Startup Istanbul, the leading startup event in Eurasia was held on October 3rd to 5th. More than 100 startups from over 40 countries were selected to attend the event along with 1500 people.
The event was home to some of the prominent executives, entrepreneurs and investors from Silicon Valley and other active regions.
Startup Istanbul was organized by Etohum, the Turkish accelerator and seed investor. After a speed networking, the event got kicked off with a fireside chat with Steve Blank. The well-known serial-entrepreneur who co-founded E.piphany, talked about his past experiences on building a startup, getting investment and failures that one might encounter during the process.
Dave McClure, the founding partner of 500 Startups talked about the differences of the startup ecosystem in Silicon Valley and other active ecosystems around the world. He emphasized on the importance of local and regional markets like Turkey and MENA, adding that “You don’t need to go to Silicon Valley, but you need to get Silicon Valley to come to you”.
On a question and answer session, he talked about the vast opportunities in Iran now that the sanctions are getting lifted. “We have to wait until the rules and the regulations change for investment, then we may visit Iran in the next 3 to 6 months”.
During a panel, Christopher Schroeder, author of “Startup Rising”, addressed the ones who are thinking about investing in Iranian startups “smart people”.
Teruhide Sato, founder of Beenos; Prof. Hans Wissema, Author of ‘’Towards the Third Generation University’’; Fadi Bishara Founder & CEO Blackbox were some of the notable speakers of the event.
For the last part of the program, 15 of the selected startups which had competed in the previous days, came on the stage for the final pitch competition.
The winners were:
Taskulu, a Tehran-based startup, is a project management platform which allows users to define roles for people involved with their project. Right now, Taskulu is integrated with Trello, Dropbox and Google Drive. The app will be integrated with Github and Slack in the near future.
Overall, Startup Istanbul was organized in its best way, and did its mission by gathering the biggest network of players in the region.
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