June was certainly a very busy and exciting month! I like to travel, but even I am getting a bit tired of (low-cost) airlines. I’ve been to London two times, plus took a trip to Helsinki (the first time I’d been there), and before the week is over, we’ll be going to another European capital to meet with potential investors. At the beginning of June, I traveled to London for 10 days partly for pleasure. When I lived in London from 2000-2001, I found it profoundly lonely, expensive and wet. I’m from NYC, so impressive world capitals didn’t necessarily impress me at that stage of my life, particularly when the city is very cold, very expensive and the people are very insular. So when I got a job with a major UK law firm in their Barcelona office, I didn’t have to think twice. Waiting 10 months for my work visa (it’d taken 3 weeks to get it in London) was a bit ridiculous, but after living the horror of September 11 from London, I decided that life was too short and moved immediately to Barcelona, where I waited for 3 more months before my visa was conceded.

I’d been back to London for an occasional weekend, but not really for any extended period of time. What a difference a little perspective (and about 5 years) makes! This time I found London was really quite awesome. It rained 6/10 days (which counts as “good” weather there), but what most impressed me was the range of things to do. That, and the fact that a lot of my Yale and Harvard friends have since moved to London (friends make a big difference). In Barcelona, the pace of life is great (and relaxed), but London is a fast, exciting city, at least if you are willing to spend a few bucks. I saw Harry Potter (naked) on stage, took in a reinterpretation of Cabaret, had (very expensive) high tea at the Lanesborough Hotel, almost went to a concert with Enrique Iglesias, hung out every night with some of my best friends from high school and college and — best of all — went to see Beyoncé live in concert. That really was the icing on the cake. Her concert was amaaaaaazing (said with the appropriate dumbstruck US accent). And as the FT remarked in their review of her concert, she has the remarkable ability to seem effortlessly beautiful, talented and gracious. In the reporter’s words: “Beyoncé wears her dazzling celebrity with the ease and lack of irony that only the very rich, the very beautiful and the very successful can muster, but she underpins it with a work ethic reminiscent of James Brown.” In any case, London really provided me with so many (English-language) cultural experiences that I haven’t been able to enjoy in Barcelona. It was a great escape to a world capital, despite the crappy weather and extraordinary expenses.

From London, it was off the same day to Helsinki to participate in the Easy Conference from 5-7 June 2007. The official title was “The INTRO Investment Forum, the second transnational EASY event. The event was organised by SITRA, the Finnish Innovation Fund, and we went as the guests of the Catalan VC, Highgrowth. It was a nice gig — all expenses paid and the chance to meet European business angels. We traveled with Mercé Tell and Jaume Solà, who are both young, relaxed and nice. They really tried to help us network and make contacts, and more than that, it was just plain fun to hang out with them. My Catalan-comprehension abilities certainly got a workout — even in Helsinki — but I still had a pretty nice time. We ate reindeer and saw the sun set every night at about midnight before rising again at 3AM. I’m not sure I have immediate plans to go back to Helsinki, but it’s nice to say that I went. As for the EASY conference, I think that it’s moving in the right direction, but I don’t think that it yet rises to the level to the main conferences such as Red Herring, Global Innovate and Essential Web. The key to any conference from an entrepreneur’s perspective is access to finance and generating buzz for your project, and it remains to be seen how effective EASY is in that regard.

Finally, last week, we went to Essential Web in London. The event was amaaaaazing. With all due respect to Red Herring and Global Innovate, Essential Web was a dream from the entrepreneur’s perspective. It was at an IMAX theatre, so the effect of speaking before a huge screen half of which had your presentation and the other half of which had your image was really cool. I literally felt larger than life, my moment to be a superstar like Beyoncé and Jay Z. More than that, the other speakers were a veritable “who’s who” of European start-ups, including such companies like Quintura, Extate, Garlik, Jaiku, ParkatmyHouse, Seatwave, etc. A lot of these companies are already very, very well funded (in some cases with investments of more than 9 million pounds sterling), so it helps to give you a little bit of perspective of what’s possible with a European VC. Sometimes when we meet with a Spanish VC and talk about valuations, they say: “This is not the US. The US is crazy.” It will soon be very difficult to make the same argument, because we are, after all, in Europe, and the major European VCs are already attempting to follow the investment paths of their American VC brothers and sisters, which means realistic valuations taking into account the market potential for a truly international product. In any case, a lot of the buzz was around Jaiku, and it was funny to see how the VCs jumped on the CEO’s bandwagon. For his part, Petteri of Jaiku went to the event dressed as if he had just come back from Sonar — totally relaxed and super “moderno” as we say in Spain — and still seemed a bit surprised that he was receiving so much attention. It worked for him. He seemed totally natural and comfortable with himself, without any ego-tripping or superstar complex. Very unassuming. Very nice. What surprised me most about Essential Web is that it was the first event where it seemed that investors were actively seeking to do deals. In fact, it was rumoured that one of our major competitors was in talks to get a major investment from a major VC. (Sam Sethi said that he might post about it today on his blog). We met the guys at the conference and wish them all the best. They’re very young (early 20s), but their technology is excellent. If they get funding, it will be a good sign for all of us that the vertical search market is about to get moving quickly within Europe. I’ll be the first one excited to see what valuation they’ll be able to get. It should set the benchmark for the rest of us.

All in all, Essential Web was a very concentrated and highly successful effort — 1 day, 28 main pitching companies, high-level executives from Google, Yahoo, News International, Index Ventures, 3i Group, Accel, Advent, etc.; a power-house event with powerhouse people. And unlike some other conferences, it was free for the participating companies! Usually, event sponsors require the winning companies to pay hefty fees to participate, but Library House should be congratulated for running a first-class event without exploiting cash-starved entrepreneurs. For anyone who’s interested in more information about the conference, I’ve uploaded a copy of the delegate booklet to this post.

Almost as successful as Essential Web was the OpenCoffee event the next day. There was a good mix of entrepreneurs, VCs and corporate executives there trying to make things happen. We had a few interesting conversations with Sam Sethi of http://www.vecosys.com/. He came over to congratulate us for us presentation and gave us some inside scoops as to the UK vertical search market. He should know. He used to be the main contact for TechCrunch UK before he had a well-publicised rift with Michael Arrington. We also had a time to chat with some potential strategic partners (of multinational companies) that were impressed by our presentation and wanted to discuss possible ways of working together. If during my first trip to London I’d been impressed by the access to global icons, on my second trip I was impressed by the access to corporate and technological innovators. The truth is that London presents a very, very compelling ecosystem.

Meanwhile, back in Barcelona, we’ve been chugging along with migoa. June was also a good month for us in terms of national press, both offline and online. We’ve been in Expansion, Cinco Dias, Loogic, Error 500, etc. All in all, it’s been a good month of media coverage. Our international exposure and participation in various conferences means that we are in the very fortunate position that major media companies throughout Europe are contacting us to talk about working together and possible investments. It’s still way too early to take any such talks too seriously (or to enter into any more details), but it suggests that we might be doing something right.Essential Web.

Hopefully, I’ll have something more interesting to report after I get back from our next trip, which will take place at the end of this week. And I think the sum of this post is that networking matters and it works! You don’t have a good product if no one knows about it, and it’s funny that at these conferences we keep bumping into the same people. They all tend to be very powerful people from Google, Yahoo, MSN and from the VCs, but the point is that the more they see you, the more you network with them, the easier it should be eventually to make something happen from a funding point-of-view. As we say in the US: You’ve got to be in it to win it!