Baltic Ventures

You often hear renowned founders like Brian Chesky from Airbnb talk about the importance of brand, company culture and having well-defined purpose, mission and vision statements - but how often is that discussed for early-stage startups? The team at Baltic Ventures and our Accelerator 2024 cohort were lucky to be joined by the brilliant Ricki Unger for a masterclass session & workshop on all things brand values, positioning, culture and strategy. She encouraged all our founders to ask the 'big' questions. Why do we exist?What is our measurable ambition? What does the promised land look like? What do we do, make or provide? Who do we do it for? How do we do it? What are the benefits? What don’t we do? What makes us special? At the pre-seed stage, there's often very little commercial traction to brag about so the ability to answer all those questions, which then feed into your purpose, mission and vision, can be hugely compelling. It's also important to take culture seriously, particularly by picking values, making them directive (rather than just vague words on a wall) and choosing at least practices to operationalise them. Don't let your company culture just happen.

We are looking forward to hosting the University of Liverpool Brett Centre for Entrepreneurship Entrepreneurs Monthly Meet-up in Baltic Ventures HQ later this month 🙌 This month’s meet-up is #Ai focused - with University of Liverpool graduate and founder of Generative Minds UK, Alex Keyter.  Alex is going to be speaking about his background in Ai and launching his new SaaS product Generative Conversations. Following this Alex is going to be interviewing Adam Galloway of lola cares about Health Tech, Ai and Incubator programmes - and finally interviewing founders of Scholar Saver, Vipashyana S. and Ashish Sandhu, about the start-up and the support they’ve received from the university and others in the LCR to get up-and-running. Like usual they’ll be lots of informal networking, refreshments and food - to sign-up you can go to - https://lnkd.in/esVFPF28

Baltic Ventures take Helsinki ❄️ Later this month the Baltic Ventures team will be heading over to Helsinki to attend Slush along with our #Accelerator2024 cohort Applatch BeGenio Tech Black Goblin Decently Dearbump EdenFiftyOne® GoPlugable EV Charging MyOpNotes Praxium AI SoSquared. If you are heading to Slush let us know, as we'd love to meet you ☕ 🔥 and make sure to connect with Samson Opaleye Dr Grace Togun Olugbodi Sandesh Shetty Ana Betancourt Emma Abbasi Kat Jackson James Chapman James Burch Tom Reynolds SLE Maebh Reynolds Andrine Mendez Grant Nolan Nelson Jordan Sam Thomas Alexander Royle Greg Donnelly Mo Aldalou Becca Harvey #Slush #Tech #StartUps #Founders #Helsinki #BalticVentures

Great to see #Accelerator2024 cohort members GoPlugable EV Charging featured in PreSeed Now 🙌

We are looking forward to next weeks #TechFounder session, covering all things #IntellectualProperty with Potter Clarkson. For tech companies, protecting your IP is an important part of your journey. Yet, the world of IP can be confusing causing many founders to treat it as an undervalued asset — or fail to recognize its value at all. So if you are an early stage tech founder based in the North West, make sure to join Baltic Ventures and Jason Teng from Potter Clarkson for an in-depth session into all things IP! 🗓️ Date: Tuesday 12th November ⏰ Time: 11am - 1pm 📍 Location: Baltic Ventures, 44 Simpson Street, Liverpool, L1 0AX. You will leave this session with actionable insights you can implement immediately to ensure you are thinking about, and effectively protecting, your IP. Link to register in the comments below 👇

🤔 What Happens When Founders Seduce Themselves 🤔 Claire Lewis, Co-Founder and CEO at Baltic Ventures shares why founders desire to build too much too soon without testing, iterating and gathering customer validation, is the quickest route to capital burn. To catch up on Claire's episode (S3Ep2), hit the YouTube or Spotify links below. 📺 YouTube - https://ow.ly/nk3a50TUSGp 🎧 Spotify - https://ow.ly/fbyX50TUSGs #TechFounder #VC #Investment #Fundraising #FounderContent

