Programme: Visegrad Fund
Venue: Szeged, Hungary
Dates: 26-30 March 2019
Participants: Martin Šebesta, Elizaveta Nechaeva, Vilém Obrátil, Jan Váša
Please read the info-pack
Hosting organisation: Gyorsan Energikusan Extrémen Kódoló Club Egyesület/GYEEK Club Association
Participating countries: Poland, Slovakia, Czech Republic, Hungary, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Macedonia and Slovenia
Project report:
Idea Challenge 2019 – Do you know what is Pitching about?
So it begins, 5 participants for Czech rep. are heading to Sheged, placed in very south of Hungary. As one of them, I had no idea about city, which name is in my language “Segedín”. That is a same name as kind of typical czech food, that we used to eat for lunch in basic school times. Well, so what to expect?
More excited I was about the project, which was called Idea Challenge. The name is promising something really creative and about that I was right.
In really begining we found acommodation placed in center of Sheged in nice hotel. Program started just same day that we arrived. We have been doing some hard “Get know each other”, cause there were more than 80 people from different countries such Czech republic (obviously), Slovakia, Poland, Bosna & Hercegovina, Croatia, Macedonia, Hungary, Slovenia, Kosovo, sry if I forget someone. Later at evening we made a groups and finaly I got a point what is the project really about. In that 4 days we should prepare ourselfs for pitching. To be honest I did not know this word before, so I will explain it here. Just imagine, that you have a great idea how to make the world a better place to live, or just some another virtual gold mine, but you have something missing. The missing thing is actually engine of the world – money. Well so pitching is simply presenting your idea to people who have money, or lets say investors. And in case that you are sucesfull, you can run your idea with their support. Interesting isnt it?
If you now expect that we gonna work whole days on this idea – no, it was not like that. Actually we have been throught very interesting companies, such as EPAM or LogMeIn, maybe you know Hamachi app, used by gamers, like me in past. There I have learnt that Hamachi was originally for a different usage. WOW, but I would say, it was really interesting. From local stuff we have been also throught local transportation company, there we saw how they are rebuilting old buses (made in Czech 🙂 and also we had some interesting presentations about electricity in local transport. At the end I should mention, that we have learnt a lot of about start-ups, also we visit some local ones, most of founders of this project were actually owners.
So we have been learning and preparing ourselfs for last day, which was the day of big competition – pitching in front of real investors. We started like that people with ideas were presenting the idea and people without ideas could join to their team. I left my idea about big goose farm and support idea about social network for musicians, which was closer to me. We have called ourselfs Music Mates! and had whole afternoon for making our idea alive together with the presentation. Pitching time was just 3 minutes, as much as I remember. And there were really a lot of teams with great ideas.
I am quite sure that our pitching was the best one, but we did not win, instead of it has won the platform for housekeeping or babysiting. Winners got 1000€ in cash and I hope that they used it for their dreams, that guys from Sarajevo were really handy.
We took from Idea Challenge a lot of interesting ideas and learnt a lot of usefull things. I am still in touch with Music Mates and I hope that in future the musicians can find and register to our page, helping them with networking.
Cheers
Martin Šebesta
