This year Investor's Day Central & Eastern Europe, an annual tech conference in Kyiv better known as IDCEE, will be fifth and the last. Starting from 2015, the event becomes part of the U-Start conference network and will be rebranded into U-Start CEE.
IDCEE might become a U-Start’s sub-event, though will be a secondary brand.
Organizers of the last IDCEE, which kicks off on Oct. 9, prepared to meet some 2,000 guests, though the ongoing war in the country has significantly decreased the number of participants from Europe and the U.S., told Viktoriya Tigipko, conference founder, managing director of TA Venture and shareholder of U-Start.
IDCEE 2014 will be the first event where the teams of U-Start and IDCEE work together. The content of the conference, however, will not change significantly, Tigipko told the Kyiv Post. Agenda will include e-commerce, mobile apps, hardware startups, social media, even bitcoins issue with traditional pitching sessions.
Although initially IDCEE 2014 conference was announced to have a focus on China, a decision was made to drop this topic and move it to the next year. “Many our potential speakers from China are tightly integrated into the current political situation (in the world), so we couldn’t bring them to Ukraine,” Tigipko explained.
This comes as a big loss, since successful public offering by China’s Alibaba, world’s biggest online commerce company, on the New York Stock Exchange in September could be seen as a valuable experience to be shared with the Ukrainian tech scene actors.
Still, representatives from some major tech companies from Switzerland and Mexico will participate in IDCEE 2014, while Tigipko also expects many of their Ukrainian counterparts to show up.
Ukrainian participants are expected to represent a bigger part of the conference’s audience than in past years. One of the reasons is that there will be almost no participants from Russia, who used to account to more than 30 percent of the attendees. “We expect to see some Russian speakers, investors and entrepreneurs, but there will be very few attendees from this country. However, we’ve beaten the target for Ukrainian participants,” Tigipko said.
In the beginning of 2014, the Ukrainian web saw several calls to boycott IDCEE because of political reasons, as the main organizer’s husband, Sergiy Tigipko, used to belong to ex-president Viktor Yanukovich’s Party of Regions. “We didn’t have problems (because of those calls). The situation was and still is very difficult, and we understand people’s frustration and desperate feelings,” Viktoriya Tigipko said.
U-Start, that names itself “a global boutique advisory firm”, was founded in 2012 in Italy. Its main focus are family offices, through which wealthy families all over the world are investing directly in different businesses.“Nowadays, startups struggle to raise money from traditional venture investors. That’s why it’s very important to engage family offices. In 2013, 15 to 25 percent of family offices’ investment accounted for the venture business, and it’s just the beginning,” Tigipko commented. “There are many family offices in Ukraine (as well). They’ve been investing in fashion business and HoReCa (hotels, restaurants, cafes), but now also are interested in venture directions like show business, cinema, and the Internet. We want to help them not to lose money.”
Andrii Degeler is the Kyiv Post’s information technology reporting fellow. Degeler has been covering the IT business in Ukraine and internationally since 2009. His fellowship is sponsored by AVentures Capital, Ciklum, FISON and SoftServe. He can be reached on Twitter (@shlema) or [email protected].
