A number of aspiring entrepreneurs will be getting together at Smart City Malta this week for the end of Startup Weekend Next, a five-week programme during which they were trained and mentored to get their ideas ready and pitch for seed capital.

The first Startup Weekend in Malta was held in June and winning team Crwd Gift competed against six other teams.

The ideas ranged from the sustainable conservation of the Maltese chicken and creating an online platform for the organisation of film nights in people’s homes, to building a web tool providing intelligent, visual, financial analytics. The winning team’s idea Gift will facilitate and improve gift buying through crowd-sourcing.

Startup co-founder Jaroslaw Bialek is delighted to have discovered Malta. He first read about Smart City in a 2008 article which discussed the IT infrastructure and its role in promoting SMEs. He felt that Malta would be the ideal place to launch a Startup programme. It took him four years but the programme was launched last year with Martin Leonard and attracted its first participants in summer 2013.

Smart City Malta came on board almost immediately – but they were all unsure what the response would be.

“Startup was already well established elsewhere. But it was completely new for Malta. Would the Maltese be ready to try something that was so new and unknown?” he said.

But the response was tremendous and the Startup Weekend was a great success, immersing the teams – often made up of no more than three people – into an intense programme of mentors and interaction.

Several teams are already developing ideas, which are vetted by a panel of experts including Kevin Valenzia on PwC and assessed for viability for venture capital funding, before moving on to the incubation stage.

They will be meeting this weekend for Startup Next, where they will be introduced to business angels and partners – including foreigners who are intrigued to find out what the Malta buzz is all about.

“If the ideas are good, then the funding will follow,” Mr Bialek said. “And there is no cap on the amount of funding. If the idea merits it, then the funding will be there.”

The teams with the most promising ideas will also attend the Startup roadshow in Berlin, where they will meet key players to whom they can make their pitch.

“These are very influential people who will be able to use their networks of contacts to put them in touch with people who can make their ideas a reality by offering their infrastructure,” he said.

What makes a suitable idea? Mr Bialek said that there were a number of factors that are taken into consideration. The potential market was a key factor: the idea should be one that would generate interest on a large scale in global markets – rather than in a limited context.

However, while a return on investment was also important, it was not necessarily a short-term requirement as the investors are willing to wait for growth.

“We don’t expect the teams to end up with a market-ready product or service. And they don’t even need to come up with a prototype,” he said.

“The important thing is that the teams have done good research. Is the idea the optimal solution? The optimal approach? We expose them to customers too so that they can get feedback. We are not there to do this for the teams – but we do provide the teams with the tools to do so themselves.”

Teams pay to join the Startup programme – but this was heavily subsidised thanks to sponsorship from Smart City Malta. Even this nominal fee will eventually be refunded to teams which show commitment.

“For us, the satisfaction comes from seeing how many of the teams get funding, how many actually launch their idea, and how many are successful,” he said.

What is Startup Weekend?

Startup Weekend, founded in 2011, is an intense 54-hour event that brings together a global network of passionate leaders and entrepreneurs.

This not-for-profit event is a weekend-long, hands-on, fun experience where current and aspiring entrepreneurs can find out if their start-up ideas are viable, while getting the full start-up experience themselves. To date, over 1,000 Startup Weekends have been held in all major cities of the world, helping over 30,000 entrepreneurs in 10,000 new start-ups.

The Startup Weekend Next programme is one of 21 worldwide editions this autumn. Next is intended to help the teams and other budding entrepreneurs become better prepared to build successful start-ups by providing experiential and action-oriented entrepreneurial education – as well as to get the teams ready to pitch for seed capital.

The programme will be followed by a Berlin roadshow between November 18 and 24, for the teams who are ready to meet the equity providers.

Next is open to all interested start-up teams, both those who attended the June Startup Weekend and new ones.

Details and more information may be obtained from http://www.swnext.co/events/malta-next .