Alliott Group co-sponsors conference for Berlin’s emerging growth startups sector

New Markets 2017: TECH/DIGITAL marked the soft launch of Connect, a new resource connecting people, business and markets around the world.

The conference, attended by approximately 70 delegates from 27 countries, enabled successful tech entrepreneurs and professional advisors from Alliott Group and other co-sponsors including Farnham Castle, HiFX and local member firm TLC, to impart knowledge on and exchange experiences related to cross border business expansion.

The conference, attended by approximately 70 delegates from 27 countries, enabled successful tech entrepreneurs and professional advisors from Alliott Group and other co-sponsors including Farnham Castle, HiFX and local member firm TLC, to impart knowledge on and exchange experiences related to cross border business expansion. The event also support Alliott Group's focus on the tech, digital and internet sector. 

Attendees listen to keynote speaker Nikita Fahrenholz at New Markets 2017: TECH/DIGITAL in Berlin

Keynote speaker Nikita Fahrenholz, CEO of Book a Tiger, a company that is aiming to reinvent facility management, shared insights on his approach to building startups into multimillion dollar international companies and “digitizing” niche markets. Fahrenholz, also explained the role he played in founding and developing Delivery Hero, an international online fast food delivery company with over US$2 Billion revenues that connects over 200,000 restaurants to consumers in 53 markets worldwide and that has to date secured Euros 1.6 billion of venture capital finance.

Among the messages for startup founders was the importance of having an unshakeable belief in the product or service being offered to the market: 

"You need to have conviction that your product is solving a real problem – it has to be 10 times better than any product on the market – it can’t be ‘kinda better’ – that is not disruptive, but more likely just piggybacking on a trend."

To achieve successful market entry, Fahrenholz described how Delivery Hero would look critically at factors such as whether the basic infrastructure and services were in place in a city to support their business model and essentially, if there was really market.

A heads-up for accountants and lawyers advising tech-driven startups

There were messages too for the accountants and lawyers in the audience with Fahrenholz making clear that when moving into a new geographic territory, startup founders need to move quickly, not pore through minutiae at long meetings: “When entering a new country, in the first few months we are not obsessed with getting everything perfect – certainly we don’t want to do anything illegal, but we just want to get going and be told what to do.”

Contributing speakers

Other tech entrepreneur speakers at the event included John Tinsley of Iconic Translation Machines, Tim Dearden of Vena Solutions, Spencer Altman of Webtrekk and Sven Weizenegger, a cyber security expert. The professional advisory speakers included Heike Saxer-Taylor of Farnham Castle Intercultural Training and Tamás Kulcsár of IBFD who talked about main tax concepts tech firms should be aware of and the basic transfer pricing and international tax rules surrounding them.

For more information

We will be announcing information on the next Connect event soon. If you need any assistance at this stage, please get in contact.