Welcome to part 2 of our After Dinner Roundup for the mammoth week of dinners we had last week (find part 1 here). Last Wednesday saw three dinners taking place at three venues across London, with the founders of Bloom & Wild and Lexoo speaking to their fellow diners, and the EventTechOCD dinner series launching at The Green in Clerkenwell. Here’s what happened:  Lexoo
The dinner at The Noodle House in Soho, involved Daniel van Binsbergen regaling his fellow diners with the story of his business from launching his idea to investment and building an online marketplace. Starting in February 2014, Daniel managed to get funding for Lexoo early on, appreciating how lucky he was securing early investment with just two clients and a front-end website. Insights that Daniel provided included, in February they did £40K in legal work and 40% of their business comes from Google Ad words. However he did state that this was incredibly expensive and ultimately, depressing how much money they have to hand over!

When times are hard, Daniel tells himself, “It’s not supposed to be easy otherwise there would be nothing to build here.”

Bloom & Wild
Aron Gelbard, founder of Bloom & Wild joined diners for a lovely, intimate dinner at Aubaine, Heddon Street last Wednesday, providing a really interesting talk covering the story of launching his successful flower delivery service. With people commenting and asking questions right from the start of his talk, it quickly turned into a more comprehensive Q&A session covering the following:

• Look into getting SEIS (Seed Enterprise Investment Scheme) grants
• Set up EMI (Enterprise Management Incentives) when you start hiring
• Read The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick
• Don’t underestimate the technical side of things.
• When raising money, be clear about your objectives
• Use third parties whenever you can

And finally, Aron’s top tip:

Don’t try to raise money in August or December – investors are on holiday!

EventTechOCD
James Morgan, founder of Event Tech Lab, hosted the first in a series of dinners relating to the EventTech industry, with last week’s dinner covering the topic, “The future of hardware”. Our very own Chief Diner and co-founder of TableCrowd, Kate Jackson, attended the dinner. She summed up the evening with the following:

After a delicious dinner, there was a round the table discussion hosted by James on the future of hardware and what we want the developers of the future to consider for the events industry. The key outcome went right back to the basics. Right now, the availability and quality of WiFi at events is a serious limitation and this needs to be improved to support all of the new great ideas and developments in the industry. Venue owners massively underestimate requirements and sometimes the importance to the attendees.

Diners for these dinners included: TreatNow, WishWant, Eureeca, Klusstr, Laura Ashley, Senselab, Street Stream, Kerbi, Monster Energy, Homejoy, DueDil, AllAboutGroup, LegalGeek.co, American Express, ThinkWall, IMEX, Reed Travel Exhibitions, Euromoney Seminars, Airfinance Events, Amazon, BrightBull amongst others.

Huge thanks goes out to our speakers Daniel and Aron, and host, James.

For a full list of upcoming dinners, click here.