Finding a business partner can be as hard as finding the love of your life. TeamVenture, a government spin-out company that helps people with business matchmaking, wants to highlight the importance of finding a team through a new entrepreneurial team award. Startups can apply until January 4, 2016.
TeamVenture is a new startup founded and led by Bram van Beek. Bram used to be innovation manager in the Utrecht region, leading several projects to help entrepreneurship. One of the projects was TeamVenture, a matchmaking platform for entrepreneurs and he has transformed this project in a standalone company.
At TeamVenture people can post their business idea and partner need, or people can look around at ideas already posted and join up. The company is practicing what they preach: Bram used his own platform to find cofounder Orhan Teke.
The award is organized together with a few sponsors: corporate sponsors are Accenture, Computable, Exact and Rabobank, and also joining are Seats2Meet and the Leiden based incubator 15km. Even though TeamVenture is a new company, the award has been held twice before when TeamVenture was just a project and not a company. The past two winners are Admesy and Vandebron. The winning team receives publicity, strategy coaching from Accenture, the opportunity to pitch at investors, free bookkeeping software for a year and several books.
Setting the right criteria for an entrepreneurial award is always difficult: on the one hand you want to reward success. On the other hand companies that are already extremely successful do not need the award. TeamVenture has settled on the following criteria:
- Main office based in Netherlands
- The current team is working together for less than 5 years
- All team members participate in setting strategy or management
- The team must have made ‘remarkable progress’ in 2015
The TeamVenture website is completely in Dutch. By covering this initiative here on StartupJuncture, we hope to inspire the many Dutch startups with international founders to participate. The Netherlands is an open economy that thrives thanks to international talent, and it would be great if this year’s winner would be an example of such an international talent team. If you are an international team, you qualify and would like to apply, let us know and we will root for you in the finals. You can enter here, until January 3. On January 19, the three finalists are announced and the winner is chosen during the final event on February 2, 2016.