Why is it so hard to make great burritos in London?

I just came back from a fantastic trip to the US with the Seedcamp teams. For a detailed summary of our trip, you can read the great posts from Platogo and Shout’Em.

I came back with one question in mind: Why is it so hard to make great burritos in London?

Indeed, everybody keeps telling me that Burritos are much easier to make in Silicon valley. You can easily find a great recipe, the best ingredients and the right skills; while in London you are likely to struggle finding chipotle chilies or even good corn tortillas. It takes a lot of trial and error with very few tools at your disposal to find that elusive combination of flavors you know is just right.

Come to think of it, burritos are a lot like start-ups.

After spending 2 weeks in NY and the Bay Area, I have to agree that the Silicon valley seems to be a fantastic place full of opportunities. Everyone knows were to find the best developers and the best technology, everybody knows someone with the right skills or a good idea. They have the infrastructure to create great new start ups, the echo-system is mature.

So are we doomed to eat average Burritos or to stick with jacket potatoes?

I don’t think so. I’ve met a lot of great entrepreneurs in London and some great technologies are being built across Europe. We have here a strong academic and scientific background and the ability to create fantastic IP but we are facing many obstacles when time comes to bring ideas to market. Saul Klein has written a great post on how Seedcamp is creating a distributed network for European start ups; which highlights some key differences between the US and Europe.

But on a day to day basis, I see one simple lesson for those of us in Europe: We’ll all make much better burritos if we start drinking more coffee.

During these 2 weeks in the US, I met more people than I meet in London in a year. Every single person introduced me to other people, some with great travel experience, some with lots of lessons to share from their previous start up and sometime I’d be the one sharing my thoughts on travel, Amazon or online payment.

I know we have meet ups like OpenCoffee, Minibar, OpenSoho or Mobile Monday. That’s great but not enough, and far from what I witnessed in the US. We have to share lessons learned, now!

We all need to spend more time meeting up around a good coffee, sharing ideas, lessons learned and contacts. That’s one important step towards making London and Europe the best place to build a start up; which is your best chance to succeed with your own business…

So if you want to make great burritos, I know were to find chipotle chilles in London, and I know someone who can find great corn tortillas, I might even introduce you to some great carnitas.

Share your thoughts in a comment or come meet me for coffee: itamar at kukunu.com

And to Alasdair, Reshma and Saul: Thank you! You did a fantastic job building an extremely rewarding experience both on a professional and personal level.

The weekly life of a travel startup - Goodbye the web, Hello Le Web

Guest post on Hotel Blogs

This week was a pretty busy week with the 6th iteration of LeWeb in Paris, organised by Geraldine and Loic Lemeur. I arrived in Paris on Sunday and enjoyed the comfort of a lovely Parisian flat and a great office thanks to the fantastic hospitality of Gary (@garycige) from Zilok.
I met several VCs on Monday and Tuesday and quickly discovered that many French investors do get travel and the opportunity for innovation and disruption. Between meetings I could focus on my presentation for LeWeb and enjoy some fantastic food and wine.
The highlights of LeWeb…

* Christopher Sacca (@sacca) on stage (man, you made me want to become a porn-star) check it out here.

* Gary Vaynerchuk on stage, just crush it.

* Many other magic presenters and a great winner for the Startup competition: Stribe, with a really cool product.

* And of course a great presentation of Kukunu, see coverage on Techcrunch here.

I ended the week back in London for a fantastic Seedsummit where, together with the other Seedcamp finalists, I had the opportunity to pitch in front of investors. Being able to discuss Kukunu with people like Brent Hoberman, Martin Varsavsky, Dave McClure and Jeff Clavier was magic.

This is the end of a pretty exciting week, in the meantime Gerald (my co-founder) developed some great new features that we are beta testing right now. Sign up on http://www.kukunu.com to participate in the private beta, we should extend it in the coming weeks.

The weekly life of a travel startup - Get ready for the pitch

Guest post on Hotel Blogs

Last week I wrote about the importance of finding the perfect co-founder and the journey to getting the right idea.

