Private Equity International names Ros Bazany as Woman of Influence 2024

Former Uber EMEA Head of Recruiting and Antler advisor, Nicolas Buteau outlines what he thinks are the most essential tips for hiring your first recruits for your startup, how to maintain team diversity at scale and hiring pitfalls to avoid. We sat down with Nic in London to discuss all this and more.

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Alright, let's say you're going on a trip to Asia and plan on hitting 5 different countries. You know you're gonna need to sort out a mobile connection to the local company in each new place.

Chore.

But, imagine if you could simply get your local SIMs before you even start your trip? So that once you land you are automatically connected. Before you've even finished breakfast in your New York apartment, in 5 minutes you've sorted out mobile connectivity for your adventure to the East.

This is the aim of Airalo co-founder and Antler alumni, Bahadir Özdemir. He plans to turn the traditional roaming market completely on its head through new eSIM technology.

Bahadir stopped by the Antler Amsterdam office for a quick chat with our marketing manager Hayden on the state of eSIM technology and the challenges in being the trailblazer for this emerging space:

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Lessons from recruiting a diverse cohort of rocket scientists, excited entrepreneurs, CTO's, management consultants and all round superstars.

Zoe Hall, Director of Marketing for the newly opened New York location, looks to fully communicate the advantages of Antler’s unique approach by sharing an illustrative encounter with Anna Ratala and Malik Alimoekhamedov, current co-founders of Zvook and Antler alumi.

Last week Fortify founder, Paul Musters gave a presentation to the Antler  cohort in Amsterdam about what it takes to build a successful startup team.  His presentation covered many aspects including the 5 reasons for  dysfunctional teams, psychological safety and more. Here are some of the  biggest takeaways we found.

On August 18, 2018, I had a realization. It was the realization that another life-changing opportunity had fallen onto my path. Earlier in life in similar situations, I didn’t realize the ripple effects that a decision has over time.

The entrepreneurial journey can be a combination of structure and chaos, success and failure. But most would agree that above all it one of ongoing learning.

Don’t strive for perfection on your first go- strive to prove that the business works and customers are willing to pay for it. Think of building your product as a miniseries, not as a movie.

This is the question that in the last years a lot of people have been wondering, because no matter how we do the math that is not enough. Written by Antti Rantanen, Venture Partner for Antler Netherlands and Head of European Operations at Avanto Ventures.

Wisnu Nugrahadi is a founder from Antler's inaugural program in Singapore from July 2018. After the first eight weeks into the program, he and his co-founders Margana Mohamad and Dimas Pramudya created Sampingan.

You don’t need a startup. You don’t need a team. You don’t even need an idea. Antler helps with all of that.

They say you make your own luck in life, and historically, I think Australia has done that... but if we believe we can ride the sheep’s back into an affluent future, then we deserve to be the poor fools we will become.

In honour of International Women's Day, we want to highlight the importance of female presence in the working space. Therefore, we sat down for a chat with Saskia Rademaker, our recruitment director in Amsterdam, and asked her all about her vision on the importance of diversity.

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This week, we speak to David Almroth, an experienced CTO and full stack developer with 20 years of software development experience and expertise in machine learning. After a decade in the startup ecosystem, David takes some time out to share with us his motivations, aspirations and overall founder journey. Come January 2019, he will also be joining our inaugural Stockholm program.

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Started my day in the company of great women, moderating a female entrepreneurship panel, jointly hosted by Antler and Ladies Investment Club (L.I.C.). The esteemed panellists included some amazing female founders and women in business including Grace Clapham, TEDx Speaker, Co-Founder of The Change School; Joanna Wong, Founder in Antler's inaugural cohort, CEO of All Woman Co.; Prerna Sharma, Antler's Director of Talent Acquisition; and Tanya Rolfe, Founder of L.I.C. and Head of Corporate Sales at Gifts Less Ordinary.

