TheStartup.eu

This is a guest post by George Tziralis, Executive Director at the Openfund, in which he will describe his experience in trying to change the status quo for startups in Greece and Europe.

The fact is, quality seed and very early stage funding is rare in Europe. At the same time, there are some people trying to change this harsh reality – and we’re happy to be among them.

The Openfund commenced it’s operations almost a year ago, trying to provide great teams with everything they need to turn at first a rough idea into a working product and eventually a vision to a successful start-up. That’s far from an easy task, but we are happy to share some progress of ours and a message that may turn out to be of interest for both aspiring entrepreneurs and the ecosystem in general. Having built what we consider to be an exemplary executive board and a capable pool of advisors and having managed to get a bank on board as our anchor investor as well as a number of individuals investors, the real challenge started.

We opened our first call for proposals for entrepreneurs to apply back in June 2009. A few months later, we had gathered applications from 20 countries and we ended up picking 4 teams to partner with. Some great stuff was in the making, and here’s some further proof in a few lines per start-up.

Listiki, a team of 3 from Cyprus and Greece, creates a wiki platform for lists, essentially providing a canvas for any type of sorted items, in a collaborative and real time way. You’ll get a sneak peek in this video.

Sportmeets, a team of 2 from Prague & Glasgow, provides a group sports planner that aims to shift the effort from organizing recreational sports into actually participating in them.

YouScan, a team of 3 from Kiev and Moscow, delivers enterprise social media monitoring and reputation management services for the Russian speaking web. Capitalizing on its local advantage, YouScan already helps dozens of enterprises to listen to their customers and react.

Fashinating, a team of 3 from Athens, delivers a suite for social fashion games. Starting from window shopping, Fashinating takes you to an addictive journey of fashion discovery, in a simple yet appealing way you haven’t experienced before.

These are our first round, already ‘graduated’, start-ups, and you should have by now a much more clear view of what we are looking for; great teams of 2-4 across Europe with an innovative idea around software, mobile and the web. We picked one more company in our second round and the call for proposals for our third round is now open, till June 30 for you to apply.

And here’s how it works. You apply by submitting your proposal in this online form. If you make it early before the deadline, you get the chance of early feedback for you to improve and resubmit. Then, we select the most appropriate board members and advisors to review your application, with all the feedback getting back to you (which is another reason to apply). The most promising submissions qualify to the next stage, where you are provided with a detailed business plan template and a couple of weeks to deliver it, while we are there to help by commenting on your early drafts. Then you have an interview with our full executive board, before we decide if you make it to the final stage, with al the selected start-ups presenting back to back in front of our investors and advisors, too.

We end up by selecting up to 5 start-ups per round of our operations, which are iterated every four months. Each one of the selected start-ups gets, on top of everything else, a small amount of 25-35k euro, in exchange of 15% of shares of the company. That’s a transparent deal, but we consider money as the least valuable part of what we bring on the table. What really matters to us is that we get to work together (no worries though, you don’t need to move to Athens, where we’re based) and help you deliver, by enabling you to quit everything else, fully focus and capitalise on your skills, team and idea and don’t waste time on unproductive activities to make your start-up happen.

Hurry up, the deadline is June 30!