CEED Slovenia had a busy quarter as they hosted three international leaders in a series of Leadership Talks. This global learning initiative aims to bring know-how and best practices to Slovenia, not only for CEED members but for wider entrepreneurship and business ecosystem.
Oliver Egan, a marketing expert and one of the masterminds behind the Politics Tamed campaign, visited CEED Slovenia on May 9th and 10th. He gave a Leadership Talk where he encouraged attendees to “be brave” when creating advertising campaigns aimed at cutting through the continuous stimuli protentional clients are exposed to. One example in his career was when he helped launch Lexus’ first hybrid vehicle by having the company’s engineers design a fully operational hoverboard. Egan’s visit was covered by local journalists, and an interview with Oliver can be watched here.
On May 20th, Sean Ellis, CEO and founder of GrowthHackers.com, a pioneer in the field of growth marketing and the person responsible for Dropbox’s recommendation system shared his experience in an in-depth workshop for scaling Slovenian technology companies and inspired a wider community of entrepreneurs and growth hacking leaders. Both events were organized in collaboration with GMC – a Slovenian growth hacking community. One of Ellis’ takeaways: “You don’t grow business by knowing how growth works. You grow business by testing.”
This event led nicely into Andy Park’s visit on June 6th and 7th. Park invented the term “growth hacking” and leveraged his expertise as Spotify’s Operations Manager to share his tips and tricks with CEED Slovenia’s entrepreneurs. One of Park’s parting pieces of advice was, “If you don’t have people that believe in the company then you cannot change the culture.”
The three events attracted a total of over 500 attendees and resulted in coverage by both local and international journalists.
CEED Slovenia developed this global learning initiative with some of the most successful global entrepreneur-founded technology companies from Slovenia, including Outfit7, Nicelabel, Cosylab, Sportradar, D.Labs, Loop, Avantcar, GoOpti, 3FS, and Parsek.
Leaders Talks are events, supported by the global learning initiative focused on hosting both Slovenian and foreign leaders who bring knowledge and experience to CEED entrepreneurs and leaders. CEED Slovenia Director, Andrej Solinc, explains that “With Leadership Talks, we aim to widen [CEED entrepreneurs’] horizons, develop their global mindset and lead them on a path of learning from founders, executives, and experts, who have gone through the same challenges.”
