Education Ecosystem Blog

Here at Livecoding.tv we’re lucky enough to be involved with European Pioneers, an accelerator company that provides start ups with funding, training and state of the art technology to allow the business to reach its potential. Every so often they hold training days in Berlin, where they’re based, and our co-founders Jamie and Michael attended one recently. Co-ordinator of the European Innovation Hub at European Pioneers, Ayah Halilah, kindly provided us with some photos of the guys during the event and Jamie sat down with me to fill me in on what they got up to.

^{Michael & Jamie meeting with a mentor}

 Don: So you went to the European Pioneers Training Days the other week – can you tell us a little bit more about who they are?

Jamie: Sure. They’re essentially a program funded by the EU commission; An accelerator program to promote fast and high-growth technology business in Europe.

D: And what’s their relationship with Livecoding.tv?

J: We were fortunate enough to be accepted into their inaugural program at the end of last year. As such, we’re in the first batch that they’re supporting, and we’re one of ten start ups working with them currently.

D: What did the the Training Days involve you doing?

J: So basically, it was spread out over three days and involved lectures, advice and meetings with mentors and investors. They told us how we could maximize every step of our future plans, how we could refine our business model and how to take Livecoding.tv to the next level through inspiring us to push on.

They’re also key proponents of Fiware, a software that the EU has developed. They want to test it out on real companies, and so we presented a report on our use of one of the Fiware modules, our thoughts on it and how we’re going to proceed to implement it in the business.

D: What was your schedule while you were there?

J: It was quite varied, although every day started with a lecture. The first was on Innovative Business Models, the second on Important KPIs to Measure Your Start Up and the third on Good User Interface/User Experience. They were thought-provoking and massively inspired both of us. We started to think afresh about the way we were looking at the business which was great stimulus for us.

They were then followed by individual, one-on-one mentoring sessions with different people, which was personally my favorite part of the process as we really got to talk in detail about Livecoding.tv.

After that we’d pop out for lunch, although it wasn’t much of a break as we were in the middle of ramping up preparation for launching Livecoding.tv and so we were working throughout. Wednesday was probably the busiest day of my life!

D: What are the main things you took away from the Training Days, personally?

J: Well we got some fantastic feedback on the business model and our plans for the future. We also got some great insight into problem solving and overall we had a really positive response to how we intended to move forward with Livecoding.tv.

D: How was the social side of the event?

J: We went for dinner out in the evenings which was brilliant. We got to know everyone a bit better and it’s always great to be surrounded by impressive people. Quite inspiring really.

D: Pleased to be working with European Pioneers?

J: Delighted.

D: So where next for Livecoding.tv?

J: Well we’ll be ramping up private beta and then taking it from there! The future is looking bright and we’ve got a lot of people coming on board. Exciting times!