Invest Horizon Coaching Academy at Startup Bootcamp Athens

 The major cultural venue of Technopolis set the ideal stage for the Startup Bootcamp Athens on 1-3 October 2015. InvestHorizon hosted a coaching academy on the second day of the bootcamp with 14 participants and 4 coaches joining the in-depth workshops and one2one mentoring. Overall, the three-day entrepreneurial venturing event featured more than 70 startup entrepreneurs from 10 European countries, 43 startup-teams as well as more than 15 investors and experts from both sides of the Atlantic.

The participants were engaged in multiple interactions full of venturing opportunities, inspiration, and knowledge. They enjoyed numerous networking opportunities, knowledge games, pitching sessions, workshops, and inspiring panel discussions.

The InvestHorizon coaching academy for early stage projects took place on the second day of the bootcamp with a session on raising capital for startups and founders and a second session on pitching effectively, both organized by Corinna Voss of bwcon GmbH.

After the workshops, the participants moved to the networking area for the one2one coaching sessions. The experts, among them Joaquin Soucheiron, Corinna Voss and Robert Koning from Baden-Württemberg, briefed the start-ups on topics such as marketing, the overall business and financing strategy, growth, internationalization and intellectual property in 20 minute sessions.

Furthermore, the programme included additional workshops on issues such as financing, building a digital business, principles of growing a company, sales and customer excellence, growing a customer base, and innovation management. The workshops were complemented by panel discussions on “Choosing the right Angel Investor” and “The Dealing Room, a virtual negotiation”.
In addition, entrepreneurs were invited to practice their creativity and collaboration skills in games like “The Reverse Engineering Challenge”. It got even more challenging in the pitching sessions: the participants had to demonstrate their business acumen and presentation skills in a startup pitch battle, in speed pitching sessions, and at investor pitches.

Networking opportunities and personal meetings with investors and business experts rounded of an inspiring event, which was hosted by Greek startup accelerator Metavallon. The venue Technopolis is an industrial museum and a major cultural venue at the very center of Athens, in Gazi next to Keramikos. It has been in operation since 1999 and is situated in the city’s former gasworks which were founded in 1857, occupying an area of about 30.000 m2. Numerous exhibitions, seminars, music concerts and other cultural activities take place in the grounds, bringing out the lively and creative atmosphere of the space and area.

InvestHorizon would like to thank in particular Metavallon, the FI Business consortium and the whole startup bootcamp team for the fruitful cooperation.


InvestHorizon is looking forward to welcoming you to our next Coaching Academies, you can see the upcoming dates here. bwcon GmbH will be organizing the Finance and Law Day in Stuttgart on December 3rd 2015. For information on the InvestHorizon project and the upcoming events, visit our website http://www.investhorizon.eu or follow us on Twitter at @InvestH2020. 

Corinna Voss, bwcon GmbH, Stuttgart