Hy! Berlin startup competition

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.
Post category
events

08 Jan

You think it's good?

I tend to be quite bullish about startup competitions, mostly because so many of them are done really wrong. But I have to say, I’m excited to see what the hy! Berlin team is pulling off.

To start with, they’re offering the winners a prize of €15,000 plus several services, including PR packages, courtesy of Piâbo, worth another €15,000 and mentoring at Hub:raum worth over €15,000. Also, as a good startup program, they’re flying the winners to Silicon Valley for a week. To be honest, what I really think is extremely valuable isn’t the monetary prize, or the trip, but the crowd.

hy! Berlin gets ready for their 2013 startup competition in Berlin

The 12 finalists of the startup competition will pitch an audience of 150 highly selected entrepreneurs and investors, including people like Jawed Karim (founder of YouTube), MG Siegler (partner at CrunchFund), Paul Singh (founder of 500 startups), Mathias Doepfner (CEO of Axel Springer), Esther Dyson (founder of EDventure), Alexis Ohanian (founder of Reddit) or Om Malik (founder of GigaOM and partner at True Ventures).

I think the winner of the previous 2012 edition says it all:

“hy! was an amazing experience and helped us accelerate our business a lot. We have met investors & press and got more exposure and feedback than we could have ever hoped for.” – Evgeni Kouris, founder of Toywheel

Startups can apply in two categories:

Alpha competition: Present your product idea or prototype to the international public
Launch Competition: Launch your product, an open beta version or a significant product feature to the public

The startup competition will consist of a four minute pitch and the deadline is January 11th 2013, so make sure you send your application very soon! The competition will take place at Berlin’s “Radialsystem” on January 18th 2013, so stay tuned because this will be going down really quickly.