2010 — graph.me Blog

Wrapup: graph.me brings home two prices from awesome TechCrunch GeeknRolla #gknr in London

We wanted to make the official graph.me public beta launch something special, so the announcement of “GeeknRolla” came perfectly right. At this TechCrunch Europe event 15 startups – hand-picked by editor Mike Butcher – were supposed to launch in front of an international audience in London. After all, we had every reason to celebrate as our pitch was the number one audience choice and we came in fifth after the judges gave their votes. So we were the only team to bring two bottles of champagne home. Included was lots of awareness for graph.me, which is also available in English from now on. More than 500 people attended the conference, the live stream viewers peaked at 5,000. A true success after we had already won at TechCrunch Munich 09!

The circumstances could have been better though. What we feared became true, easyjet cancelled our flights due to the icelandic ash cloud so we were going plan B. With one of the remaining rent cars in Germany we started our roadtrip at 7am on Monday, April 19 and rolled all the way from Munich via Holland, Belgium and France up to Britain’s great capital (1,150km). It was a long trip, the food on the ferry was very British (sorry for that!) and the following night too short as the ones before had already been. I guess this can be seen as a reason why our pitch wasn’t quite the way it should, nonetheless the result is nothing to sneeze at. Thank you very much Mike, Petra and Rebecca for a great GeeknRolla 2010! And congratulations to all the other startups having pitched at #gknr, especially Cortexica, DriveK and iGlue. In addition to three startup pitch sessions the agenda was crammed with great speakers – from true hands-on experience, an investor’s perspective what to avoid when pitching to chances for startups in mobile business. Skype co-founder and serial entrepreneur Morten Lund’s closing presentation was the highlight of the day, who even got VCs to play the flute. The later it was, the more #gknr became RocknRolla with Mike Butcher’s surprise guitar performance “She blocked me on Foursquare” and some nice tunes performed by “SixNationState”.

And after all this, was it worth it driving thirteen hours through Europe for speaking three minutes in London? Oh yes! We have met many interesting people, got a lot of feedback on graph.me and truly felt the GeeknRolla spirit. We would have loved to stay longer in cool britannia instead of hitting the road again Wednesday night. We’ll be back soon!