VintageFilmClub is drawing back the curtain to reveal the classics of Soviet Cinema that, through lack of subtitles or for political reasons, never made it to the west.

There is much to celebrate here aside from the political and historical insights the films provide, the craft & artistry of The Lady With A Dog or the sheer pleasure that comes from watching Amphibian Man – a thrilling, comical, love-story and monster-flick.

To mark the opening of the site Oxford University’s European Film Society will be screening one of the films at the Nissan Auditorium at St Antony’s College.

VintageFilmClub.com aims to draw on the treasure trove of 55,000 Russian films produced during the Soviet Union, as well as films from Eastern European countries with rich cinematic traditions, such as Poland and Romania. They will launch in December, with streaming of 100 films and quality subtitles inEnglish and other languages. By building communities around the films they will add content, such as cultural annotations and articles, while innovative features such as a ‘virtual cinema’ (simultaneous screening to two or more users) and free weekly screenings will make this site as unique in form as it is in content.

Olga Malinovskaya, Ginanina Zugravu each speak four languages and bring a wealth of cultural understanding and passion for art to the project, while the third founder, Evgeniy Prishchepa, is a talented developer, technical project manager and also runs his own development company.

A message from Olga Malinovskaya:

“When an Idea is facing Reality, it may perish in the impact, unless there is a gentle and thoughtful guidance. Betafoundry has been our flight dispatcher with their keen expertise and knowledge of trajectories in business and technologies. But it’s been more than that, it is as if through focusing their attention and sharing their resources the Betafoundry guys have ‘willed’ us from the dream zone into ‘the online and the real’ where we intend to stay and prosper: Γαλάτεια will live. Thank you, Betafoundry!”

Thank you Olga!

Register now to test the platform and watch two Russian classics for free!

In order to test the platform VintageFilms are allowing you to stream movies for free. When registered at VintageFilmClub.com just click on ‘ticket’ in order to watch films for free until 1 December, 2011.

To see Vintage Films’ demo day powerpoint click here.

‘Currently the Internet’s ability to generate applications is not matched by its ability to filter out unsuitable candidates.’ – KeyNote Market Research

Behiring have developed a web based tool to filter applicants. It incorporates tests developed by the team that can directly measure the skills that would be used on the job – like typing speed, ability to research (via “Google races”) and ability to prioritise (for example in responding to customer queries). They are also working with SHL to use their market-leading psychometric tests should employers wish.

The site  is tailored towards Small and Medium Enterprises, allowing them to generate a set of tests appropriate for the job vacancy. Once the tests have been run a number of applicants are recommended to the employer who can rank them according to their performance in the tests. The employer can also view ‘micro interviews’ or short, automated videos where applicants respond to text questions.

From left to right: Sam Adcock, John Cant, Arek Turlewicz preview Behiring.

The team are Sam Adcock – who is leading the research into what companies want, John Cant who is focusing on UX and Arek Turlewicz an experienced and talented developer. They’re in a private beta and actively looking for employers interested in recruiting in a simple, streamlined way – so get in touch with us via our contact, or go to their site.

You can find their demo day PowerPoint here.

We are pleased to note that the BeHiring team have been accepted onto the Oxygen Accelerator, where they will continue to build their ideas.

IvyLeap is online tutor marketplace. Bringing together the best in virtual classrooms and social networking it allows tutors from top Universities to connect with centres of demand. Launched in Beta it has already attracted a number of tutors by word of mouth and Facebook sharing, testing will begin in earnest by partnering with charities such as OxFizz who focus on preparing candidates for interview at Oxford. This will bring a many tutors and potential tutees to the site, most importantly it will allow the site to be battle tested.

Founders Ray Lal and Andrei Akhvlediani are DPhil candidates in computer science, having worked as tutors themselves they understand the sector. There is a huge opportunity in this space – the UK market alone is at £3.5b but is eclipsed by the US which, perhaps surprisingly, is itself overshadowed by South Korea. In their pitch (Ivy Leap Pitch Powerpoint) Andrei and Ray argue convincingly that the market is not well served.

IvyLeap is a well built and extremely worthwhile product, if you are interested in tutoring or being tutored go to the site to be among the first using this excellent platform.

