European startup advice

I spent the last 6 weeks in a top university start up incubator programme in Europe.

We were given 6 weeks, 4000 euro and a mentor to validate our startup idea and then pitch in front of 4 investors.

Here is some bits of advice we got that I’d like to get some perspective on.

1.) Don’t try enterprise sales straight away.

For our idea we wanted to target larger enterprises as economically our solution made more sense for larger customers. We were told no large company would work with a small start up by two 22 year olds with 0 experience. I thought this sounded reasonable and started to target small businesses before realising our solution didn’t make sense for them….

2.)You don’t need to move to US to start a start up

Stripe was founded by 2 Irish guys who moved to the US to start stripe. Many people now believes Sripe could be created here as we have the talent, capital etc. YC and others like Pieter levels disagree.

Enterprise Ireland, a government funded agency, is one of the biggest VC investors in Ireland and the EU. Their typical deal is 500k as long as another investor matches them for about 10/15% equity.

Stripes seed round in 2011 was 2 million alone…

3.) Massive focus on the problem completely forget about the solution.

In reality this is very hard because when you talk to investors or customers all they want to hear about is your idea. You sound stupid if you say “we don’t have an idea we are just investigating the problem.”

When we had a solution we would be scolded and told we needed to validate the problem more.

That’s some of the advice from our mentor (accomplished entrepreneur), people inside the programme and investors.

What are your thoughts.