We spent five minutes with robotics and tech engineer Alok Pathak to learn more about his entrepreneurial journey with Antler and the different aspects of building technology and prototyping that gets him excited.

Nobody operates in isolation, especially when you’re building a company. It’s a challenging journey that you’re not going to accomplish if you try to go it alone. Learn the fundamentals to approach effective partnerships.

One of the most common hurdles when setting out to build a new company is figuring out where to even start. It's sometimes overwhelming to frame things when the possibilities are endless. It's easy to get lost or frustrated without a clear framework to guide your thinking. Here, we share an easy-to-use framework to help think about new ideas in a consistent and comprehensible way.

Design thinking is a solution-based approach to problem-solving. It is a process that draws upon logic, imagination, intuition, and systematic reasoning, to solve complex problems by exploring possibilities of what could be and create desired outcomes that benefit the end-user (customer). Solonia Teodros, co-founder of The Change School*, breaks down the science of design thinking and how any professional can benefit from it.

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How can a $1 horse be sold for a hundred bucks? Pretty easy, there are multiple ways to weave a narrative around your product or service which can set you apart from the crowd. Anh Nguyen, subscription marketing lead at YouTube APAC, shares her valuable insight into the secret to good storytelling for any product or brand. Storytelling is a crucial skill to master for any startup as it helps to inspire potential hires, customers and investors - to believe in your brand. The aim is to cut through the noise and communicate succinctly but effectively. Inspirational stories form the bedrock of effective communication, and they help to convey the sheer passion and drive behind incredible ideas.

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After months of preparation, the first Antler cohort is finally in full force in Singapore. It has been an intensive 120 hours as we introduced our 62 founders to the program, each other, and ran through key topics and exercises that broke down barriers in getting to know each other. These sessions were formatted with the intention of bringing out different personalities and working styles, through a range of high and low pressure settings. There was a variety of light-hearted icebreaker sessions to intensive product building hackathons. Lots of laughter, chatter and hard work ensued. Here, we've put together a little roundup of our first-ever week!

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"Try to make every lunch lead to a meeting with two new strangers" Lisa Enckell is a partner at Antler leading Marketing and PR. She shares how marketing for startups can be a challenge, but used right, the restrictions can be turned into a blessing.

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Finding and recruiting talented co-workers is one of the hardest tasks as a founder. Antler's head of recruiting, Prerna Sharma, hired hundreds of people to Uber's Southeast Asia operations, and at other companies like Flow Traders, a Dutch proprietary trading firm which has the same hiring values as any growing startup. She has several years of experience in recruiting talent for startups. Here, she lists the crucial prerequisites you need to consider before building your team.

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Jordan Dea-Mattson is a 35 year veteran of high tech, having worked at Apple, Adobe Systems, Yahoo and a number of Silicon Valley startups. He is now site director for Indeed.com's Singapore Engineering Centre, and recently he joined our Happy Hour to share some valuable advice with the Antler founders.

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We are all familiar with the startup worlds of Berlin, Stockholm and Silicon Valley, but where do we look for Asia's startup hub? You might want to switch your gaze away from the skyscrapers of Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Russia. Southeast Asia could be your much-overlooked getaway into Asia, and here are some reasons why.

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We are all familiar with the startup worlds of Berlin, Stockholm and Silicon Valley, but where do we look for Asia’s startup hub? This could be your much-overlooked gateway into Asia, and here are some reasons why.

In a series of blog posts, we'll introduce the people behind Antler. First off is our founder and CEO, Magnus Grimeland. Read on to get his perspectives on why he started Antler and what his ambitions are for this new startup generator. He also shares some useful tips for aspiring entrepreneurs.

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Identifying talent is not easy; however, in saying this, specific attributes  have been defined that make a person more likely to be a great founder.  Academic research, coupled with the experience of startup investors and  founding teams, point to a set of critical traits and skills that great  founders should comprise.

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We believe that the #1 reason behind successful companies is the setup of the co-founder teams. The right mix of the right people is what transforms a great idea into a great company.