We organised two tech-related dinners this week. One for non-technical founders looking to build their first tech product and a dinner for those looking to succeed in FoodTech. A fab turnout for both dinners as usual, here’s the skinny on what went down:

Dinner with The Food Corporation
Our TC members had the pleasure of dining with Kimberly Hurd (CEO and founder of Tabl and The Food Corporation) and David Tabizel (founder of The Food Corporation, and hugely successful and experienced entrepreneur). Dinner took place in the private dining room of The Anthologist in The City, with our partner Wellers joining in the discussions. There were plenty of hints and tips shared by both David and Kimberly covering everything from being honest with yourself to being sure you know what you want.

As someone who loves building businesses, David’s insights and tips included:

• Be brutally honest with yourself – he admits to having had lots of failures, but reminded his fellow diners that if you do fail, to do so quickly
• Know your numbers and be careful about over projection
• Understand your competition and your exit – know what you want and where you want to end up
• Have an objective strategy tactic – don’t walk into the dark not knowing what you’re doing, and
• Remember – your time is precious

Kimberly has been in the FoodTech space for 5 years, her comments at dinner were:

• Establish what you are trying to solve
• Be humble to each other
• Having a good team and focus is very important
• 90% of your decisions as a startup will be wrong. That’s okay – just pivot and change
• Be able to answer questions like who would want to invest in me? Why would I be a customer of me? What are my margin? And so on

Kimberly also mentioned that she believes there is too much funding going on at early stage which is giving false hope to some startups. Don’t forget there is nothing wrong with being a small business (niche micro-companies are a growing business), be honest with yourself as to whether you do actually want to scale through investment.

Dinner for non-technical founders
Being at the helm of a tech business as a non-tech founder can’t be the easiest thing to do, so to have a dinner with Fabrice Bernhard, Cofounder & CTO of Theodo, a tech-team-for-hire business helped many of our members garner insights and ideas to help realise their tech vision. Dining at Piccolino in Exchange Square, everyone enjoyed an evening covering tips for those non-techy types amongst us that have a vision to build an app or web platform. Read all about Fabrice’s five lessons for non-tech founders.

Our speakers were joined by Neema Food, Bubblo, CafePod, Sapling, Crowdfooding, EatAbout, The Food Rush, Output Group, Not Just Vegetarian, Intelligent Crowd TV, FlatClub, MercuryLab, Inploi, Henry’s Avalanche Talk, Liberte Fitness, Imby, Fountain Partnership and Unocodrinks amongst others.

Thanks to David, Kimberly and Fabrice for speaking as well as our partner Wellers.

Whet your appetite with what’s coming up at TableCrowd this month.