This is a guest post by the Twilio Poland Roadtrip team
The victorious German team are parading through the streets of Berlin, and that means one thing – the World Cup is over. So it seems like the perfect time to take that summer break, but where to go? How about a road trip with a difference?
Europe is like one big tech scene with many small centres of activity, so jumping on a bus and travelling from city to city to meet startups is a great way to break down some of those barriers. And right now, there’s nowhere more exciting in tech than Poland – so cloud communications startup Twilio has invited four startups to join its Roadtrip Tour through the country at the end of this month.
The San Francisco-based company has increasingly been looking to expand in Europe, and the local teams on the ground have been looking at different countries. Now Poland is on the radar, a country which is known for its technical knowledge and excellent IT brain power.
But creating a great business is also about scaling your product, building a team and leading a vision is as important as the technology you work with. Experience and inspiration are the key points here – and that’s what the Twilio Startup Bus is going to try to achieve. Twilio is known for its non-aggressive sales style and for its efforts to support the startup community, with campaigns like Twilio.org and The Twilio Fund. The expansion into Poland is not going to be any different. Listen, help and inspire is the motto for this trip.
Starting in Berlin on July 20, the six-day journey will see the bus travel to Poznan, Warsaw and Krakow. In each city the group will be visiting local startups and joining meet ups and events. At their first stop, they will be at Hive61 in Poznan to talk about insights of their startup lives in Berlin, San Francisco and London. Afterwards they will visit Warsaw startup estimote at its gaming hackathon, and then finally they will meet the Krakow crowd at a funding panel at the city’s Hubraum.
These and more events can you find on our travel website powered by evolero.
However, these are only the official events – in between the team will be visiting local startups and their founders and checking out co-working spaces, accelerators and VCs. Silicon Allee will cover the trip exclusively so you can stay in touch with the team – it is sure to be an insightful and fun adventure. Follow it with the Twitter hashtag #twiliopl.
At the end of the trip there is the chance to meet the team in person at a final dinner on July 26, sign up here – and remember places are limited.
Here is the Twilio Roadtrip Team:
Josef Dunne, co-founder of Babelverse currently based in London. Babelverse’s vision is to bring seamless communication between all languages. The team won last year’s European Twilio Fund.
Jonas Huckestein, founder of HipDial. Having spent the last few years in Silicon Valley, Jonas is now in Berlin working on his Twilio-powered company HipDial (which will be coming soon to Poland).
Tony Blank, developer evangelist from San Francisco based startup context.io. Check out the cool Twilio implementation by Keith Casey.
Maciek Laskus, co-founder of Startup Safary, which is creating tech infused, scalable events and licensing internationally. Maciek is based in Berlin but originally from Poland and will be able to show us the secrets spaces and places.
Lisa Lang, our Berlin-based European marketing manager. Lisa is focused the Eastern European market and has travelled to a lot of cities and met local startups.