Sami Benchekroun – TALKS WITH PETRI
Sami Benchekroun talks about the three phases of startup growth from bootstrapping to scaling and raising over €20m in funding. We discuss the role of mentorship and finding the right type of investors but also some French puns are involved.
Bio
Sami Benchekroun is the Co-Founder and CEO of Morressier, the virtual conference provider and platform for the scientific community. Sami has over ten years of experience in academic conferences, scholarly publishing, and entrepreneurship. He drives Morressier’s vision forward and is dedicated to increasing the impact and reach of professional and scientific conferences. A frequent industry contributor, Sami serves as a scientific communications lecturer at the Technical University of Berlin. He has a background studying management at ESCP Europe.
Show notes
- Bootstrapping and VC funding
- How it all started and the learnings along the way
- Early-stage science research and its discovery
- Initial idea sold as a product
- The early success and positive cash flow while bootstrapping
- Customers started to call and the demand potential was discovered
- Go out and expose yourself to innovation
- Talking to VCs in Web Summit changed the course of the company
- Even if the product works your business model may not scale
- Expensive trial-and-effort that failed with friends, family’s and fools’ money
- How right angel investors and mentors make a difference
- Professional communities and the role of conferences
- Choosing the target customer
- Where your market approach is rather unique
- How to make money in the research field and provide value
- The Project Ice Cream (Matrix 4)
- From conference posters to data teams and content analysis
- Building a startup with family life and small children
- Support network for founders
- Entrepreneurship as a fast marathon
- Role of honesty and vulnerability
- Mentorship
- Listening to other people’s advice and experience is not evident
- Entrepreneurs’ Organisation for founders
- What COVID-19 changed in personal life and in the company
- Raising a VC round in Corona times
- What changes in later funding rounds
Show links
https://websummit.com/ (Web Summit)
https://hub.eonetwork.org/ (Entrepreneurs’ Organisation)
