While people are switching on their home heaters to maximum in Ukraine, we decided to take the last sunbathing.

While most of us were on the shore of Mediterranean Sea at Gera-IT annual Turkey co-work&rest, Sergey Mykhailenko was making new connections in sunny Madrid.

South Summit is a good place to be in October. It brings you to all in one: chill, inspiration and new connections.

Here is Sergey’s feedback:

“South Summit has a very professional team. I reached out to them few times before with my questions via email and always got the reply within a few hours. The information provided in advance to the event was perfectly tailored. They sent updates to visitors on how to get to the venue by bus, train, car, taxi, uber and even provided with some discounts. Also, there was a free bus from La N@ve to the center and back every 30 min.

The venue was as simple as its name La N@ve (Eng. – The Ship, but the locals told me it is also translated as Garage). There is a very well organized check-in at the entrance. About a hundred small stands inside are mostly filled with early and growth stage startups and seed funds. One big and one small networking area with bar tables and high stools. Open air food court was wisely located  in the shade because of 32-degrees October heat. Everything was done with Spanish simplicity, but all the necessary details  were considered.

The networking could be better if they had used something  more professional than Bizzabo app, that works terribly on mobile and even worse on laptop browser. Push notifications  were not working steadily, there is no calendar to make appointments in the app and a few critical bugs that make you uncomfortable. 

People mostly  came to listen to the speakers. Dr. Werner Vogels (the CTO of Amazon, Sanjay Sarma (Co-Founder of Shazam), seniors from Rocket Internet, BBVA, NASDAQ, Microsoft, Amadeus IT Group, MIT University, Singularity University were heating up the audience.

The event was very much oriented to the Spanish society, but I was surprised that everybody respectfully talked in English with me. One guy from Argentina even brought a translator. The 10-20% of companies were from LATAM region.

I am so excited to see how open Spanish people make cross-border import/export contracts. However, most of the startups are aiming to take positions on the internal market first and then go Global.

The biggest number of startups are acting in the Travel industry. Such huge corporates as Amadeus (btw rooted from Ukraine) and the Government are supporting the growth of this niche. Technical-wise IoT seems the most trending domain, AR/VR goes next. 

As usual, my meetings were not only conducted with locals. It is always a pleasure to meet people from Denmark, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, the UK of course and even Australia.”

In the meantime, we are back to a normal office work in Kiev. Getting ready for a winter season and looking forward to seeing you at our headquarters soon.

All the best,

Your Gera-IT Team