On the 13th September, 2011 we held the demo day for the teams of the inaugural BetaFoundry programme at Techhub. Presenting were:  IvyLeap, Behiring and VintageFilmClub. In attendance were a number of VC’s, geeks and other good guys.

Three startups to watch:

IvyLeap - a free market to bring tutors from top universities to the aid of students. It includes an online platform for the tutorials to take place as well as social tools and rankings to ensure the quality of the tutoring. The site is in beta, tutors sign up now! At demo day, founders Ray and Andrei shared their vision along with some fascinating stats that reveal big opportunities in this industry. They are working with charities to test the site and will continue to support free education by allowing tutors to give free lessons should they wish, read more here.

Behiring - are aiming to bump off the recruitment consultant. By introducing a suite of simple online tools targeted to test for very specific skills, Sam, John and Arek will make the hiring process a happy one – allowing employers to quickly filter job applications and rank candidates according to exactly the aptitudes their businesses require. Read more here

Vintage Film Club – will stream classic Russian and Eastern European films – titles that, up til now, have been unavailable to Western Europe and the US, despite some of them winning international awards. Olga, Gianina and Evgeniy are committed to giving these films the attention they deserve, their site will build communities around the films, ensuring the that subtitles are of high quality and accepting cultural annotations and articles from the members. To get access to some of this stunning content for free read more here.

While this marks the end of the programme proper, it marks a new period for the companies while they beta-test their products, and continue to iterate but with a clear idea of their direction. They began with ideas and enthusiasm and they’ve graduated with MVPs/beta products and have kept that enthusiasm. This is certainly not the end of our (the BetaFoundry partners) involvement with the companies. One of us will be sitting on the board of directors of each company and we look forward to helping in whatever ways we can, it’s a pleasure working with the teams.

Thank you!

We’d like to extend out thanks to the mentors who have brought so much to the programme:

James Brady of WebMynd; Itxaso Del Palacio Aguirre of Imperial College VC research, Jonathan Black of Oxford Univerity’s Careers Service; Jamie Dear of OxFizz; Simon Bayly of Epiphany Capital; Justin Wohlstadter of BOLDstart Ventures; Tracy Dorée, Rory Stirling and Jon Coker of MMC Ventures; Matt Wood of Amazon; Stephen Brett of Anderson Law.

We’d also like to thank: Barbara Diehl and Dorothea Ringe of The Said Business School; Husayn Kassai of Oxford Entrepreneurs.
And everyone else who has helped, you’ve helped lay the foundations for three very exciting companies. We look forward to working with you again for BetaFoundry 2012.

The best place to get advice about pitching is from the sort of people you might be pitching to. When we met with investment managers from MMC, the Betafoundry teams practiced their pitches and got some great feedback.

One question – especially when searching for early stage or angel funding – is whether to seek a convertible loan note or a straight equity investment.

Let’s suppose you’re after an investment of £500k and you’re prepared to give up 1/3 of the business.

Straight Equity
You value your company at £1m (this is the pre-money) and you ask for the £500k for 1/3. The value of the company after the investment (the post money) is then £1.5m – so the £500k for one third works out. Equity is easy to understand and it gives the investor an unambiguous interest in the success of the business – because it’s partly theirs.

Convertible Loan Note
You don’t put a value on your company but take £500k, when you do get a round of VC funding – or take cash in exchange for equity – the loan is converted into equity, but the original investor gets a discount (typically 20%) on the shares. Suppose you take a funding round where VCs put in £1m in return for 25%, giving the business a post-money valuation of £4m. The £500k CLN, because it gets shares at a 25% discount, affords 500/0.8=£625k of shares, or 16%. You, the founder hold 59%… but 59% of a £4m company, whereas in the previous example you would have to give up more equity at the next stage – 25% of the 66% you holding, so you’d end up with 50%.

What’s good about CLNs
In this example the CLN works well for the founder. Apart from the fact that they end up with a greater share in the company it also bypasses the problems associated with putting a value on the business at such an early stage – that problem gets deferred until the next stage when the business has more history (and hopefully more revenue).

