Connect Estonia is a non-profit organization that helps new businesses. They run what they call “springboards”, which is a meeting where they get together some experts to evaluate the future plans of a company. It’s a great way for a small company to get feedback on their plans.

Yesterday I participated to such a springboard for a company that was just created and that was in search of their strategy. I was really impressed by the quality of the panel of experts that was there (it was somehow flattering to be part of it). The discussions were very interesting and I think some great feedback and advise was given to this young company.

Among other things it was suggested to them that they need clear answers to a few important questions:

• Since they were coming from the university world, who was owning the Intellectual Property of their company?
• What is the exit strategy? How long do they want to be doing this company and how do they want to finish the adventure?
• What is the financial value of their idea?
• Is someone among the founders of the company the business manager? If not, they may need to need someone external to be this manager, as there is a need for someone to be the boss of the company.

How I ended up being in contact with Connect Estonia? Through blogging I met Justin Fidler, the president of a small software company here in Tallinn. He was involved with Connect Estonia and when they had companies that wanted to get into the embedded world, he mentioned them my name. Blogging is really getting me to meet great people in real life too.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 8th, 2005 at 4:54 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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