Week ​​5 & 6 at the Techstars Accelerator program

​​Omg it’s a double article! We’re very sorry for this combo, but the recent development of events forced us to take down our article for the 5th week and re-update it a bit. So that took some time and by the time we were ready, week 6 was basically over — hence this double-decker issue. But enough talk — let’s dive into the deep end:

Week 5

​​Going places

This time I’m going to lay out our week in reverse-chronological order.

Ready for it? Here we go.

Last week Friday, the whole Techstars crew boarded the bus and set out to Hudson, NY for the much needed two-day retreat trip. Despite Kamil not being able to join us at the last minute due to getting sick, we had a great time there and definitely managed to take a break.

​​Taking a break for a bit to leave Manhattan and the never-ending vortex of events is more necessary than we may think. When we arrived in Hudson, we went for a hike. You know, just one of those standard hikes — we took an Uber to a nearby forest, walked up to see a waterfall and went back to the hotel. But it was great and the snowball fight really made our day.

​​In the evening, we enjoyed a pretty great dinner and party where we, the European guys, stayed true to our country of origin by the volume of alcohol we consumed. On the other hand, it’s fair to admit that others would easily obtain the Czech citizenship right away for their drinking performance during the Buffalo game — brought to you definitely not by Yossi.

​​For the rest, I will let the pictures (and their captions) speak for themselves:

Part of our Techstars squad in front of the end-goal of our hike — a very significant waterfall somewhere in NY to which we had to walk (!) for a total of 12 minutes.

Bruce Willis — I mean Roman, saved the party again.

Last but not least, we had a great lunch and an all-hands meeting in the fanciest possible former theatre, now hotel, in Hudson, NY.

​​Raising the funds

When it comes to real business stuff, our main focus of this four-day week was to develop the fundraising strategy and work on all the associated documents. We needed to divide the work and progress towards the desired outcome which comprises of a bunch of different documents — the deck, the scenario for the negotiations and the overall strategy itself — just to name a few.

Even though we didn’t manage it as expected (the goal was to have everything ready by the end of the week), we’re still getting to where we need to be very quickly. We’re also sending a big thank you to our lead mentors for all the help and feedback they provided. Many lessons learned!

Another rightful highlight of the week was Roman’s private master class about communicating with investors. We sat down in the smallest meeting room in the office space, and Roman began to transfer his thoughts onto the whiteboard (see picture) and we were just digesting it in utter amazement (see Jakub’s face). This makes us much stronger as all of us are aligned around what we are doing as a company.

​​Pimp my ride

It also has to be mentioned that our Prague-based team did an exceptional job in the past week. As we’re talking about a possible collaboration with a very prospective client, we wanted to bring something tangible and amazing to the next meeting with them.

Long story short, we pulled off a customized version of the Veracity Smartphone app, bespoke to the client’s needs with all their look and feel. These guys turned a concept into a fully working and ready to-use-app in just a few days. Hats off to them!

Week 6

Roman, Jakub, and Kamil all worked hard while I (Albert) was catching rays in a fancy ski resort in Europe. Even though I cannot really reflect on what happened in the sixth week, here are some highlights, curated by Kamil:

Busy with business

​​Again, myriads of calls and product demos hit the team like a storm. It’s not easy to manage but at least this week felt much more organized. Or maybe it’s just a matter of having selective memory because most of the meetings were successful and/or just nice.

​​Jakub spoke to some very interesting businesses and discussed how our tech could service their efforts. It’s just nice to see a genuine interest from global leaders and established companies. Not to mention the first signed MoU! We are gonna be working on a paid project while a few others are already in the pipeline fairly close to being signed as well.​

​​Having fun is fun

​​This time, the fun part of the week was the Pitch Karaoke energizer, organized by the Techstars crew. The rules were simple: one presenter had to do a pitch while following random slides he or she had never seen before. This was apparently as funny as it sounds. Roman was also impressed by the rhetoric and improv skills of the contestants.​​

​​The guys also went to grab dinner with Rob Bailey, our lead mentor. Kamil ate so much he could barely move but that’s obviously not the most important thing to mention here (although still quite important). Most of all, this was the first time the team went out for an informal meeting with one of our advisors and it was really nice. We’re looking forward to more family-like moments like this one. Thank you, Rob!

Going light

One last notable thing for this two-week resumé: The whole team’s effort of creating a sleek UI for our product Veracity Register is already visible. Kamil managed to put together all the necessary parts of the backend, frontend, his Linux terminal, industrial cameras and even a couple of other complex things — and the result is amazing.

Now, whenever we present the demo of our industrial setup to our prospective clients, everything looks polished and tangible. It’s neat, has transitions and is also ready for the demo day — which is only 45 days away! 😱

And last but not least, this is Jakub, working on his physical condition in the gym after work. Just showing this here as a metaphor to what the whole program feels like. More specifically, you can imagine this is him replying to all the emails in the evening (wait for it).

“Veracity Protocol brings a new authenticity standard of fingerprinting physical objects to combat counterfeits. Thanks to computer vision and machine learning, we identify unique material characteristics and use them for future protection, verification and visual inspection. Unlike tags, chips or markers that need to be embedded and can be removed or tampered with, our solution works with items’ surfaces even when damaged and is still 100% tamper-proof.”