We started defining Kukunu’s concept in more detail, a new travel planning experience that would be fun and easy to use, and that would leverage smarter technology. We already had a good idea of the business model, and I built a first business case before sharing Kukunu’s concept with some travel experts and investors to challenge us and improve the proposition.

“First you jump off the cliff and you build wings on the way down”, Ray Bradbury

Last August we decided to quit our day jobs and work full time on Kukunu. We never had the opportunity to start thinking about next steps as a few weeks later we were selected for the Seedcamp 2009 final.

I’m trying to keep this post short, so if you want to know why Seedcamp is such a great experience, go read the post by Emi from Brainient. It was a fantastic week, we met awesome people, some of them are still helping us today.

We left Seedcamp with one idea in mind, get something, anything - a stripped down version of Kukunu - out in front of some users. One developer and eight weeks later, we had a first preview of Kukunu ready to share with some friends. We are now getting ready to launch a closed beta at LeWeb in Paris. Another fantastic opportunity, but I’ll talk more about that next week, during LeWeb 09 edition.

Looking back at the past few months, I can insist on 2 points:

1. Pick the best co-founder: someone you trust, someone that complements you, someone that will be with you whether in good fortune or in adversity.

2. Build something: you have no excuse to not have a working beta before raising some funding. It took us two months with a single developer to have something we were not ashamed to share, and three months to get something really cool and scalable.

Now it’s time to fine tune the last details before LeWeb. I’m leaving to Paris tomorrow. From this point onward I’ll stick to a weekly blog post relating the events of that specific week.

The weekly life of a travel startup - The beginning

This is the first guest post I did on Hotel blogs, I thought it would a good post to start Kukunu’s official blog.

My name is Itamar Lesuisse, to what people would typically answer ‘sorry?’ then ask me if I’m French. Born from a Belgian father and an Israeli mother, I studied Telecom engineering in Belgium and Canada. I have been a consultant at The Boston Consulting Group, a Product manager at Amazon where I launched new product lines, worked on ePayment at Visa and I’m now co-founder of Kukunu. I’m living in the UK and can be found on Twitter (@itamarl) or in any cafe in Soho with good coffee (I’d definitely recommend the Flat White)

The Start up roller-coaster didn’t start for me with a great idea or a disruptive technology but with a great Start up offering me a position of Chief Marketing Officer in London: perfect job, awesome team, great salary and equity in the company; I had 2 weeks to give them an answer.

I jumped on the Eurostar and met Gerald, my best friend, for a beer on the terasse of Cafe Belga. I told him about the job and after a few drinks we arrived to the conclusion that this was not the right move. It was time for me to build my own start up. The plan was simple:

1. Get the right best co-founder

2. Get an idea

1. Get the right best co-founder

I left Cafe Belga pretty relaxed. I knew exactly what I wanted and now the pressure was on Gerald. He had 2 weeks to let me know if he wanted to jump on the roller-coaster and be that best co-founder I was looking for.

I told him the job would be based in London, the opportunity was much bigger than in Belgium; I knew this wouldn’t be an easy decision for him who got married recently and just bought a flat in Brussels…

The next morning he was in.

This is the first and probably the most important step towards building Kukunu. How do you know you found the right co-founder? I guess you never know but in my case I have known Gerald for more than 25 years and I know he can handle me after a 100 hours work week and 5 espressos. I also know that he is smarter than me and as an engineer, PhD in Physics and great developer, he is the perfect match.

2. Get an idea

In 2 months we had disrupted more than 5 markets, changed the life of 500m people and generated more than £2b revenue, all that on some Excel spreadsheets and Powerpoint slides. It’s easy to get ideas, even great ideas, not so easy to pick the right one.

So I asked the team (at that point, this was Gerald, me, wife, fiancee, sisters, brothers, friends and the Starbucks staff, all those who spammed us with great, fun and crazy ideas) to stop looking for ideas, this wouldn’t work. Instead I needed them to share their daily problems and frustrations, we would take care of the rest. You’d be amazed on how much frustration people can face in a single day, on a single working task or a leisure activity.

Few weeks later, when planning holidays with my fiancee, Kukunu was born…