LeBridge

Tobias Nevin from everfeel took the time to share with us some more background on his startup and his ambitions, in the fourth of our Startup Caravan interview series:

Tell us a little bit about everfeel: what makes it exciting?
At ND Interactive, we have the chance to make something really new, to offer a new form of expression – a different way to interact with other people. So, we’re excited by the challenge of the innovation, by the unknown, by the scale of the ambition. Our service ‘everfeel’ is also about making people happy, surprised and excited, so it’s normal that our team is in the same spirit.

How did the idea for everfeel come to you?
I was on a train with my friend and co-founder, and we decided it was unacceptable that there was no way to immediately connect with other people online for an experience that was fun and beneficial.
We felt there was a massive gap in the ‘real-time social’ proposition of social networks, dating sites and online games – and that gap still exists today.
Over the first month after our ‘idea’ we tested the concept with c.100 users in our imagined target group and got great feedback. We didn’t look back.

What is the maximum potential you see in your idea? What does ultimate success look like?
Our service has global appeal across a wide user group. We see 100s of millions of potential users.
Ultimate success will mean satisfying the needs of a large and loyal customer base, across multiple screens in connected internet environments. User satisfaction will always be the focus of the company and our product R&D.
Our consumer base will support win-win deals with local TV and cinema licence holders to increase their revenues and amortise marketing spend, and will provide a rich environment for targeted product placement for leading brands.
We aim to hold dominant positions via content deals, brand presence and user base in major geographies such as the USA, Japan, France, UK, Germany and Brazil.
In time, a mix of B2C and B2B revenue models will support profitability, and allow NDI to maintain a competitive advantage in the core user experience, and finance new geographic development and product diversification.

How long have you been working on this and what is the status of the company now?
We’ve been developing the service and our technology for two years, and have raised over one million in funds. Our 10 person team has just launched the private beta of everfeel, after testing our prototype with over 250 test users. We are now rapidly iterating the product and marketing to improve the UX and gain traction.

What’s the craziest thing you’ve done as an entrepreneur?
Starting.

Who are your role models and why?
I wouldn’t want to single anyone out, but can say that I admire drive, focus and character above any material success. I think balance is really important, and appreciate down-to-earth people.
In a professional context, other entrepreneurs, and my team members and board offer me a lot of positive energy and examples of these qualities.

What’s the best thing about Paris for startups? What do you think London might have that Paris lacks?
Paris has good balance between creative and tech talent, and there is government support early on for cultural and technical innovation.
London embodies an ambition for large-scale success with the means to achieve it. This means great bus-dev talent, international connectedness and potentially a more open dialogue with VC partners.

What are you most looking forward to on this trip?
I look forward to spending some time with local entrepreneurs and VCs, and identifying new opportunities for my startup.
London has great energy, and I look forward to tapping into it.

You can find out more about everfeel on their website or follow them @everfeel_

In our third interview with the Startup Caravan startups, Philippe Honigman from social storage app SocialFolders shares the view from his transatlantic startup:

Tell us a little bit about SocialFolders: what makes it exciting?
Social Folders is a new way to manage people’s online, social content, directly from Windows File Explorer and the Mac Finder. Today documents, pictures, sounds and videos are massively moving online and are embedded within Web and mobile apps. Think about Flickr, Facebook, SoundCloud, Instagram, etc. Or, in the business world, Salesforce, Chatter, Docusign, Google Docs, etc.

We bridge the gap between new services/usages that drive the massive growth of online content and billions of mainstream users that manage content through files and folders metaphor. The magnitude of the opportunity is the most exciting thing about our business! Helping people to truly own their content is a great goal, and a complex challenge to solve as online apps becomes the primary mean to access people and businesses’ data. We have a unique approach and a great technology to solve it, and that’s part of the excitement as well.

How did the idea for SocialFolders come to you?
SocialFolders results from a pivot on our technology assets. My previous startup was offering online storage, a type of service that was quickly becoming commoditized, in a super crowded market. The idea came through discussions with my partner and investor Jonathan Siegel, as an attempt to think out of the (drop)box and change the game of online storage.

