Zercatto is a Lisbon Challenge Alumnus invested by Seedcamp. During the #LIS - Lisbon Investment Summit, they had a chance to meet Mike Butcher, Techcrunch Editor, and this is their story:
“Zercatto at the Lisbon Investment Summit with Mike Butcher, Techcrunch Editor
This week, Zercatto (@zercatto) has been invited to participate at the Lisbon Investment Summit, uniting Europe’s top investors, business angels and VCs, to startups from all over the world. The Summit was really interesting, with great speakers discussing how they find their next big investments.
Our panel was moderated by the well-known editor of Techcrunch, Mike Butcher (@mikebutcher). Along our side were our fellow Seedcamper Lucy Stonehill from BridgeU (London); Y Combinator backed Vasco Pedro from Unbabel (SF & Lisbon); Aurora Chisté from the noble Hack for Big Choices (San Francisco); and Rita Petrilli from Sellf App (Treviso, Italy).
The time we had to discuss several topics was an hour and a half, which made it quite a long session (if not the longest of the whole summit?). So I have to congratulate Mike on his proposal which was rather than us talking for the whole time, we would invite a few members of the audience that were just starting out to come on stage and gather some mentorship advice from the panel.
We discussed three main topics during our panel: Ed tech (and how technology is disrupting Education), FinTech (and how new business models are changing the traditional financial industry) and the effect of new translation services on the world.
The first topic was EdTech. Lucy iniciated the discussion by answering Mike’s first few questions - that revolved around whether Universities will still be needed in the future. The panel’s opinion was unanimous in agreeing that universities will always hold a key position in a young adult’s development. However, we did discuss how the role of the teacher must change. From a personal perspective, and I expressed that during the debate, I fiercely believe that the role of the university should be that of teaching people to question assumptions and theories - only through this capacity to question will society develop and grow into a better place. BridgeU is doing just that: it is connecting young people with universities where they will actually enjoy studying at, rather than with the university that stands higher in the ranking.
The second topic was Fin Tech, and I was invited to discuss a few examples on how different areas are disrupting this traditional industry: crowd lending, crowd funding, online asset management, and of course, smarter investing, like the one you find on Zercatto. I discussed the importance of rethinking and unbundling what the industry has tried to reinvent for years, without succeeding: aligning interests with investors, and at Zercatto we believe that every interest should be aligned; that’s why we are confident to put through a fee structure where our investors only win money if there are profits. Oh! And of course, we discussed Bitcoin. Everyone is obviously excited about Bitcoin. As you may have seen from a previous blog post of ours, we love the concept but still believe it is not mature enough to have your savings deposited in this currency. As discussed, I believe it still needs huge institutional money poured into it, as to give it the required stability.
Thirdly, we discussed translation, and how startups like Unbabel are allowing for a mix between machine and human translation, hence allowing for small companies all over the world, and working on tight budgets, to be able to access clients in languages that were once forbidden due to the high costs of having to have a native speaker of every nation.
After that came another interesting part: the mentorship session! Here, Mike selected and invited about ten entrepreneurs to come on stage and ask for advice. I loved this part: it is always amazing to be able to give back and at least share some of the experience we are fortunate to be having with Zercatto! Good luck to all of them!
Congratulations to Beta-i on the great organization and fun event! Follow them if you want to keep yourself on the loop.
Cheers,
Gaspar”