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ArtificialIntelligence Entrepreneur PythonMarch 24, 2012

This Week In Startups, StrongSteam Pitch, Reimbursements, Mentorship

By Ian

It has been a pretty nutty couple of weeks. PyCon a week back was ace, we signed up some clients and partners for StrongSteam and got offered investment. David Kim was good enough to interview me so I got to demo our OCR for text recognition and image recognition APIs via some mobile demos – check out the second video on David’s Enthought post.

Last night we got featured on Jason Calacanis’ and Tyler Crowley‘s This Week In Startups (@twistartups), via StartupChile. This was a bit nuts. I pitched earlier in the week for James (@jameskennedy) and Tyler’s (@looglalanguage) BizCamp pitch contest, we won the ‘best 4’ competition and that gave us a pass to be featured on the show. A competition was run yesterday here for 20 other companies to pitch to get a 5th place on the show. Once the show started I was up second.

Check out the video below at 0:19:00 to 0:32:00 to see me pitch and then at 1:05:00 to 1:07:30 to see the three judges decide that StrongSteam was ‘best bet for investment’. Being judged was fun. Focusing on giving our users what they need from our API is more our focus for now.

A few days before I was submitting the second month of reimbursement paperwork for our StartupChile placement. Emily has written a long piece on this already.

Below you can see my pile of paperwork – for each transaction (few big purchases, some contractors, some travel) I have a full audit trail that starts at the receipt and ends, via banks and credit cards, to a bank account in my name, with proof that I own that bank account. For contractors I include a full contract too. This proof is required, this is the ‘price’ of giving up 0% equity under a government scheme. It took 8 hours including my meeting with my account executive. They haven’t reimbursed this round yet, assuming they don’t reject anything (which is far from guaranteed) then this only costs 8 hours (last month cost 2 days). If they reject stuff then maybe I’ll invest a total of 10-16 hours.

Something that’s painfully obvious from yesterday’s pitching and today’s BizCamp is that pretty much all of us here lack t-shirts with our name, logo & strap-line. I could really have done with t-shirts at PyCon, I pitched to 100+ of the 2,300 delegates but got on stage in front of them all once – if someone had seem our name and noticed ‘AI’ or ‘computer vision’ then I bet they’d have come over for a chat. Lesson learned.

I’m also going to give a shout out back to Moo in the UK for their cool little business cards. So many people here don’t have any cards yet, this is such a mistake. Everyone needs cards, I’ve used Moo for years, I’d vote you go via them and get the mini cards and  a plastic case (they’re robust, mine is >2 years old and is still fine).

Finally – Vivek Wadhwa kicked a bunch of us up the arse two nights ago and again last night talking about self-mentorship (given that there is no formal mentorship out here). I’m going to be organising a group who want to self mentor such that we can meet regularly (maybe every week), set goals, be held accountable and basically focus on getting ready for demo day in 2 month’s time. It’ll be an interesting experiment.

For now this is nearly the end of a crazy 2 months. Tonight I’m going to get a take-out Chinese and settle in front of a movie.


Ian is a Chief Interim Data Scientist via his Mor Consulting. Sign-up for Data Science tutorials in London and to hear about his data science thoughts and jobs. He lives in London, is walked by his high energy Springer Spaniel and is a consumer of fine coffees.
Account Executive, Api, Apis, Audit Trail, Best Bet, Credit Cards, Crowley, David Kim, Demos Check, Emily, Enthought, Government Scheme, Image Recognition, Jameskennedy, Jason Calacanis, Ocr, Paperwork, Pitch, Reimbursements, Startups, Text Recognition, Xxxx
Previous High Performance Python 1 from PyCon 2012 (slides, video, src)
Next 2nd Data/AI Meetup – official SUP event at Santiago’s hackerspace next Wednesday
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