When you're running a tech accelerator and spending time with brilliant and ambitious founders, it's easy to get 'wrapped up' in the day to day...#DadJoke We brought our Accelerator 2024 cohort together for the first time in mid-September and we've since: 🤝 Enjoyed a brilliant kick-off day with founders and our incredible coaching pool and some of our alumni teams 🧑💻 Supported Liverpool Slush'D to help bring the ecosystem even closer together and giving our new cohort a brilliant profiling opportunity 🧑🏫 Organised four days of masterclass sessions delivered by David Levine, Margo Lau, Daniel H., Nopadon Wongpakdee and Eva Dobrzanska 🎙️ Facilitated two 'ask me anything' investor panels with George Mensah, Marc d'Abbadie, Susanna Lawson DipIoD, Ranvir Singh MBA, LLM, MA(Oxon), Michael Tefula, Hannah Williamson, David Newman, Emma Cassidy and Katie Nicholson 🚆 Enjoyed a two-day trip to the Sifted Summit conference in London, where we also organised a Baltic Ventures drinks reception for our founders and VC friends 🧠 Arranged in-depth coaching sessions with the legendary Carl Wong and David Woods, who are spending dedicated time with teams in the cohort to help them move forward and unblock challenges 🧻 I got wrapped up like a mummy And there's much more to come, including more in-person masterclasses, pitch coaching sessions, a trip to Slush in Helsinki, two investor dinners (Liverpool & London) and an end-of-programme Demo Day 🎤 in January!

In Liverpool yesterday I joined an investor and founder AMA session at Baltic Ventures. Got lots of great questions from founders on a variety of areas, ranging from the abstract to the tactical. Two quick examples and my thoughts on each: 🚀What levels of ambition are VCs looking for and what type of businesses are suitable for venture capital vs. other types of funding? 🤔My take: VCs look for radical opportunities that have the potential to create and capture massive value with speed and scale. My colleague Francesca (Check) Warner at Ada Ventures wrote a great post about this here https://lnkd.in/eN5X5gYb 🤖 Should founders who are using AI in their products lead with “AI” in a pitch deck or should they focus more on the problem/solution and value proposition? 🤔My take: focus on the value you’re creating with the technology rather than “AI” lingo that’s being overused atm. Technical implementations matter only to the extent that they help you create more and better value for the world.

Another fantastic day yesterday with the #Accelerator2024 cohort as we dived deeper into #FundraisingLikeAPro. In the morning we welcomed back David Levine for his second session of the programme 🙌 This time exploring some of the red flags that founders need to look for when fundraising, before going into a live pitch deck roast...kudos to Sam Thomas Alexander Royle Grant Nolan and Ana Betancourt for sharing their decks and taking onboard the feedback 💫 In the afternoon we were joined by Eva Dobrzanska who took the founders through an interactive session exploring #investorengagement and outreach strategies. Eva shared tonnes of practical, easy to implement but proven tips to help the founders in their outreach strategies....perfectly timed ahead of Slush in a couple of weeks! To wrap the day off we were joined by Katie Nicholson Hannah Williamson Michael Tefula Emma Cassidy and David Newman for a brilliant and insightful Ask Me Anything Session. With it being #Halloween week we couldn't resist a bit of spooky fun....Mo Aldalou makes an excellent mummy don't you think 🤣 Applatch Black Goblin BeGenio Tech Dearbump Decently EdenFiftyOne® GoPlugable EV Charging MyOpNotes Praxium AI SoSquared Sum Vivas Ltd

⏰ Time is running out! ⏰ Applications for Launchpad 2025 close in just a few days - Thursday, 31st October 2024 at 5pm. Don't miss out on the opportunity to be part of a game-changing programme designed to help you demonstrate commercial traction and captivate investors. Apply now and get access to workshops, coaching, networking, and more. Plus, a chance to pitch for an equity-free cash prize! 🚀 Apply today at: https://lnkd.in/ewxDq6wJ #Launchpad2025 #DeadlineReminder #StartupGrowth #Founders #Tech