500 Startups Week 6 Wrap. 1.5 Months in!

Personal Log earth date 11-16-5774

Unfortunately I missed some of the activities this week due to intensive preparations for the Phocuswright Travel Innovation Summit #TIS13. OLSET is one of a few startups selected to present at this prestigious event. You can see more details here: http://phocuswrightconference.com/ . This means we are spending next week in Florida so the week 7 wrap will be written by guest contributors.

OK, now that’s out of the way, let’s talk about week 6.

As always the weeks kicked off with the batch meeting. This one had a somber note as it was decided that we will not be partnering with Angellist on a fund for the batch. Luckily most of the companies in the batch are OK with this.

Here’s Christine Tsai delivering the news…

The great mentor sessions continued after that. Marvin Liao shared insights on partnering with large organizations like Yahoo based on his vast experience.

On Monday afternoon we were visited by an group of entrepreneurs from Korea who pitched their companies at 500 Startups. Very interesting!

On Tuesday we had a few meetings in the city in the morning and made it into 500 just in time for a noon presentation by Reddit. The provided a lot of information about the Reddit platform, how we can get started with it and the benefits of marketing with them.

On Wednesday we met with Softlayer to learn more about what they can offer us both in terms of hosting and other sales & marketing support.

I have not shared information about Rewardli yet but it is a great program. Whether you are a 500 Startups company or not you can get a lot of value from this platform. One example is that we get free hosting for a couple of years with AWS, MS Bizspark, Softlayer etc. There are many other benefits for startups. You can learn more here: http://www.rewardli.com

We’ll see if we can work with Softlayer as we have PCI compliance at OLSET and AWS offers a platform that supports the compliance.

We had a hump day happy hour at 500 S on Wed afternoon but I missed it as I went to the opening night events for the MEF global forum. 500’s very own Parker Thompson was on a panel at the conference & he invited both OLSET and Partender to present at the event.

The Wed evening reception was held at the Mozilla offices in San Francisco. Great view of the Bay Bridge (from the other side of the view from my house) and the Ferry building:

 

Quick break from the week’s events at 500. Quite a few people apparently care what Dave McClure is up to as he hasn’t appeared in my posts in the last few weeks. Well, turns out Dave is hopping around the world with Geeks On A Plane #GOAP. This week he shared great views from Dubai & Abu Dabi. Here are some awesome pictures that he shared.

 

We hope he actually makes it back from there… 🙂

We now continue with our regular programming.

Thursday morning we presented at the MEF forum. You can find my slides here: http://www.slideshare.net/bashvitz/olset-presentation-at-mef-nov-2013

This was followed by the investor panel talking about their focus & interest.

Ryan Domico from Crocodoc came to visit and have lunch with us on Thursday.

He shared some of his knowledge and experience starting a company, growing it and being acquired.

After that we met with Aaron Batalion from Living Social. Aaron had some GREAT insights on testing marketing ideas and validating distribution options without development.

Our mentor meeting with Aaron was followed by him sharing insights & knowledge in a fireside chat.

We worked from the city on Friday and I know we missed a few things but we had to prepare for the conference next week and the launch with our partner Any.Do next week.

The week actually wrapped up with a mentor session with Omer Perchik the CEO of Any.Do. Very timely 🙂

That’s it for this week. Amyn (My Co-Founder and OLSET’s CTO) and I are off to Florida tomorrow morning.

Wish us luck.

Have a great week.

Gadi