And we’re off, our BeConnections team will officially be landing in Dublin in the next 2hours, wow, are we ready to rock ‘n roll.
It’s been 3 months of jam packed meetings, preparations, business plan revamps, proposals, emails back and forth to Brian, Emma, Aaron, Paddy and the whole crew… I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re sick of us already (oops!). But the truth is that Hailey and I couldn’t be more excited!!
To put it in perspective, I’ve spent the last 2 weekends cutting out stickers… yes stickers. Like most entrepreneurs, Hailey and I are on a budget, which, means doing stuff ourselves. Since printing out vinyl stickers was too expensive, we asked our local friendly printing shop to buy sticky paper and print out our logo several times, on a dozen A4 sheets. What this meant is that I went home, cut out each logo individually… 600 times, and stuck it onto the lollipops, gum and mini Kitkats that we bought at the supermarket. Total: EUR 30, as opposed to EUR 350. Success!
The best and possibly most awkward moment, however, was on Friday night. Unlike most people my age (28), I was at a printing shop at 22:00 the night of Halloween… no costumes were involved, nor was I having an affair with Jose, our local printing man… instead I was picking up the 500 pamphlets, 1000 flyers and 1500 business cards that we had ordered weeks ago. I ended up chatting with Jose’s young assistant (18) who quickly told me all about his girls problems. Shame, what a sweet and innocent young man. Does it all go downhill after 30? As my aunt would say, the older we get, the more we have to pick from the scraps of men left in the single aisle. Although to their albeit, I have no complaints yet.
Focus, back to the printing shop… Madrid has just installed electric bicycles all over the city, and I used this cheap and environmentally friendly method to get back home, which normally would have been fine except for the unusual circumstances. Imagine this, big birds, Mickey Mouses and assassins walking through out the city center, and me, on my electric bike carrying 15KG of printing material… who’s scarier?
Trying to fit it all in my suitcase, plus clothes and candy is a whole different story…
So who are we meeting? Only the best and brightest of the industry! Hailey has done an awesome job at picking at her old contacts from Silicon Valley (she used to work at the Emerging Technology Fund in Texas). Just to name a few off the top of my head, we’ll sit down with Stewart Rogers from Venture Beat, have a coffee with Bruce Upbin from Forbes, meet with Stephen Partridge from Events.com and chat with Scott Sandell a General Partner at New Enterprise Associates. Two words in capital letters: VERY EXCITING!!
And the best part of all is that we’re just beginning – literally, I’m on the plane on route to Dublin! To kick off the event, Hailey and I will be attending a pub-crawl this evening and one of our investors, Felipe, arrives tonight to give us a hand throughout the week – how nice, right? It promises to be an intense but hopefully rewarding Movember ahead and of course we’ll keep you up to date with our news.
For those reading this post that will also be attending The Summit, shoot us an email and lets grab a Guinness! We can be reached on info@beconnections.com.
Pitch by Pitch 