Hi!
This December, DevClub will inspire you to bring your ideas to life. We believe that there are no limits for our community. With proper guidance, you can jump from idea to solution. That’s why we’ve teamed up with five great startup founders from Latvia who received more than 4’000’000 EUR investments, and they will share most important that they’ve learned on this path.
If you want your own start-up, you don’t want to miss this one!
Come to Start-up focused event at Monday – 12th December 18:30, Zaļā iela 1, 4th floor (Microsoft Latvia office).
Agenda for Start-up focused 50th DevClub.lv:
- Mikus Opelts founder of Giraffe360 and SkatSkat.lv will give a talk “My experience on developing a product that users will love and how to build business around it.”
Will share knowledge of what are the mistakes that we have made in our business, what stands behind success and that includes story of why investors decided to back us with 0.5 million EUR investment before official product launch.
(Language — Latvian)
20min talk
Tags: Business Development, New Product Development, Innovations, Sales
Mikus started skatskat.lv right after the high school and in next 6 years built it in to leading interactive technology provider in Northern Europe. In 2015 founded Giraffe360 virtual tour technology company that raised half a Million Euro in seed investment round.
- Eriks Nelsons, Co-Founder & CEO of Champick will give a “Why Champick failed first market entry and why succeeded in the second? Key learnings and crucial ingredients of high-potential startup in Latvia”
Champick is daily fantasy football platform with more then 30000 users all around the world and successful market entries in Georgia, Hungary and South Africa.
Eriks will share experience of attracting local angel investor money and failing once, then standing up again by attracting new foreign co-founders and investors, which led startup to successful launch in several markets globally. Will give his opinion about key ingredients to become successful from Latvia and why it’s not mandatory to be located in Riga (Champick team is from Liepaja).
(Language — Latvian)
20min talk
Tags: Business Development, Case Study, Failing, Transition
Eriks after high school started his corporate career and in 9 years achieved to become International Marketing manager in PINS loyalty program with the biggest focus on Northern European and Asian markets. Since May, this year, quit his corporate career and become full-time Champick CEO.
- Ernests Jenavs from Edurio will share the story of founding Edurio – a startup that helps schools find the hidden insights in student, parent and teacher surveys. Ernest’s story will cover the route from the idea and first unsuccessful attempt to create a prototype to having one of Latvia’s most exciting startups and analyse what factors have contributed to Edurio’s growth. He will talk about working across Latvia and the UK, attracting equity and grant funding (Edurio recently got a 1.9m EUR Horizon2020 grant) and growing the team rapidly.
(Language — English)
20min talk
Tags: Start-up, EdTech
Prior to founding Edurio, Ernest studied decision sciences and worked as a strategy consultant in the UK. He has also worked as a freelance consultant, invested in and advised startups in the UK and Latvia and worked as an expert for the European Commission. Ernest is a member of the board at the Latvian Startup Association.
- Marcis Gogis from Mintos will speak about building a company that has fundamentally transformed the concept of peer-to-peer lending, making it into the Top 3 p2p lending marketplaces in continental Europe with lightening speed.
Within a year, Mintos has grown from a newly established and unknown platform in the Baltics to a fast-developing marketplace well recognized across Europe. To date Mintos has financed more than EUR 100 million in loans. Marcis will share his “hands on” experience of building Mintos from the ground up, including how the Mintos buisness model was developed and important lessons learned, for example, how they used MVP in order to gather validates learning and successfully develop the product further.
(Language — English)
20min talk
Tags: Success Story, Peer-to-Peer Lending, New Business Model, MVP
Marcis is the Head of Product at Mintos, working with cross-functional teams to develop and implement new product ideas.
- Jānis Kiršteins from Notakey will talk about starting a new company. From finding co-founders, to managing initial finances, to coming up with a product and finding external funding. He will share his experiences in these and other topics, from the point of view of a software developer who quit his day job without a clear plan ahead.
(Language — English)
40min talk
Tags: Start-up, Case Study
Jānis has more than 7 years of software development experience. In 2015 he left his day job and in early 2016 co-founded a B2B security startup called Notakey. Currently it has distributors in the Baltic States and Finland, as well as partners in Switzerland such as Credit Suisse and UBS.
Our new sponsor ALSO Cloud keeps doing awesome stuff and looking for awesome people.
Geta Digital is a international Digital Commerce Agency with offices in Norway, Latvia, Sweden, Netherlands and the U.S. They are looking for
– .NET Web Developers
– Front-end Developers
– Test Engineers
Scope Technologies’ aim is to make the “Connected Car” a reality, through providing innovative, cost-effective and reliable end-to-end telematics products and services. They are looking for C# Developers
Intexsys is looking for:
– QA Engineer – Can you assure our quality?
– PHP Developers – Always welcome!
– DevOps Engineer – Chef/Puppet/Ansible lovers, we’re looking for you!
We promise – it will never be boring!
Intrum Justitia is looking for:
– Junior Java Developer
Thanks to our sponsors we are able to make DevClub.lv events and have drinks and snacks:
