I believe in the people of Ukraine, and even more so after the bravery they’ve shown in the past few days. VCs want to be investing in people that show resilience and determination. Once Ukraine wins and the dust settles we will be there to invest into the amazing founders and I'm sure many others will follow. In the meantime let's try to help however we can as the global startup community!
One day I was playing a game on my ZX Spectrum micro-computer (I was 9 or 10 at the time) when something unexpected happened. The loader threw an exception and I was presented with a weird listing of words and numbers which turned out to be program's source code. Something told me to mess around with it, I changed a few names and numbers and somehow managed to run the program. It worked and funnily enough, the things I changed in source were reflected in new labels in the app (a football manager AFAIR).
This was early nineties and I had no books, no library, no Internet to learn from (my parents had no programming knowledge either) so I had to hack around. I learned to stop programs just before they finished loading and view the source and learn from it (good old days when no one thought of closed-source and obfuscation).
Soon I started writing my first app in Basic. It was a game where you had to get a dot around a rectangular track. Not a complex one but took me a few days to finish.
Things went fast from then. I learned Pascal and started writing more complex programs on a PC. When choosing a school I didn't even consider anything else than computer science. Got my first programming job in a Warsaw-based software house when 21, while still studying. I learned Java and Linux at that company. Then came a few others and eventually in 2010 I started my own company, a movie analyics startup Filmaster.TV which is all I'm focused on right now.
Spaghetti Monster only knows where would I be now if not for that faulty ZX Spectrum program in my childhood.
I remember Football Manager - as you say it was written in BASIC, one of the few games that I owned which was.
I started hacking on a ZX Spectrum, initially via the orange manual, later with books from the library and so on.
After BASIC I jumped to assembly, and kept up on assembly on MS-DOS 3.3, via Ralph Brown's interrupt list. I didn't try pascal, or any other real language, until many years later at university.
Aah, Ralph Brown's interrupt list, that takes me back a long time. I used to write assembler quite a lot when I was ~14year old. Now I'm a webdeveloper mainly doing php and some basic sysadmin stuff and it strikes me how far apart those things are. Assembler needs a different mindset and it's quite hard to get into it again.
Great game indeed. I remember translating it later all to Polish changing all the British premier league teams and players to local teams. My dad could not believe that was even possible :)
HackFwd was the best thing that happened to us on our entrepreneurial road so far. The ability to meet and network with Europe's top entrepreneurs, investors and jounalists, the ongoing support from the staff and the general coolness of the programme and the people is what shaped me as a doer.
The programme was not without its flaws. Yes, the amount of stock HackFwd took was significant, and the communication between everyone involved could have been better between the Build events, but overall I cannot imagine a better place to start my first business than here and I'm very sad other young entrepreneurs won't be able to experience this anymore.
Europe is losing one of their best startup schools and I can't see on the horizon anything that will replace it anytime soon. Let's just hope TechStars grows outside of London and Seedcamp gets even bigger, or maybe someone some time will try to create a new geek-friendly accellerator machine without making the same mistakes. Fingers crossed!
Just as Mikko hinted, most startups took 191k for 27% of shares. The thing to remember is that HackFwd gets diluted in next rounds together with the founders, there are no anti-dilution clauses in Geek Agreement (which is public, btw).
Infogr.am, Watchlater and Cobook have amazing consumer traction and will definitely be great exits for HackFwd in a couple of years.
Some other companies like Yieldkit or my own Filmaster.TV have pivoted towards a b2b model and generate proper revenue in their niche (we help cinema exhibitors and television providers learn about their customers tastes, personalize marketing communication and grow their audience).
Others like Visualnest and BeamApp are fascinating pieces of technology still looking for the right application.
I believe only FlockOfBirds has officially closed down.
If you have specific questions about any of the startups, let me know, I'll be happy to help.
As for FlockOfBirds, we had to pull our app from the App Store due to the rate limit changes in the Twitter API v1.1. However the company still exists, and we are planning a come back for next year.
We're looking for a Python hacker in a personalization & analytics startup Filmaster.TV. We're based in Warsaw, Poland. It shouldn't be a problem getting a work permit. We're already hiring an American guy and we've been through the procedure. Read about the job and the company here: http://filmaster.tv/jobs.html and if you're interested, happy to talk on hangout.
I tried it while it was in beta. It's not yet ideal but definitely on a good path to compete for the default keyboard replacement for Android. It's especially useful if you tweet a lot from your phone and need to precisely cut and copy single words and sentences. Beats the Android defaults by far. The usability and the speed of the app needs to improve, though.
