News

Lithuanian startups hacked investors’ lounge in Web Summit in Dublin
2014
Nov 11

How not to get lost in the crowd of 22 thousand attendees and 2 thousand startups and to get in contact with the right investors from the top level VC funds? Last week startups participating in the Startup Lithuania Roadshow 2014, powered by Enterprise Lithuania, attended and survived one of the largest tech conferences in the world – Web Summit, held in Dublin for the fifth year in a row. Check out the photos here.

Lithuanians, willing to stand out from the crowd of two thousand startups introducing their products at the conference, made the very right decision to start getting ready far in advance. The Lithuanian startups arranged individual meetings with the investors and potential partners attending the conference and reserved some of their time, they also made the lists of people they wanted to spot in the crowd. Each of 7 participants of the Startup Lithuania Roadshow 2014 spent one day showing off their companies at their stands, while one team was selected to pitch its business on the stage. 

“Dublin is the third stop of the Startup Lithuania Roadshow 2014. The participants have already tried different forms of pitching their businesses: they participated with investors at prearranged meetings in Tel Aviv, visited the offices of VC’s in London, while in Dublin they not only attended the pre-planned meetings but also made an effort to spot the required people in the huge crowd and talk to them. This kind of experience makes the startups stronger and will come very handy in the future, in particular, when visiting the last stop of the project in San Francisco boasting the largest concentration of investors and startups willing to disrupt the markets,” says Dovydas Varkulevičius, Head of the Entrepreneurship department of Enterprise Lithuania.

The conference held in Dublin was attended by other Lithuanian startups as well, including the representatives of venture capital funds and technology enthusiasts from Lithuania. Founder of “YPlan” Rytis Vitkauskas had the floor at one of the conference stages.

Below you can find Dublin visit impressions and comments from Lithuanian startups:

Tadas Deksnys, CEO of Inside Warehouse:

Web Summit with 22,000 attendees turns Dublin into an epicenter of startups, investors and geeks coming from all over the world. Next time it should last for at least 8 days.

Artūras Jonkus, CEO of Rotten Wifi:

Web Summit for us was a good place to discuss potential partnerships with other startups. We hope that this will grow into good partnerships in the future. 

Šarūnas Legeckas, CEO of Place I Live:

Web Summit is an awesome and huge tech event that blows your mind. It gives you a chance to meet tech stars such as Drew Houston, CEO of Dropbox and Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal. This gives a lot of strength and motivation to create and make this world a better place.

Simona Andrijauskaitė, CMO of Cloud Mic:

Web Summit appeared to be the highlight of the Startup Lithuania Roadshow for CloudMic until now: new potential clients and partners, wide range of investors, successful startup exhibition, expanded network and few interesting offers. Thanks Enterprise Lithuania for making this happen! 

Mindaugas Zagorskis, CEO of Pipelinepharma:

I found Web Summit a mega large event. I marked for myself that I should have more introductions and recommendations 1-2 weeks before the event, in order to be successful with the networking with the VC’s during the event. 

Edvinas Bartkus, CTO of PlateCulture:

Web Summit Dublin has been a great event to expand the network with potential partners or service providers. The presence of almost all possible startups from different countries allowed starting the conversation about exchanging services. Hopefully, introducing ourselves to some high profile people will lead to follow-ups that eventually will become great friendship with potential advisors. Whatsoever, everything was possible in one day, actually.

Rytis Laurinavičius, CEO of Soundest:

Hacking investors lounge was both useful and fun. We really worked as a team and even were named "Lithuanian mafia" by few investors.