It has been a slightly more calmer week here at Oxygen Accelerator compared to our previous weeks.
With ‘speed mentoring’ sessions taking a bit of a break, the teams have had more time to develop their startups taking in all the information and advice given over the past few weeks.
However, the teams aren’t free from the mentors just yet…Oh no.
On Monday we had Rob Hawkes from Mozilla in to talk about new web technologies/HTML5. If you have a bad memory like me then you can check out Rob’s presentation on here. After the presentation, Rob met up with a few of the teams to go through any questions they had.
Tuesday was another rare day here at Oxygen- rare being eerily quiet. Dubbed ‘development day’, the teams were given the time to work on their startups. It was so quiet, I feared some of them were sleeping at their desks but no, they were just hard at it. That’s what we like to see.
But as we now know, the quietness doesn’t last for long here at Oxygen Accelerator with Wednesday’s schedule jam packed with all things finance. We had Tim Powell from Minerva Angel Group, Mark from the London Stock Exchange talking about raising capital on AIM, Robbie Beak talking about investing Non Execs, Stephen from Midven talking about what VC’s want to see and Mazars talking about raising corporate finance.
Well you know what they say, ‘money talks’…. *groan*
Thursday morning saw Ian Holder from accounting firm Mazars popping in to give a presentation on Business Planning. This brought me back to my ‘business studies’ days at high school learning about SWOT analysis and breaking even. With to much emphasis on the ‘product’ sometimes you forget the importance of a business plan so this was a really beneficial talk for our teams.
Friday was another hectic day at Oxygen but a different kind of busy. In the morning we had a founder story from mentor James Leavesley. James is the co-founder of CrowdCrontolHQ which is a web-based social media management tool.
It was a really interesting talk especially as social media is something that has become so prominent in the online world recently.
After the founder story was finished it started going a bit hectic with the teams setting off for a day trip to ‘the big smoke’ aka London-but that’s another blog post….
