This past Tuesday, Joe and I turned our backs on the glorious London springtime weather we’ve been graced with this week, and instead joined a multitude of Europe’s finest web movers and shakers at Geek’n'Rolla 2009. With the day packed full of fascinating panels, pitches and talks (including one by the illustrious Joe Stepniewski himself), we thought we’d bring you some of our highlights.
Our friend Andy McLoughlin from Huddle had some great tips for hiring a top-notch team whatever business you’re in. Hiring is like falling in love, when it’s right, you’ll know. Don’t compromise. Huddle uses a famed four point scale for rating candidates: Definitely No, Maybe No, Maybe Yes and Definitely Yes. If there are three people involved in the hiring, you need three Definite Yes’s.
Treat your team like family and build a sense of trust and openness by encouraging people to learn about all aspects of the company. Buy a great coffee machine, and ensure that good ideas can be generated and fostered by anyone, be they CEO or Office Manager. I’m confident we hit a lot of those goals here at Skimlinks, although we could use some higher quality caffeine… Alicia?
Andy’s slides can be found here.
Inbetween some heated debating, launch of an excellent wiki full of web tools, William Reeve, (formerly of LoveFilm, the UK’s answer to NetFlix) had some excellent things to say about managing your cashflow. If you’re bootstrapping your business, pick some core metrics to monitor meticulously, and keep your cashflow super-tight. Most of all, push your suppliers hard as every extra day you can squeeze out of payment terms is valuable. You can find his slides and some more in-depth notes here.
Finally, Fred Destin from Atlas Ventures gave us an insight into the day-to-day life of a VC. They’re human too! Working with VCs is about building relationships. Pitching is show-business, so if you have the opportunity to pitch, make sure you get the VC excited from the outset. Also, beware of ‘pitch decay’. Leave your audience with four or five key points that they will remember when considering you at the next stage. More details here.
It was an action-packed day, and I’ve only scraped the surface in this post. Check out all the coverage at TechCrunch Europe. Alicia will be at A4U Europe next week. If you’re there, say hello. Otherwise she’ll report on it here once she’s back.
Thanks for reading!
Mark
