Thinking global is not an option for startups anymore
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Alex aka Chief WOWness+
CEO and Founder of Press42.com, a site that wants to bring startups to the right bloggers, founder at Inkzee.com, co-founder and curator of Tetuan Valley, an international startup incubator based in Madrid, startup mentor at HackFWD, Springboard, Seedcamp, Wise Guys or Huge Things, partner at Okuri Ventures, Sandbox network Madrid Ambassador, Global Shaper by WEF and Startup Digest Madrid curator.
We just got back from Poland were we were invited to give a talk at one of the largest investment forums in Poland, the Satus VC investment forum. It’s been a very interesting trip. We were initially connected with them in San Francisco and we had a long conversation on the need of getting European companies outside their local boundaries.
Satus VC runs 3 different incubator programs across Poland and as such, it has a very large pool of startups in its portfolio. Because they touch many fields, they have very different types of companies, some of which have global goals in sight. And as such, they asked us to collaborate with them in aiding these startups when it comes to communicating and going global.
So we delivered a first talk on the matter that judging by the feedback we got from many attendees, it was very well received and it nailed down the major problems Polish, and most definitely, most Easter European companies are experiencing in terms of market location.
We can’t stress how important it is for European companies to break the local barriers and start thinking in a global way from day one. Most people would mistake thinking global with going international. While it might seem similar, one is a probable consequence of the other. Having a global mindset implies that the company operates on the global market, it has operations, transactions, advisors or customers from all over the world. In most cases, this type of mentality enables the founders to open subsidiary corporations or branches in different countries, most typical for startups, that would be either London or San Francisco, that’s going international. Nevertheless, some companies don’t need to open commercial branches everywhere but just on specific locations.
Our hope is to keep educating and helping startups to change that mindset, to change their communication strategy and concept and to learn how to deal with doing business in different markets.
The following are the slides from the talk, feel free to take a look and we’ll eventually upload the recording of the session too, so stay tuned.