Why equity can work best
CLNs can be complex and may lead to conflicts of interest: the investor will be looking for you to receive your next stage of funding at a lower valuation so their CLN buys them a greater stake. While an investor with an equity stake will want you to get the highest valuation and they’ll work with you from the start to add value.

In the US, where the scene is a bit more developed, CLNs are popular, in the UK EIS – the enterprise investment scheme – makes equity investments particularly attractive.

Yesterday we brought the Betafoundry teams to the offices of MMC Ventures, a Venture capital firm in London. With over 10 years in business and £80 under management the have a history of sound investments and were able to give us a deep insight into what VC’s look for, where they fit into the ecosystem and how best to approach them.

Where VC’s come into the life of company
MMC look to make investments of between £500k and £2m, typically the companies they are interested in have revenue, often hundreds of thousands of pounds, and have been in business for a couple of years. Usually they will have raised some money to get them that stage – for example from angel investors, or from calling on friends, family and their own savings.

A view from the other side of the table Start-ups looking for VC funding might think they have a tough job of it – networking like mad, explaining their vision hundreds of times over – but they should spare a thought for the firms looking to make investments.
Of the 1000 or so companies that MMC contact or are contacted by in one year, perhaps 4 will get investment.

The search for a deal
Where do those 1000 companies that contact the firm come from, and how do they get cut down to 4?

1 – initial contact: 1000 companies
75% of which come via the way of networking, it can be as simple as sending someone you know your 2 paragraph pitch to someone to paste into an email and send direct to the firm – attaching an exec summary is also a good idea. A lot of those companies, around half, can be quite quickly dismissed – they’re not areas the firm is interested in investing in, they have no revenue or the market is too small. More of those can be filtered out by a bit of desktop research.

2 – Meetings with 150 companies
MMC have seen an exec summary, they’ve done some research on the business in question, now they meet – though maybe just one of the team members. The business is pitched, questions are asked … and another 100 businesses are filtered out.

3 – Second meeting with 50 companies
At this stage at least one of MMC’s investment managers is enthusiastic about the business – they’re championing it – it’s time to get the whole team and all the other investment managers around a table.

4 – Drawing up Heads of Terms for 10 companies
Almost there. The investment managers agree on the business potential and more background work has been done. The terms of the deal are drawn up – equity agreed upon. There are, normally, just two legally binding clauses in these: one is exclusivity, that the team now stops looking elsewhere for funding (at this stage many companies will be in discussions with 2 or 3 other VC firms); the second is that the team will be liable for the cost of the due diligence check if it fails because they failed to disclose important information. It’s very rare for the deal to fail for that reason, and unless you’re being rather dishonest it should’t be feared.

Not all 10 companies will accept the deals terms. Of those that do there is an important period of waiting that follows: the due diligence checks. These take 6-8 weeks – if you’re burning through cash, this can be a painful time.

We thank the kind people at MMC for giving us so much time – particularly given the effort they put in to making a single investment – not to mention the work they do on the boards of invested companies to help them grow.

We are very happy to announce that Amazon Web Services has signed up as a sponsor to BetaFoundry and is providing $500 in credit for use on their cloud computing services. Amazon is a pioneer in the cloud computing industry and the variety of offerings and scale offered by AWS is unrivaled by any competitor.

Amazon Web Services has revolutionized the acquisition of computing components by allowing you to hire them on demand, 24/7, and for any period of time with billing based on hourly prices.  In addition, AWS provides many other valuable services such as: S3, which takes the hassle out of storing large quantities of files reliably and securely; Cloudfront, which allows you to deliver content (including media streaming) fast and cope with any amount of user demand; SimpleDB & RDS which offer a scalable and rapid database solution; Elastic MapReduce which takes the hassle and scaling issues out of processing massive amounts of raw data.

As a guide, the $500 credit from Amazon translates to any of the following:

- 5,882 hours of computing on EC2,

- More than 33 TB of data served by Cloudfront

- 5million emails delivered by Simple Email Service

- 3.5TB of secure data storage for one month on S3

We are very happy to welcome them onboard!

We are very happy to announce that we are now accepting applications for our Summer 2011 program. All that is required is that you fill out our simple application form and we will invite the top teams to Interview in person or over Skype.

Don’t delay – the sooner you apply, the more time we will have to consider your product in depth.

Apply Now