Accelerator QIWI Universe. Start
Hi, Habr! We are the QIWI Universe team. Our project is a joint QIWI acceleration program and the MSU Business Incubator. It had long been necessary to do this, but the hands reached only now, so let's get acquainted.
Once we thought: how can we make the world better? The answer was beautiful in its simplicity: to improve the world, you need to improve yourself and help others grow. So we defined our goal - to find first-class innovative projects in the field of IT and help them develop. We have assembled a team of enthusiastic specialists and started decisive action. For the MSU Business Incubator, this was not the first acceleration set, they have been launching excellent startups for several years. But for QIWI - this is a completely new interesting format of work.
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We were most interested in projects from the field of Big Data, financial technologies, e-Commerce and m-Commerce, services for user identification, virtual and augmented reality. However, we were happy with any other IT projects. The most important condition for participation was the presence of a breakthrough and enthralling idea, along with the desire to bring it to life.
It was possible to get into the program in two ways: by taking part in the hackathon or by submitting an application directly. The first method was more suitable for those who had great ideas, but there were no like-minded people, the second one was for existing teams. At the beginning of the summer we conducted a series of regional hakatons in Moscow, Minsk, Kazan and Novosibirsk. The event was attended by about 600 participants, who presented more than 180 projects. Then, during the direct selection, we looked at more than 300. After the winners of the hackathons and those who presented a successful idea directly, got to the final with pitches, meetings and other fun.
As a result, we selected twelve winning projects. 4 of them are already mature and kept in great secret by us, but we will tell about the rest in our blog here. They all have an incredibly difficult but interesting way to implement their ideas. And teachers and mentors from among the experts and experienced entrepreneurs of the Russian and foreign IT-market help them in this entertaining process.
And what about the buns, you ask? We are telling! In addition to the expertise, mentors and development assistance, each project participating accelerator received an investment of $ 20,000 and the opportunity to work productively in the QIWI Universe Loft coworking program created on Nagatinskaya.
Work on projects is well under way: there have already been classes on Lean Startup concepts and business models, Agile development, product metrics, as well as training on design, SMM, contextual advertising and networking. In all these classes, the involvement of teams is important for us, therefore we call only practitioners, and all cases are dealt with directly on the projects of our participants. Every week in the accelerator meetings are held with top managers of QIWI and large Russian IT companies, who share experience and increase the motivation of residents. Also, every Thursday and Friday, the guys have reporting sessions in the course of work, where curators from the MSU Business Incubator correct, advise and guide, being actually part of the team of each project.
Here we will talk about how the gradual transformation of cool ideas into a real and effective working business. The guys will share the joys and difficulties that a new startup startup faces, as well as how to overcome them and how to extract valuable experience from difficulties. Go!
Once we thought: how can we make the world better? The answer was beautiful in its simplicity: to improve the world, you need to improve yourself and help others grow. So we defined our goal - to find first-class innovative projects in the field of IT and help them develop. We have assembled a team of enthusiastic specialists and started decisive action. For the MSU Business Incubator, this was not the first acceleration set, they have been launching excellent startups for several years. But for QIWI - this is a completely new interesting format of work.
')
We were most interested in projects from the field of Big Data, financial technologies, e-Commerce and m-Commerce, services for user identification, virtual and augmented reality. However, we were happy with any other IT projects. The most important condition for participation was the presence of a breakthrough and enthralling idea, along with the desire to bring it to life.
It was possible to get into the program in two ways: by taking part in the hackathon or by submitting an application directly. The first method was more suitable for those who had great ideas, but there were no like-minded people, the second one was for existing teams. At the beginning of the summer we conducted a series of regional hakatons in Moscow, Minsk, Kazan and Novosibirsk. The event was attended by about 600 participants, who presented more than 180 projects. Then, during the direct selection, we looked at more than 300. After the winners of the hackathons and those who presented a successful idea directly, got to the final with pitches, meetings and other fun.
As a result, we selected twelve winning projects. 4 of them are already mature and kept in great secret by us, but we will tell about the rest in our blog here. They all have an incredibly difficult but interesting way to implement their ideas. And teachers and mentors from among the experts and experienced entrepreneurs of the Russian and foreign IT-market help them in this entertaining process.
And what about the buns, you ask? We are telling! In addition to the expertise, mentors and development assistance, each project participating accelerator received an investment of $ 20,000 and the opportunity to work productively in the QIWI Universe Loft coworking program created on Nagatinskaya.
Work on projects is well under way: there have already been classes on Lean Startup concepts and business models, Agile development, product metrics, as well as training on design, SMM, contextual advertising and networking. In all these classes, the involvement of teams is important for us, therefore we call only practitioners, and all cases are dealt with directly on the projects of our participants. Every week in the accelerator meetings are held with top managers of QIWI and large Russian IT companies, who share experience and increase the motivation of residents. Also, every Thursday and Friday, the guys have reporting sessions in the course of work, where curators from the MSU Business Incubator correct, advise and guide, being actually part of the team of each project.
Here we will talk about how the gradual transformation of cool ideas into a real and effective working business. The guys will share the joys and difficulties that a new startup startup faces, as well as how to overcome them and how to extract valuable experience from difficulties. Go!
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/236003/
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