What are you most looking forward to on this trip?
Meeting new people, sharing experiences, drinking tea.

You can check out SocialFolders here and follow them @socialfolders

In our second interview with the Startup Caravan startups, Antoine Sakho from Skimm! took the time to answer some of our questions:

Tell us a little bit about Skimm!: what makes it exciting?
The technical and commercial challenge of scaling a mobile payment system. The David vs. Goliath nature of it (Banks, Telcos, Visa, Mastercard, Paypal….and Google). The REALLY disruptive nature of Skimm!. Bringing e-payment to local commerce. (more…)

In the first of our interview series with the Startup Caravan startups, Baptiste Broughton shares some of his experiences as founder of Neo-nomade:

Tell us a little bit about Neo-nomade: what makes it exciting?
Neo-nomade helps you connect with flexible workspaces. If you’re tired of roaming around the city looking for a place to work, Neo-nomade allows you to find and share flexible workspaces of various types: free access (cafés, lounges), pay per use or long-term (coworking spaces, business centers). The project is at the heart of a major transformation in the way we work and the way we live – work no longer needs to be done from an office or from home – it can be done anywhere, in new innovative spaces where communities develop and thrive. Neo-nomade wants to act as a catalyst for this movement by helping spaces and users connect with each other. (more…)

The list is in! We’re really excited about the absolutely amazing batch of startups that are making the trip to London on May 28!

Apart from the sheer quality of the founders and their projects, we’re also excited by the diversity of the startups on display: we’ve got social (SocialFolders), collaborative consumption (La Ruche Qui Dit Oui, Neo-nomade), mobile (Chauffeur-Privé, Skimm), networking (Infinit), storage (ForgetBox), e-commerce (JimmyFairly), entertainment (Everfeel) and even image recognition software (Moodstocks).

You can read more about these great companies here and we’ll be adding in-depth profiles of each startup and founder every week until the event, so stay tuned!

On May 28th, 10 Parisian startups are embarking on the Startup Caravan for an action-packed full day of pitching, networking and partying in London! We picked ten of our favorite Paris startups and are shipping them off to London to meet the best that the London startup ecosystem has to offer.

Among other things, we’ll be:

• hanging out with our friends from Seedcamp and Springboard
• meeting iconic founders of hot startups such as Mixcloud and Crashpadder (the recent Airbnb acquisition)
• discovering London’s most dynamic co-working spaces, Campus London and Innovation Warehouse
• exploring Digital Shoreditch, London’s answer to SXSW
• schmoozing with the coolest VCs in Europe including ProFounders Capital, Index Ventures
• …and partying with the big cheeses!

We’ll announce the 10 lucky startups this Tuesday. If you’re a startup and you’re sad to not have been included, worry not my friends, because we will replicate this in other cities (and also do the return trip from London to Paris).

Europe has many small tech startup hubs, that are experiencing an unprecedented boom. The level of organization of local communities is remarkable and it’s exciting. However, there is still a lot to be done. Constant questioning of why Europe can’t seem to produce its own Apple or Google has not ceased. The reasons for this are multiple and complex.

We think that individual European cities should not try and become the new Silicon Valley. Europe’s fragmentation, which is often regarded as its major weakness in the innovation arena, also provides us with the strength of diversity – but it’s a strength that we are not leveraging.

We know that Berlin has world-class designers, that London is home to world-class media innovation, that Warsaw has some of the best developers – but all of these ecosystems are siloed.

At LeBridge our mission is to fix this – we want European startups to be just that: European. A startup should have employees from all over the continent. It should have investors from outside its headquarters’ country. It should be thinking of selling outside of its country from day 1. At networking events, people in Paris should no longer be saying “I’ll intro you to Jacques next door”, but “I’ll intro you to Arto in Helsinki”.

This is not a fantasy. We’ve tamed transportation costs and time, and we have this new thing called the Internet which lets people connect from afar. After decades of EU construction we have broken down legal and administrative barriers too. There are no barriers left, now is the time to start building.