Last week Madrid received for 3 days the South Summit in one of the most emblematic monuments in town: the Las Ventas bullring.

South Summit is an event organized by Spain Startup with the goal of showcasing the startup talent and the existing opportunities in Southern Europe. The event brought together startups, investors and some leading corporations from Southern Europe, the Mediterranean and Latin America.

Between talks on relevant topics for entrepreneurs, and workshops on practical tools, a startup competition took place, with 100 promising startups selected among almost 3000 projects registered on B2B, B2C, Energy & Industry, High Tech and Biomed-Digital Health.

Even modestly, Portugal was present at some points of the event.

On the Innovation Stage, Inês Silva (Startup Pirates) and Pedro Rocha Vieira (Beta-i), joined Paolo Lombardi (Trento Rise, Italy) and Alex Barrera (Press 42, Tech.eu, Spain) to talk about building bright startup ecosystems.

Some interesting outcomes from there:

• As startups have more and more difficulty in finding technical people to develop their products, the panel predicts that with time, that difficulty will be on finding business and marketing people to support the project’s growth;
• To have an ecosystem in Europe, where investment between countries is a reality, there must be a bigger standardization of laws, for example, in the legal forms of the companies;
• To the ones that want to start and build startup ecosystems, the most important is to bring people together and don’t ask for permission.

At the Startup Competition, you could find 4 Portuguese startups: CoolFarm (B2B), Shipizy (B2C), Tuizzi (B2B) and Uniplaces (B2C).

PHC, the Portuguese management software provider with presence in Portugal, Spain, Angola and Mozambique, also had a spot at the South Summit Marketplace and at the Startup School, showing their will to support startups.

The South Summit highlights the relevance that Southern startups are gaining in the European scene. Given the developments we’ve been assisting in Portugal lately, we hope to see a stronger Portuguese presence there the next year.