Open Coffee - gonna make you a star Thursday, April 26, 2007
The week I go away on hols, the TV crews roll up at Open Coffee in London to report on the success of the internet albeit under the headline "Dot Com Boom or Bust".
Channel 4 News carried a report which you can see here which included a brief interview with Saul Klein who founded Open Coffee, which has now spread to 22 other cities worldwide.
Included in the report was the CEO of Moveme.com who claimed that after attending "one of these" events on the Thursday he had received £1m in funding by the Monday. As it happens, they got their funding from Robin Klein (Saul's Dad) and others sometime before Open Coffee launched, so a distortion of the truth somewhat. However, today is the first Open Coffee since the TV report went out, so I rather suspect that the attendance numbers are going to be considerably up on usual (which is 100+) with claims like that having been reported.
Could be scary to be an investor today!
Other amusing thing is that the event has become so well attended that the Esprit store in which Starbucks is located, has asked that the event be moved elsewhere following complaints from their customers. Seems that the footfall resulting from the event actually wasn't buying anything from the store!
Labels: opencoffee, VC, VC startup
posted by John Wilson @ 9:06 AM Permanent Link
newsvine
reddit
1 Comments:
-
At 5:42 PM,
Unknown said...
-
What I actually said was we had met at an event like just like one of these.
And although we had been emailing for quite some considerable time we had not met Robin (Saul's Dad) until the Monday before the Second Chance Tuesday (ie an event just like one of these)at which Saul was speaking.
Advent introduced us to Robin and Brent Hoberman, and the time line from this from first meeting to deal closure was not more than six working days.
So in all the start (meeting the Advent team) to finish (money in bank)was three weeks, the meet (Robin and Saul..the people to whom the interviewer was motioning) to finish was infact little more than one week.
What you may wish to consider is how TV gets edited. We shot 15 minutes of video, both at the Coffee morning and later at the office. Which concentrated on how we could help other companies get started, what you might consider when applying for VC, what different companies are like and so on.
In the end Channel 4 ran a very shallow frankly misleading report that served to reflect the mood of the reporter and not the mood of the investment community in London.
So in this instance you have my permission to shoot the piano player (or programme editor) as that which you saw was not the extent of what was shot.
Please feel free to contact me if you have any further comments - Mark Cunningham, CEO Moveme.com
