The Internet Initiatives Development Fund (IIDF) and the Tomsk State University business incubator held Startup Day, which brought together more than 200 people-experts and beginning entrepreneurs.
The experts were speakers from the IIDF, the Finnish accelerator Startup Sauna, and other successful businessmen. Tomsk Startup Day was held so that start-uppers can get mentoring support for their projects.
- You can use the whole TSU infrastructure, and recently we opened a resident centre where you can come at any time and use it to communicate with different groups of the population, - said Konstantin Belyakov, Vice-Rector for Innovation. - Involve more people in your projects. The more people you involve, the more investors will pay attention to your project.
The Startup Day programme included master classes from practitioners and competition in pitches (presentations), where participants could talk about their projects, invite people to the team, and attract investors. During the expert session, start-uppers could communicate with each of the 20 experts in the format of individual 15-minute meetings.
At the end of the day, four projects received an invitation to the IIDF distance accelerator, a two-month training programme for the main accelerator, after which companies receive investments of 2.1 million rubles. Two other projects received special prizes from the experts.