While I gather my thoughts, and put my own feedback together, I thought I'd share my 10Layer cohort Jason Norwood-Young's feedback to Philipp Moehring and Reshma Sohoni:

Hi Philipp

Please pass this on to Reshma as I don't have her email address.

I'd just like to briefly let you know what Guy and I thought of Seedcamp. When we initially signed up, we had in mind to look for VC through Seedcamp, but before the event we'd changed our strategy to try and fund ourselves for as long as possible. I think this was advantageous as we weren't really pitching to the mentors and could happily admit all the large holes in our current business plan and get real, honest and excellent advice.

I think it was also to our advantage that we are for the most part just "slideware" at the moment, as we're able to implement the advice from the mentors immediately without having gone down wrong roads to having to change existing business practices.

For these two reasons I suspect we experienced Seedcamp quite differently from the other startups.

So how did we find Seedcamp? My measure of its success would be the amount of change it has created in our business, and by this measure it was highly successful. In particular, our marketing message and pitch was dramatically honed; our pricing structure will have a severe review; our funding time-frames and the entire way we think about funding have changed dramatically.

Our weakness is that we take our strategy by thinking about the product and the customer. While this is still vital, we don't think enough about the business - it's a typical weakness for us idealistic startups. Seedcamp gave us access to people who think about the business first - its sustainability, profitability, risk reduction, and market perception. We feel significantly more skilled after Seedcamp (although still far from considering ourselves to be experts).

While every mentor was valuable and excellent, Sheraan and Stefan stood out in terms of strategy, Andrea was amazingly open and gave us an immense wealth of information, and Gareth was incredibly insightful. I'm sure Guy has his own list of stand-out mentors.

The most incredible thing about Seedcamp is it was exposure to experience that it would have taken us months to achieve, and probably immense expense. You guys brought us this amazing resource, for free, compressed into a day, and I cannot express my gratitude enough for what you've done for us and our business.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Kind regards
Jason
10Layer

The emotions that drive us are strange things, anger over the dehumanisation of Caster Semenya, fear of an unknown East taking over an unfit West, and hope for a better day, and a better land that we love. Yes I'm an ardent patriot, doing what I feel is necessary to change the landscape for a better South Africa, and it seems I'm not alone.

Rockstar entrepreneur (and poker player) Vinny Lingham and investment entrepreneur Justin Stanford shared a dream typical of many in this country, and instead of letting the typical culture settle into it, have pushed on it and pushed hard. Part of the problem that faces this country going forward is what I refer to as corporate succession planning, the gap between the larger corporates and the younger entrepreneurial type companies that can help us push for new blood in the business lifescape. There are many causes for this; whether it be the interesting way our talent moves, either snatched up by the larger entities for security, interesting company jumping for higher packages, or exporting itself because of a lack of trust and security, or the hold back from government, given difficult tax laws and poor incentive, and one cant forget the economic elephant in the room. The above are just a few variables impacting the lack of startups in South Africa, and yet the skills that we have, the passion that we have are at a global level (according to seven time startup owner Gareth Knight).

So the question is then "What can we do about it?" As Vinny and Jus noticed the number of emerging startups in the Cape, and were reminded of the symbolic landscape of Silicon Valley as the future of California in the late 90's, they decided to share their vision for the Cape moving into Africa and do something about it

The Silicon Cape vision is of an ecosystem in the Western Cape of South Africa, that serves to attract and bring together local and foreign investors, the brightest technical talent, and the most promising entrepreneurs, to foster the creation and growth of world-class IP start-up companies in an environment that competes with other similar hubs around the world against the backdrop of one of the most beautiful settings and pleasant places to live, work and play on the globe.

In the style of a digital Martin Luther King, http://www.siliconcape.com went viral quickly, and the team will be hosting their first event in early October. Western Cape Premier, Hellen Zille, cleared her diary to talk to the tidal wave movement of entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and media that is breaking over this vision for the future.

I'll see you in the Silicon Cape.

The past 6 months have flown by, and until the beginning of last week, I had thought nothing had happened in this year, I was wrong, in this year I became a different person, and through the last week I've been reeling to get my personality back.

Somehow in the last 6 months I became delusional, I saw my dream of Telamenta flying nicely, the work I was doing for Cycan was high level, complex and intricate, and my name seems to be ploughing through what I considered influential social circles. I was hanging out with "The cool crowd" of entrepreneurs in the South African scene, and somehow I decided that I was cool by proxy. Acceptance has always been a bit of an issue for me, standing off to the outside is my default mode of behaviour, separating myself somewhat from the inner circle of black leather jackets, and suddenly being accepted into this was seductive, intoxicating, addictive, and I lost myself. I deluded myself into thinking that the entrepreneurial rockstar lifestyle was sustainable, hell I deluded myself into thinking it was something I wanted.

Here I sit, on a Sunday morning, about to go off to a family lunch for my aunt's birthday, trying to find the person I was before the parties, before the cool, trying to remember what it was that the T-Bird's originally saw in me, before I came one myself. It was the fact that I was real, for a long time integrity was all that I had, I was down to earth, prepared to do the work, prepared to put in the extra hours (all day, all night, all weekend) and prepared to help, listen and support.

I've been reading Joseph Jaworski's "Synchronicity: the inner path of leadership" noticing patterns, and pulling out the deeper importance. Life is about relationships, deep and meaningful ones, it's about stories and people, relatedness, not things or fulfilling childish needs for the acceptance of the world.

I have moved from my worldview that the entrepreneur is a rockstar, where the pay off is superficial adoration from the thousands that have no idea who you are. Entrepreneurialism is about serving, creating something better, doing something better, or developing your community for your community, not for yourself but for the liberation, freedom and betterment of those around you, selflessly.

I don't pretend for a second that my new view is going to be easy, or that the behaviours are simple ones to change, but the pay off is bigger and the game itself is more fulfilling.

Panta rhei - Everything flows