Openfund

To get this out of the way, we expect to deliver the first round of feedback to all applicants by Monday the 16th along with the first go no-go.

Following that, two weeks' time will be given to the teams that don’t have a business plan to write one. As always, if you feel comfortable about your idea you may skip ahead and start doing that based on our guide.

We thank all the entrepreneurs that shared their ideas and aspirations with us and vouch to make the best we can out of them whether we end up working together or not. We pride in offering feedback to every founder, on both what we liked and what we didn’t like. Even if you don’t end up being selected you will know what (in our humble opinion) you should work on improving.

With the 5th call having just closed, we wanted to take a look backwards and look at what we have achieved in the Openfund.

The following graph shows the accumulation of applications over time. Even though we advise that you send these in early, similarly to every previous round, the founders took the maximum allowed time to refine their submission.

It also corroborates to the myth of Greeks doing things “last minute” -- even though all countries seem to be trigger happy in the last two days.

Two also interesting stats is the percentage of foreign submissions. After these 5 rounds and accounting for regression it’s safe to say that 41% of applicants come from the rest of Europe and 8% from beyond. We’re flattered by that, especially given that we don’t actively promote outside Greece.

We’re also proud to have proven that we’re more than interested in investing in any country where a team of talented founders lives.

Another tidbit worth mentioning is the (lack of) evolution with respect to the skillset of the people that are interested in seed funding. The above bars reveal the self-evaluation of people with respect to certain skills.

Clearly this dispels the mythical geek in a garage startup. The teams that apply are mature, well rounded and become even more so over time.

Future updates regarding all those that participated in this round will arrive at their inboxes.

round v, selection

The Openfund is excited to announce the opening of the call for proposals for our fourth round of operations. The reopening of the call coincides with the beginning of our second year of operations and the announcement of a significantly improved proposition for aspiring entrepreneurs.

Specifically, the range of funding is almost doubled to €30.000-50.000 up from €25.000-35.0000, while keeping the equity at 15%. Also based on a significant number of additions to our advisor board, we are now able to provide much more mentoring time and networking to all projects.

The annual structure is also adjusted, reducing the number of calls for proposals to 2 per year, a winter and a summer one, during which up to 7 proposals will be admitted. This also allows us to extend the incubation time significantly and also the time we can devote to our actual participation in each and every project, including mentoring time, business development and others.

The call for proposals will remain open for almost 2.5 months, with the deadline on November 30, 2010. Aspiring entrepreneurs are strongly encouraged to submit their proposals much earlier, to receive timely feedback, improve and resubmit before the deadline. This will significantly increase your chances of proceeding to the next stages of our selection process.

You may apply today by filling the form here. You are also encouraged to take a close look at our process, the FAQ  and best practices before proceeding with your application.

The selection process will begin on December 1st. Extensive reviews will be provided to all the applicants, while selected applications will proceed and helped to prepare a full business plan, before the next steps of the selection process including an interview and presentation. Final decisions will be made in January 10, 2011, with a 5-month incubation period starting right afterwards.

We look forward to putting our resources into turning your project ideas to successful businesses.

openfundiv, cfp, applications

In a rather complicated Saturday we held our interview day. To give you some insights on what’s happened behind the curtains, let us share here a few more details regarding the procedure.

We managed to perform within a day interviews for all the selected teams, which consisted of any mix of people with physical or virtual presence. We also had to enable partners of ours who reside in different countries to observe and directly interact with the other participants. From a technical perspective, this meant two screens, one for the presentation, one for the video of the participants and of course voice for the interaction.

The participating teams generally belonged to any of these four groups:

• Entirely psysical, ie teams from Greece, which were requested to be there.
• Mostly physical, with 1 or 2 members that were participating from abroad.
• Mostly virtual, with just 1 member presenting live.
• Entirely virtual, where we had screen sharing, and a voice/video call.

Having performed in this kind of setup for 10 hours and with the entire Executive Board including the participants of each team, I think it’s honest to say that this kind of operation would never be possible outside the confines of a purely tech oriented organization.

Each of the teams got the chance to present and showcase or demo their idea in front of our Board, while also having an extended Q&A session. We are happy with the results, as we believe that, through the initial application, business plan and interview process, we’ve formed a clear view of each one of the applications, enabling what we consider a robust judgement.

That said, the teams securing a ticket to the next phase have been already informed, while we’ll also put time on providing further details to the teams that didn’t make it, trying to improve their value proposition, and chances to succeed in a future Openfund call or elsewhere. Let us also mention that to us, being entrusted with each one of the applications containing your dreams was an honour. We tried hard to repay you for this trust by replying back with reviews of on average 3 times the extent of the original idea submission, from a number of executives and advisors.

For those who succeeded getting that far, we will be working closely overtime to iron out their business plans and demos in order to improve their chances of getting finally selected, while more details on the procedure and the forthcoming selection eevent will follow soon.

Onic is presently focused on other matters that require his undivided attention. Consequently, he decided to resign from the OpenFund as he cannot devote the time he considers necessary to its affairs.

Onic thanks everyone that has helped-start this much needed ecosystem to Greek entrepreneurs and looks forward to maintaining a relationship with OpenFund’s members in the years to come.

Onic’s resignation was accepted by the executive board in terms of mutual understanding. The board thanks him for his considerable contribution in shaping the Openfund to what it is today, wishes him the best with his endeavors and looks forward to future cooperation.

Today we are announcing two partnerships that further expand the toolset of skills that our startups can tap into.

The first, is the addition of the the team of CSS3.grdesign experts.

CSS3.gr will work together with the selected start-ups to secure excellent  results from a design and user experience perspective. We really look forward to the results.

To further highlight the impact of our cooperation, we are equally excited to share with you that we are already working with CSS3.gr on a new version of the Openfund website, which is about to be released in the following weeks.

The second is a partnership with the Christopoulos and Associateslaw firm.

Having collaborated with the firm in the past, we are very pleased as they really get information technology, and as such we believe that they will be able to provide better services to the companies that we invest in.

The firm will advise on such issues as intellectual property protection and access, commerce law as well as day to day issues that arise.

As with all partnerships the companies that we invest in retain the right to use or not use the services of our partners. But should they choose to use them, we have secured that these will come at a reduced cost and handled in more friendly terms overall.

Persistent in our commitment to maintain a boardof trully commited and active advisors we are happy to announce the participations of several people that have undertaken this responsibility.

In this sprint we have mainly tried to establish more connections with people that hold experience with more practical skills rather than strategy and business positioning.

As always we will keep tending to the pool of available advice. The list of additions is after the jump.

More...

executiveboard

The OpenFund has launched - we are now accepting proposals! Feel free to check the various sections of our main website for details regarding the OpenFund's operation - and if you have any questions don't hesitate to contact us!

call, open, start