We recently ran our first start up competition in Ukraine and while I was aware for at least a decade that Ukraine is an excellent place to outsource software development I was blown away by how sophisticated the offerings have become. One of our longtime MiniBar members Nick Black – who launched his company CloudMade at MiniBar more than ten years ago and exited successfully recently – now has over 120 top engineers in Kyiv (which btw is a very welcoming place and full of surprisingly stylish bars and restaurants and the city has lovely beaches).

We partnered for the competition with two very distinct companies who help tech companies at different stages. One of our partners is Cloud9Solutions who go beyond the traditional outsourcing model where you basically get product/software development cheaper than in lets say London, but you don’t have a dedicated team. They specialise in what has become known as ‘outstaffing’ as they hire a team for you, supervise it, do initial scoping and operate everything from payroll to booking holidays (though they also do more traditional outsourced dev projects). Interestingly they have also developed a specialised software platform for managing software teams and HR processes including billing called PeopleForce (get in touch if you want a demo and a beta account). Another USP of Cloud9Soluitions is that it is managed by an Australian chap called Andrew Cetinic who landed 3 years ago in Kyiv and built the business up from scratch, which helps a lot with bridging the different business cultures.

Our other partner is Alcor BP run by two Berkley law school educated brothers called Dmitry and Sergey Ovarchenko. They have taken the outstaffing model to the next level and essentially build whole back offices and R&D solutions for tech companies that need to rapidly scale up. Jokingly it left me with the impression that the future of tech start ups in a place like London is to have a couple of desks in a WeWork and everything from marketing to sales and development will be in Kyiv, which turns the traditional way of thinking about outsourcing on its head. They operate a whole keyturn solution: from finding office space, hiring talent, payroll to managing visas and every other legal aspect of setting up in Kyiv. We visited their offices and then went upstairs where we ended up on a floor full of developers who exclusively worked for a Silicon Valley company and the place in terms of style and vibe could have been in Shoreditch or the bay area.

With both partners we did a workshop as part of London Tech Week and a great case study was provided by the CTO of People.ai a Silicon Valley company funded by star investors including Andreesen Horovitz and YCombinator. In short they used Alcor BP to set up a whole back office/R&D operation in Kyiv in the presentation below they summarise their experience, lessons learned and why they would recommend this to others.

And here the Alcor BP presentations:

If any of you are interested in speaking to the companies or want to get involved in a future start up competition, or come to Kyiv let us know. We are also planning a tech tour to Kyiv for September.

We had a superby turnout on the sunniest and warmest February day ever recorded in the UK for our first CBD/Cannabis Start Up Accelerator day: 60 entrepreneurs, manufacturers, exporters, growers, investors and turned up at 2pm on the dot. And to our surprise we had a very international audience with attendees coming from as far as Greece, Israel and Canada. Attendees immediately started exchanging ideas and experiences and then we had some great  workshop sessions followed by some drinks and more networking. And thanks to all the great feedback we will be hosting another event in the near future.

Below we are sharing slide decks from some of the highlights from the event.

Industry & Consumer Trends (Pulsar)

Distributing CBD In The UK, Lessons From The Trenches (CannAmplify)

Investment Workshop (SeedLegals)

This month we are focussing on the much talked about and hyped  Bitcoin phenomenon. But in good, old MiniBar fashion we are more interested in the technology and its potential for disruptive innovation than the media frenzy about stolen bitcoins etc..

In that vein the discussions will centre around the theme ‘Bitcoin might be a bad currency, but perhaps it is a great, open financial network that can disrupt the financial system”?

To help us with the event we have invited  Paul Gordon from the London Bitcoin Meet-Up to be the co-curator.  You can RSVP here.

Program:

Bitcoin 101

Long standing CoinScrum member, Darragh Browne will give us a brief overview describing how the Bitcoin protocol works and how the underlying technology has the potential to disrupt much more than legacy payment networks alone.

Cointouch

Chris Beach from Cointouch will present their platform that utilises users’ extended Facebook networks to allow them to advertise buy and sell orders for digital currencies with settlement based on the trust of their peers.

