Bubble Bar #7 on the last day of Oslo Innovation Week. We stepped up our game and invited 3 early stage investors to talk about personal stories and best practices in creating communities of angel investors and raising seed and angel rounds of funding.

Guest #1
Ekaterina Gianelli - VC at Inventure, Helsinki, Finland

Ekaterina is a Director at Inventure, a leading venture capital fund in the Nordics. In 2014, Inventure were in the top 3 most active investors in the Nordics and the most active in Finland. Ekaterina focuses on seed and early stage investments, and works with the portfolio companies in online & mobile space. Prior to joining Inventure, Ekaterina has been involved in many innovative companies, including an adtech startup, Kiosked, and a leading service design agency, Fjord.

Guest #2
Thomas Berglund - Serial and parallel entrepreneur, angel investor from Oslo, Norway

After years as senior manager in the Telecom & IT industry, in 1999 at the age of 32, Thomas founded his own Ed-tech and e-learning company Edvantage group and run it as CEO for 12 years. As one of Europe’s leading e-learning companies it was sold to Lumesse in 2011. Parallel to that Thomas co-founded two Med Tech Companies (SB12) and (EB24) and as the Chairman sold them in 2007 respectively 2014 to pharmaceutical companies. Since the last exit Thomas has been working full time as a private investor and business angel, currently holding a portfolio of 8 companies. The latest project is to set up Angel Challenge together with Startup Norway. A hands-on program for private investors to become more professional in their startup investments with the vision to get business angels to work and invest together. Privately Thomas lives in Oslo, married and have 3 daughters. Hobbies are MTB-Biking, gaming, cooking and ice-hockey.

Guest #3
Sean Percival, Partner at 500 Startups with a focus on the Nordics.

Sean launched his first internet startup in 2006 for a mere $12, then sold it in 2009 at an 835,000% return on investment. His second internet company (the popular media site lalawag), which he founded with his wife Laurie, was created in 2008 and sold in 2010. More recently Sean was the CEO and Co-Founder of Wittlebee, the kids clothing club. Prior to that he was the Vice President of Online Marketing at Myspace.

He’s also been a recognized, leading authority in digital business, media, entertainment, online marketing, and e-commerce, working with high-profile startups and companies including MySpace, Tsavo Media, Docstoc, and Mahalo among others. His projects and insight have also been featured in Forbes Magazine, The Los Angeles Times, TechCrunch and at SMX: Search Marketing Expo and many more.

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Recap
Bubble Bar is a relaxed monthly Friday afterwork event for the startup community in Oslo. We gathered some trouble-starters to launch this new series, to have a regular venue where we can discuss the glorious ups and the miserable downs of startup-life.
There’ll be tough questions, honest confessions, annoying buzzwords, hot trends, boring fads, bubbly beverages and tons of fun. We’ll try to wrap all these into an entertaining talk-show format and bring the founder stories close to you.

Bubble what?

*Bubble: There’s no angry way to say ‘bubbles’ (we know you tried).

*Bar: You know the deal. There’s no such a thing as bad beer. At least not around here.

Let’s grab a cold one and have fun together!
Sincerely, the producers and hosts:
- Kriszti Tóth (co-founder, MESH)
- Vilhelm K. Vardøy (co-founder, Xeneta)
- Adam Scheuring (co-founder, Loop Health)

PS: This bubble will never burst!

The event is part of the official program at Oslo Innovation Week being held 12-16 October!
More info at www.oiw.no #oiw2015