or, for example, here . In the Valley, you have to choose the best from the best, as every day a huge number of interesting meetings take place: both huge conferences and small specialized meetings.

What to do if it is uncomfortable in a crowd of English-speaking public? Search AmBAR and TEC (The Entrepreneurs' Club) in the Valley. They regularly hold professional events in the Valley, where you can meet compatriots. At TEC club events you can also make a pitch of the project. Alik Vernitsky, CEO and CoFounder GetGoing , this is how he commented on his participation in the pitch at TEC club events:
')

TEC pitch night was a turning point for us - we raised $ 250,000 literally at the event, and the remaining investment almost immediately after. This is all thanks to Anna and Stas *, who taught us to present the startup to investors, introduced us to investors, and moreover, helped us to the very end of raising investments. If I ever need to raise money again (although I hope I don’t need it), TEC will be my first step.

There is also a large conference that gathers a decent amount of Russian-speaking public, through which it is easier for a startup to “enter” Silicon Valley - SVOD (Silicon Valley Open Doors) - an annual technology investment conference, which is held in partnership with TEC club and AmBAR, and regularly gathers in its The walls of this amazing audience are more than 600 participants - investors, start-ups, entrepreneurs from all over the world, including from the countries of the former Soviet Union. It is difficult to count how many startups have visited SVOD over the past 8 years, and it’s also not easy to track what happened to them during this time. Let us recall some of them that were created by our compatriots.

SVOD2005
Evernote is a web service and software suite for creating and storing notes. Now it is a corporation with a capitalization of $ 2 billion dollars.

Interview with Phil Libin, CEO of Evernote
(We will soon post an interview with Evernote founder Stepan Pachikov)

SVOD2006
Viewdle . The first performance of the Ukrainian startup Viewdle. In 2012, Google acquired the Ukrainian-American company Viewdle, which developed the technology of automatic facial recognition.

SVOD2007
Wrike - a popular online project management service created by our compatriot Andrei Filev, was first introduced to the public on SVOD. Wrike recently raised another investment round - $ 10M from Bain Capital Ventures

4HomeMedia . Alex Fedoseyev made a pitch with 4HomeMedia, an application for managing home automation networks. In 2010, 4HomeMedia was sold to Motorola.


SVOD2008
Eccentex is a provider of dynamic case management solutions. At the conference, Alex Stein raised investment.

Wikimart . After a successful performance on SVOD, Maxim Faldin received the first angel investment. Now this company is a leader in the Russian market, in which tens of millions of dollars have been invested by Western investors, including one of the largest players in the investment market, the Tiger Global fund.

OktoGo is a Russian online hotel booking service that received its first investment after the successful performance of Marina Kolesnik on SVOD. Now OktoGo is among the top ten Russian companies and has raised more than $ 15M dollars from large investors.


AlterGeo is a multifunctional cross-platform geosocial service that allows users to find nearby and choose places to rest, share recommendations and photos with friends, win virtual and real rewards, as well as receive discounts and bonuses in urban establishments. Anton Baranchuk spoke at SVOD with the first version of the service Wi2Geo. In the same year, Wi2GEO received seed investments from the AddVenture fund. In the fall of 2009, the geolocation service attracted a first round of investment from the Kite Ventures fund. At the moment, the number of AlterGeo users is about 1 million people.

SVOD2009
Zingaya - Zingaya is now an online service for companies that allows you to organize a new channel of voice communication between site visitors and any divisions of companies. Alexey Ailarov spoke at SVOD with the pitch of the ISC / Flashphone company, which was later renamed Zingaya.


ADCO-Engineering (now Advenira) - the first performance, the audience award, investment from the corporation Rosnano.

Competentum - Natalia Soboleva presented her online education project to the American public on SVOD2009. Nowadays, Competentum is one of the recognized leaders of online education.

eMazeU - Igor Chirashnya presented technologies that broadcast any materials sent from cameras and camcorders to TV. In 2010, it was sold to Zoran Corporation (NASDAQ: ZRAN)

SVOD2010
GetGoing - now a successful online ticket service GetGoing, got their first investment after speaking on SVOD. Later they believed in startup Yury Milner, TA Venture, Lightbank and Data Collective.

SVOD2011
Kuznech - winners of the SVOD2011 Startup Competition, now a successfully developing startup.

SVOD Summer 2013
The companies Amazing Hiring , Driveway Software , Ittavi , BuildersCloud , TranscribeMe all got the first rounds of investment!


SVOD Winter 2013
Soon the next conference will be held - SVOD Winter'13 , which once again opens the door to a successful future for 20 startups. Let's see which startups take off after it.

Note:
* Anna Dvornikova (http://www.ambarclub.org/anna-dvornikova) - TEC-Club Managing Director, TEC Ventures Seed Fund Managing Partner, SVOD Conference Founder (www.svod.org)
Stas Khirman (http://www.ambarclub.org/stas-khirman) - founder of TEC-Club, serial entrepreneur, partner of the seed fund TEC Ventures

Thank you for your attention and for the positive feedback. Subscribe to our blog on Habré , Twitter , Facebook , YouTube-channel to follow the updates. Previous posts can be found here .