Anton Kirichenko tucks his laptop under his arm, adjusts his suit and follows an event coordinator into a separate room for his speed date. The young entrepreneur has precisely eight minutes to impress his interlocutor.
Waiting inside is Yaroslav Sedrichev, manager of Microsoft’s strategic technologies department. This is no ordinary speed date: the aim is not to find romance, but to do business.
Yevgenia Lyubko, development director of Skolkovo startup Pryaniki, awaits her turn at the speed dating session held as part of Microsoft Day this week. Photo: Sk.ru
For eight minutes, Kirichenko describes what his company, Visitech, does (it produces software that helps companies working in industries such as energy, mining and manufacturing to improve safety and efficiency), outlines demand for the product (plenty) and competitors (few), lists possible clients and describes what stage his product is at. Sedrichev listens, asks questions and enters the information into his laptop. When the coordinator returns to call time, no ticks are entered onto scorecards, but Kirichenko, whose company has been a resident of the Skolkovo Foundation’s IT cluster for about a year, certainly hopes it will not be his last meeting with Microsoft.
“My aim in coming here was to get some feedback and make some contacts, like Yaroslav,” the entrepreneur said following the hurried meeting, which he described as productive.
“Microsoft has programmes like the technical accelerator, it’s possible that we meet their requirements for taking part. We’d like to, of course,” he added.
The “dates” were part of a Microsoft Day event held at the Skolkovo Institute of Science and Technology (Skoltech) this week, when representatives of the technology giant came to meet resident startups of the Skolkovo Foundation and tell them about various channels of support and information available to them, including the Azure cloud hosting.
“Ninety percent of startups die,” Natalia Radosteva, head of Microsoft’s startup accelerator programmes, told the entrepreneurs present at the event. “To reduce that number, we have some programmes to help them.”
Those programmes include the accelerator mentioned by Kirichenko, run in conjunction with Skolkovo’s mobile tech centre, in which companies can win a “cloud grant” of cloud hosting resources worth $120,000, as well as working with mentors, industry experts and technical and business consultants on how to make their business processes more efficient and attract investment.
Microsoft also offers a BizSpark programme, also run in partnership with Skolkovo, under which startups get software, support and access to the company’s Azure cloud hosting, and a Go to Market accelerator for startups that survive the first treacherous year and are already enjoying some success.
Konstantin Goldshtein, a tech evangelist at Microsoft, presented the possibilities offered by cloud computing to the startups. Photo: Sk.ru
Following the event, Microsoft said that Skolkovo startup MobilityLab, which makes mobile workplace solutions, had been awarded tickets to Microsoft’s DevCon conference on May 25-26 devoted to international trends in technology.
Daria Popkova, business development manager at Microsoft’s department of strategic technologies, outlined the main reasons that businesses fail, according to data collected by Microsoft Russia.
The first is that they don’t know their target audience well enough, which, she said, is often summed up in the complaint: “We’re developers, not salespeople.”
Other common factors are inefficient use of resources (not just money, but services such as consulting) and a lack of strategy for promoting their product on the market.
Microsoft’s programmes are aimed at helping startups to avoid these pitfalls. However, it is not a one-way street – by encouraging the startup community, the tech behemoth is adding to the pool of companies with which it might one day work.
“Microsoft has a huge partner network: more than 17,000 partners in Russia alone, as well as many abroad,” said Radosteva, explaining why Microsoft works with startups.
And Skolkovo companies have not just benefited from Microsoft’s support programmes.
“There are already commercial deals between Microsoft and our companies,” said Ivan Kireev, partnerships and business development director of the Skolkovo Foundation’s IT cluster.
Whatever format future cooperation might take, many of those present left the event hoping for a second date.