Last week’s trip to London was governed by the laws of Murphy, or Sod as Londoners would call ‘im. It was a fun and interesting trip, don’t get me wrong, and I still love London almost as much as I did after my last trip there two years ago. It’s just that pretty much everything imaginable that could go wrong actually done gone wrong and the culmination of this was that we didn’t advance to Seedcamp week.

But let me start from the beginning. Day one went great, we finished the linear algebra exam (flunked it yet again btw) and set of to Munich for the flight. The ride went spectacularly smooth and we got to our flight on time. And that’s when the trouble started.

During the day I got some more ideas on how to polish our presentation and decided to do them at the airport. There wasn’t enough time. Alright, I’ll do them on the aeorplane. Oh crap, aeroplanes don’t have internets, no go. Very well, can’t do the presentation, can’t do the polishing on the demo. Fine.

So then we got to Gatwick and paid through the nose to get to Victoria station. Now what? Well after a brief search for somewhere to stay, we took a ride off to Pimlico where the fucking shoebox was ready to take us in. It was a twin bed   (two guys) that took up the whole room and the bathroom used to be a wardrobe. Hostels were unavailable unfortunately.

Alright, time to call up Peaches and make arrangements for drinks, the drinks were probably the funnest bit of the whole trip and aided a lot in my transition to speaking in English smoothly. Unlike last time I seemed to have much less of a slur these days and we all understood each other a whole lot better. Ben, her boyfriend, was a cool bloke too.

Of course before we left for drinks I wanted to work on the presentation and demo a bit, but lo and behold, the hotel has no fucking wireless! Fine.

Come next day. We were knackered from … well everything, so we got up at ten, which is a dash late. This morning was supposed to be spent on my practicing the presentation and public speaking at speaker’s corner in Hyde Park. Instead, however, it was spent running around London trying to find some free wireless. The horrible thing here is that many locations advertise having wireless, but then magically ask you to pay for it via some obscure means.

Finally we’ve found a McDonald’s covered by The Cloud, which was lovely. Of course being lunchtime by now it took us several minutes before we got a place to plump our arses down and work. Think we managed to frantically work for almost a good hour before it was time to race off to the hotel again to dress in better clothing and whatnot.

Then we raced to eOffice where we would give our presentation. During this racing I prepared my cue cards from head, which was perhaps the most preparation for presenting I’d had all week since the Monday drilling with @simonbelak.

We were naturally  half an hour late in getting there and by this time I felt like a wet rag from all the running around and complete lack of proper preparation. Of course upon getting there we discovered they had plenty of free wireless. Argh. But we only had a few minutes to fix up the demo and there was just no way it could be done now. Fingers crossed and it actually worked when presenting

Needles to say during the presentation I was so nervous and/or full of adrenaline I must’ve seemed like a complete and utter lunatic. I fucked up a slide change, screwed up a rhetoric topic-changing phrase or two and again turned the presentation into being what-we-don’t-have-yet instead of what we actually want to do … classic. And I’m fairly certain that even upon them asking what is it that we do I failed to really answer the question sufficiently.

But I did manage to distribute eye contact evenly across the room. Yay!

At the afterparty we didn’t bode much better. Being totally tired and without alcohol (open bar only for soft drinks and I hate wine and beer) or caffeine (the bar didn’t have energy drinks, for shame) and having only eaten a sandwich all day we didn’t do so great at mingling. Sure we mingled a bit with the teams, but where it counts, the judges, we only chatted for a little bit with two of them. I’m still fairly convinced the afterparty is part of the selection process because as entrepreneurs we need to be good at networking.

You’d think the trouble ended here wouldn’t you? Well you’re wrong.

We had a flight next morning and to get there on time we had to leave the hotel at 05:30 … of course that was when I got up. So we ended up being late for check-in by about ten minutes.

This resulted in increased expenses to re-book our flight for later and in waiting 10 fucking hours at the airport because we simply couldn’t afford the Stansted-London-Stansted trip. Fail.

I ended up getting back home Friday at 3am. Since I’d been reading The Dark Tower IV for about twelve hours the previous day and it was saying something about the Wizard of Oz I put the movie on and fell asleep before the title sequence was over. Got up at noon the next day (technically still the same day)

It was at that point that I decided to just fuck everything and have a few days of being nearly completely offline and doing fuck all with my girlfriend. However, brace brace, the next few weeks are three exams that I need need need to pass in order to finally get out of first year of uni.

Although I must wonder, could anything more have gone wrong on this trip, which just happens to be my first business trip ever … do they all look like that?

Related articles by Zemanta

• Data From Seedcamp Shows The Startup Trends In Europe (uk.techcrunch.com)
• Top Teams for Seedcamp Week 2009 Announced (seedcamp.com)

Tags: Business, life, Linear algebra, London, Seedcamp

Seedcamp, as many probably know, is a bit like America’s Next Top Model, but for entrepreneurs and their ideas. Therefore, apply I must, yes. Well the deadline was last night and we’ve done the best we can and now we wait for the gods of innovation to smile down upon us and smite us with their blessings.

The whole process went a little bit like this:

• work on a project with a vague idea of what you actually want (for a year)
• get so involved with the details of the project that you forget to even consider the master vision
• suddenly snap out of it and realise you’ve been approaching the problem all wrong
• boil away all the cruft and come back to a naked master vision
• decide to give it a new wrapping and rework the whole thing with help from some awesome people
• realise something like this would do great on seedcamp with the right pitch
• suddenly remember the deadline is in a week

After that it was just a mad dash to the finish line, which ultimately culminated in a rather lovely pitch (a full 20 hours before deadline, lovely), a quite well working proof of concept prototype demo, which I’m not going to show you guys, and a video, which you’re about to see.

The whole week was packed chock full of twelve and more hour workdays, especially because I also had  to study for some upcoming exams, and mad problem solving fu that brought us to yesterday … yesterday was the maddest of all. We were at the office until well past midnight working on a presentation video and I think we did rather well. The voice acting is kinda special

So what do you think about the video and its message? Information butler, by the way, we need something catchier and with less syllables when we’re finally ready to unleash the awesomenes unto the world.

Tags: Business, Information, life, Prototype, Seedcamp