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