How To Web 2012

We are having a great and busy week in Bucharest, first, two days participating at the How To Web 2012 Conference.
Two days full of inspirational talks, success stories, pieces of advice and meeting great people, that is.

Here are a few worth-to-remember words from the speakers:

A piece of advice

• Get back on your feet and keep going! Iterate, iterate, iterate!
• Don’t be an entrepreneur for the wrong reasons!
• “Getting an investment is not a validation. Traction is.”
• “Work hard and be nice to people.”
• Keep an open position longer, instead of hiring the wrong person. Keep your criteria.
• Get a designer co-founder! 😉
• Enjoy responsibility and dedication + prototype + test + iterate often + fail fast
• The reasons for starting a company are extremely important. Big house, nice car, trophy wife or fame are not the right ones.
• Don’t follow the HIPPO (highest paid person’s opinion)
• No matter what you do, 50% of people will tell you that you are an idiot.
• Reason startups fail: believing you are further along, pre-mature scaling.
• And again, work hard!

Facts and figures

• Evernote has a very special way of thinking about the competition: “We don’t!”
• If you are the CEO of a startup, you are not at the top of everything, you are responsible for everything.
• “Just because something worked, it doesn’t mean you have more knowledge!”
• Traction is people’s time. How much time do they spend engaging with your product?
• Great entrepreneurs are: driven, analytical and GOOD with people.
• A designer can make a huge difference, but a stylist doesn’t.
• “Startups in Eastern Europe are not brave enough to tap into big problems, instead they replicate in their region.”
• The secret of Silicon Valley is “permission to fail”.
• “If it was that easy, monkeys could do our job.” Don Draper quote used.
• Startups were frequently asked “What’s your secret sauce?”
• “Big data is not about finding patterns, it’s about finding anomalies in your data.”
• TechHub Bucharest announced.
• “The cyborg: closer than you might think”.
• “Why do you rob banks? Because that’s where the money is!”

The buzz words for this edition were traction, reasons and hard work.

Startup Spotlight challenge winner from How To Web 2012 is incrediblue the “airbnb for boats”, from Greece. Congrats guys! A good example of hard work and a great pitch!
Congrats to Bogdan and the team!