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

It's only fitting that my first post for the year is around something that probably framed the year for me. I went through to Geekretreat 2009 and it was great, there were a bunch of us that got together talk about a bunch of stuff, and then partied. A lot of fun, and interesting, however it may have missed the origional purpose that the triad of Heather Ford, Justin Spratt and Eve Dmochowska were trying to convey.

Although excited about the retreat, I went with an initial feeling that maybe, due to workload or focus, my time could possibly have been spent better staying in JHB and closing down some projects that are deadlining for the end of January. It became clear quickly that the retreat was very different from last year. A large part I contribute to a mental space, an understanding of what to expect, better focused topics, and a theme running through of a focus on technology in education.

Various projects were showcased which peaked interest:

* P2PU - A peer-to-peer university project with a focus on informal education, run over the internet, with set syllabus.
* Cognician - A software based thinking guide that walks through the structure of a problem to enabled critical and systemic thought.
* Personera - An interesting project that piggyback's on Facebook in order to put together a profile of pictures etc, in order for you to create personalised calendars, wallpaper or gifts.

There were also a number of incredible conversations which were started.

* Andy Volk did a presentation on how his group runs a services based company, which also develops product. A model that several of us at the retreat had been looking at as a way to fund product without the involvement of venture capital.

* Stefan Magdalinski showed us how he liberated government data and handed it to the people who own the data, the people.

More important than the presentations and the projects were the connections made, made between people in the NGO space, and the education space with others that can help them. There have been a few projects that have rolled out of this. Resources have been allocated, and the geeks are helping each other wherever possible.

This retreat was one of binding a community around a purpose, the organisers should be proud. The people were amazing, and the outputs are good. What happens now is up to the participants, the connectors have done a fine job of putting the right people together, and I'm honoured to have been included.

External links:

From Cognician - http://cognician.wordpress.com/2010/01/18/geekretreat/ http://cognician.ning.com/profiles/blogs/geekretreat-an-inspirational
Elaine Rumboll's Blog
Eve D's Blog
Peter Flynn's Blog
Jarred Cinman's vies on the retreat

I think, like many people, I grew up thinking that my youth was different to many others, a little outcast from a lot of society, I grew up mostly around a business table with the content of a large amount of regular discussion reflective of business landscapes and coporate culture. This had a great impact on my interests, it was tech venture capital magazine Red Herring that graced my bedside table rather than Car Magazine, and I felt different, and that was OK. Except I wasn't.

The Silicon Cape launch brought together communities from academia, government, finance and the tech sector in order to pool a wealth of South African talent in a single geographic hub so that the dreams of uplifting ourselves, and our economy could be addressed, realistically and from the right stand point. Key speakers included high level names like Dr. Johann Rupert, Dr Mamphela Ramphele and Helen Zille.

Although there are still concerns of "typical" South African backscratching, the energy that was felt within the one circular wall of The Bay hotel's rotunda was not only immense and passionate, but also thoughtful and concerned. If there is one thing that we have it is talent and passion, in order for this initiative to be successful we also need drive, patience and to be relentlessly resourceful in our approach to how we get government on sides.

Already in the news items have come up, regarding a push for the western cape to be a tax neutral zone, one of Dr. Rupert's primary key points, which, when made, was cause for Helen Zille to break into applause. Dr. Ramphele (who is now heading up the Technology Innovation Agency - TIA) almost brought down the house with her softly spoken: "I can't believe that we can't sell to people who pay in dollars. How stupid is that? How can we grow our economy?" as she spoke about the importance of government creating an enabling environment and bringing down regulatory barriers.

There are very real challenges in trying to make this work, and I don't think that any of us expect it to be an easy road, however the pawns have position themselves to the bishops and queens, and they are the pieces that have to take this to the king. For now an important start has been made, an ethos created, and a vision shared. For now, we will talk, and share, and and commune together, maybe not physically in the Silicon Cape, but at least in that mind space.

All in all, I must congratulate Justin Stanford and Vinnie Lingham on a remarkable event, I've never felt as enthused as when I left that building. An an entrepreneur I'll be looking on with great interest and expectation, because it is my overbearing opinion that if we don't get this right, we are in a world of trouble as a country. At some point, we've got to grow up, and learn how to manage our resources, as the mantra of the event mentions "If we're not exporting our IP, we're exporting our talent."