Inspiration, tough love
Jürgen Furian, co-founder of STARTeurope and Pioneers Festival
Pioneers Festival, taking place in Vienna later this month, should be on your radar, says Ivo Spigel.
Pioneers Festival was called Startup Week last year, and the organisation putting on the show, Vienna’s ambitious STARTeurope, is determined to outdo last year’s very successful outing on all fronts.
The venue for this year’s Pioneers Festival is the imposing Hofburg Palace, historic seat of the Habsburg Empire in the centre of Vienna.
At the Festival, Seedcamp is co-organizing one of the two main tracks, called Startup Academy. There’s also a pitch competition featuring 50 start-ups, whittled down from 850 applications, plus the usual speakers and panels.
We’re generally easy on uncritical praise here at The Kernel, but with Colette Ballou on PR, Sean Ellis on lean start-up for growth and Angry Birds Mighty Eagle Peter Vesterbacka on going global, what choice do I have but to say… awesome?
On hand for the panel on investing and building in Central and Eastern Europe (or, as I prefer, “New Europe”), we will be hearing from Erik Bovee, Max Niederhofer, Markus Wagner, Alexander Galitsky and Ondrej Bartos.
This gang should give us a balanced but no-bullshit perspective on what’s going on in with investment, not only in New Europe but in Europe overall.
It’s not just web and mobile. Esther Dyson will be leading a discussion about the innovation race to space. Apparently, we’re getting closer to space with Austria’s own Felix Baumgartner scheduled to jump from “the edge of space” very soon after I finish writing this post.
Whether or not you’re comfortable with “Hacking the Human Body”, Daniel Kraft will talk about just that. Roman Stanek and Lars Hinrichs will have a fireside chat about big data.
The Kernel’s Milo Yiannopoulos will be there, in a conventionally conciliatory mood (or so he tells me), as will I and TechCrunch’s Mike Butcher, speaking about how we can do better in Europe. We’re looking forward to his traditionally terse and provocative viewpoints.
If we in Europe want our start-ups to be the best, they need to be tough as nails to compete with merciless competitors from the States, Asia and everywhere else. Pioneers Festival looks to be the perfect mixture of inspiration and tough love.
Editor’s Note: The Kernel is a media partner for this event. The author of this article is an advisor to the company.