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Lisbon Investment Summit, where startups should be

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Rafael Pires

Jun 9, 2015

LIS - Lisbon Investment Summit

Last June 4th and 5th I attended the Lisbon Investment Summit organized by Beta-i. Just from the lineup, it was already impressive. I can’t recall an event in Portugal with that many investors at the same place.

The summit took place at the beautiful Palácio de Pombal, and it’s not just me saying it, you can find a lot of tweets mentioning it:

https://twitter.com/writerpollock/status/606465056759521281

From the moment I stepped inside, I came across Felix Peterson, Jeremy Yap among other investors – A dream for startups looking for investment. Several interesting sessions can be highlighted:

  • “How stuff works: Venture Capital” – key investors talking about transparency, the time needed to build a company and the founders’ responsibility to do the due-diligence to know more about who they are getting married to;
  • “Live Mentoring” – some startups got feedback on stage. The main advice for all of them was to better segment and focus on the segments;
  • “Reverse Pitch with later stage VC’s” – well know VC’s pitched what they do and answered questions from the crowd. Really insightful.

https://twitter.com/pt_startups/status/606765933928042496

But in my opinion, what was priceless in this summit was the amount of networking opportunities.

The main networking area was an extremely informal garden – even being in a palace – with a live band and an environment that we can only find at traditional Portuguese celebrations. It’s hard to translate to English, but it felt like a true “Arraial”.

LIS - Garden

The garden before the beginning of the second day

The speakers were always around and it was very easy to find and interact with them, something that usually is hard to do in an event like this. I interviewed some and more news about it are coming soon.

Another important takeaway was the acknowledgment that world class VC’s such as Accel are looking to Portugal, which is good news for Portuguese Startups.

A big heads-up to Beta-i for putting together this summit full of content and opportunities for the whole startup ecosystem.

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