Satoshi Point

Jonathan Harrison will talk about the cash-to-bitcoin ATM’s that are now operating in London and other locations around the world, simplifying the often convoluted process of buying and selling digital currencies.

Tibdit

With digital currencies offering a potential mechanism for making making online micropayments viable at last, Iain Cresswell will take us through their Tibdit’s approach to tackling this perennial problem.

Cryptopay.me

Although the concept of Bitcoin and similar value-transfer protocols may offer us the ability to bypass financial intermediaries, the reality is that merchants want simple, safe and secure solutions for processing their payments. Cryptopay.me is a UK based digital currency processor that simplifies the task of accepting bitcoins, issuing receipts and converting revenue into the currency of the merchant’s choice should they wish to do so.

Dmitry Gunyashov will discuss the trials and tribulations of bringing his product to market in what is still a very grey regulatory environment.

XBTerminal

With the technology still being so raw, a whole host of applications and services will have to be layered on top of it if we are to see wide scale adoption of stateless alternative currencies.

Usability will need to match the options that we already have at hand so Aleks Nowak will present XBTerminal, a first-in-kind NFC enabled touch pad that makes spending bitcoins as easy as using your Oyster card.

MiniBarCamp Ravensbourne from MiniBar on Vimeo.

Get the Money – half day workshop

12.30 to 5pm – Friday 27th of September

Where: Mother at the Trampery

92 St John Street, Clerkenwell, London EC1V 4JY

Why?

For Start-Ups and small companies growth capital is what is often hard to come by. Venture and angel capital is often the right option, though many entrepreneurs find it hard to access.

This is why GrowthAccelerator, Mother and MiniBar have teamed up for a series of workshops covering topics such as, ‘how to pitch your idea’, ‘an insight into the investment landscape’ and ‘the role creative branding plays in growing companies’.

What?

We are offering 20 companies the chance to attend a half day of workshops Mother at the Trampery on St John Street. Over the course of the afternoon you will learn the ins and outs of VC and angel investment, meet a series of experienced VC’s, angels and successful entrepreneurs.

If you want to attend please email Katie Lewis – k.lewis@e-synergy.com – a one page executive summary, which must include your company name, registration number and telephone number. She will then inform you, if you have been selected to attend.

Outcomes

Since joining our Get The Money workshops many entrepreneurs have moved on to raise investment and grow their businesses.  To name a few Vonacall have gone on to secure proof of concept funding, Zaawi were accepted on to Accelerator Academy, and SharepointCity have secured a new contract. Din Dins is now selling their healthy pet food supplement at Harrods and Model Two Zero has raised multiple rounds of investment and is employing over 10 staff in Shoreditch – coincidentally at Mother at the Trampery where we will have the next workshop.

We have just been sorting through years of back ups and we found all these wonderful old photos from MiniBar 7 years ago. What a sweet, young group of real geeks we were… actually some of you are still coming now! At this point we were still housed in the Truman Brewery… oh the nostalgia!

Even back then were were on the money and always asking the most important questions. Check out this MiniBar interview about Open Source Sex. Genius. And look at the interviewer, its our favourite friend Pete from CodePositive.

I have a really enthusiastic assistant this morning writing this post- and I just want to say – if there are any typos, blame Ronald!

As always we had a brilliant night of internet fun at our Northern Ireland MiniBar last night.The NISPO (The Northern Ireland Spin Out) Fund brought along six young start-ups who presented their businesses to the MiniBar crowd.

Each of the presenters have been supported by the NISPO Fund either through grant aid (of up to £40k), equity investment (of up to £250k) and/or mentoring & advice.

Our Presenters:

You can see them waiting in the wings in the photo above.

Mike Bowman – E-Synergy Ltd & Director of the NISPO Fund 

Aaron Taylor – Goprezzo
Breda Doherty – Hubb it
Vincent Breslin – Sians Plan
Chris Johnston – Adoreboard
Patrick Cutliffe  – Choorpy

And I have to say that these Irish folk make amazing presenters! Quick, concise, funny and lots of enthusiastic clapping. It was really great. I forgot to charge my camera so thank you all of you kind people who sent me pictures from last night.

See you next month!