Sesame Summit 2026 – application open

Data trends and Clubhouse

This list was started two weeks ago. You’re looking into my brain as of February 10th. And here we are, publishing on February 18th.

As mentioned in previous articles, I always enjoy looking into patterns in these lists, especially afterwards.

There’s an overarching structure that encourages you to read through the list from books and reports, to general articles around strategy, entrepreneurship or venture capital. And then we go deeper into marketing, podcasting, newsletters – topics related to Selected – before ending with some science, gaming, arts and music.

In some occasions, there are also deeper connections between items which looks fascinating in retrospect since I never plan them. We explored them in our annual list of lists.

I feel like this is a consequence of using this list as a form of digital gardening, a way for me to collect ideas and stories worth checking afterwards. You can do it on Notion, Roam Research or Evernote. You name it.

This week, the red thread is data. It’s present on (almost) every single item. And it’s the core of what we’re building at Sesamers as mentioned in my recent Clubhouse article.

Welcome to the most Selectivest.

Books

Paving – Conversations with Incredible Women Who are Shaping Our World

A book about 25 global women leaders would be remarkable by itself. The fact that it is written by a teenage girl makes it incredible.

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The Cold Start Problem

Otherwise known as the “Chicken or Egg Problem,” the “Cold Start Problem” is a puzzle that this book promises to address by revealing “what makes winning networks successful, why some startups fail to successfully scale, and most crucially, why products that create and compete using the network effect are vitally important today.”

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RyanBerg

Big Ideas 2021 Report

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Faster Than The Future: Facing The Digital Age

Shoutout to one of this report’s co-authors who also happens to be one of my good friends, Robin Wauters

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Page47

Culture

A letter to my people: I

Ignorance is a choice, thus it is not an excuse

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MemeGenerator
  • Link: nicolasdolenc.medium.com/a-letter-to-my-people-i-b19a3ae1f8f5
  • Author: Nicolas Dolenc

Venture Capital

Turning up the heat on VC cold inbound pitch forms

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Marketing

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Battery
  • Report: battery.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Battery-Whitepaper-B2BTechBranding.pdf
  • Author: Rebecca Buckman

The Loop: Our Community & Public Platform strategy & roadmap for Q1 2021

Inspired by the interplay between their Community & Public Platform teams.

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Podcast

A Post-Mortem for Social Podcast Discovery

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Data

The Data Source #2 | The Metadata Revolution ✊

It all starts with having a strong framework around extracting metadata into one source of truth, an end-to-end lineage powering use cases including data operability, access control, quality, auditability, and more.

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Pinterest

Helping the Enterprise build reliable data products

From a VC point of view, if you’re a believer in the evolution of the stack, playing the monitoring part is often a “good” bet to take.

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Source: bi-survey.com/top-business-intelligence-trends (n=2,653)

Gaming

A sneak peek at MetaHuman Creator: high-fidelity digital humans made easy

Creating one high-quality digital human is difficult and time-consuming. Scaling that effort to create many diverse digital humans of the quality required by next-gen platforms and high-end virtual production is a formidable task indeed.

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YouTube

Science

Algorithmic and human prediction of success in human collaboration from visual features

What’s the best group to win at an Escape Room game? Larger, older, and gender diverse groups are more likely to escape. And machines are better than humans at predicting the outcome.

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Music

How Music Promotion is Going to Change in 2021 (Spotify Growth, FB Ads and Beyond)

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Smarter Playlists: automate your music discovery, playlist strategy, and library organisation

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Events 2 days ago

Last week, I spent three days at Bits and Pretzels in Munich — a startup-focused event with a distinctly Bavarian flavor. Think Oktoberfest meets startup conference, complete with dirndls, lederhosen, and more beer than you might expect. As someone building an AI-powered event platform, I went in with a specific mission: Observe how startups actually market themselves at events. Here’s what I discovered: GoodBytz: The power of good demos What they did: Robotics startup GoodBytz set up a booth where its robots prepared kaiserschmarrn (a traditional German dessert) all day long. Why it worked: Nothing beats seeing a product in action. While other booths had brochures and demos, GoodBytz’s robots were actually cooking. The smell, the movement and the end result stirred together an experience that people will remember and talk about. The lesson: If you have a physical product, show it in action. The old writing adage generalizes well: Show, don’t tell.  Let people see, hear and touch the product. WeRoad: The bathroom hack What they did: Posted “Missing Investor” flyers in bathroom stalls with QR codes pointing to their website. Why it worked: Pure genius. Every startup at the event was looking for investors, but the “Missing Investor” headline, while a bit on the nose, proved irresistible. Plus, bathroom stalls are one of the few places where people have 30 seconds to actually read something. The lesson: Think about where your target audience’s attention will remain undivided. Sometimes, the most effective marketing leverages the most unexpected places. Emqopter: Visual impact matters What they did: Designed a bright orange booth that displayed their drone prominently. Why it worked: In a sea of grey, white, beige and brown, Emqopter’s bright orange booth was impossible to overlook. The drone was real, too, and proved a real conversation starter. The lesson: Your booth is competing with hundreds of others. Make it visually distinctive and ensure your product is the hero. Quests: Community building using the product What they did: Created a busy, branded booth with accessories (toy car, traffic cones, a bulletin board) and used their anti-loneliness app to build communities among founders at the event. Why it worked: Quests used their product to solve a real problem right at the event, and the busy booth design generated energy and curiosity. The lesson: Use your product to solve a problem at the event — if it’s possible, of course. Demonstrate your value in real time. Dyno: Event-themed marketing What they did: Distributed branded electrolyte packs with the tagline “Your hangover ends. Your pension lasts – with Dyno.” Why it worked: Dyno aligned its messaging perfectly with the Oktoberfest theme. Every attendee was thinking about beer and hangovers, so Dyno’s goodies were quite relevant. The tagline was clever, memorable, and directly addressed a pain point most people at the event might have to deal with later. The lesson: Tailor your marketing to the event’s theme and culture. The more you tie your messaging and product to the context, the more memorable you become. So, what did I learn? Event marketing is about more than just showing up and setting up a booth; you have to understand your audience and create experiences that people will remember. Here’s what really struck me: most startups and even big companies don’t know how to leverage events properly. They book the booth, show up and hope for the best; maybe they bring some branded pens and a pop-up banner. Then they’ll go back home and wonder why they spent €5,000 in exchange for 50 business cards that never convert. The startups that stood out at Bits and Pretzels understand something fundamental: event ROI isn’t about booth size or location; it’s about strategy, creativity and planning. None of the startups above improvised on-site, or planned something the night before the event in their hotel rooms. They laid everything out 4-6 weeks before the event. A solid pre-event strategy is what separates successful event marketing from expensive booth rental.  But what matters most for early-stage startups is that you don’t need a massive budget to stand out. WeRoad’s bathroom stall hack probably cost €50 to print the flyers. A standard booth package at Bits and Pretzels would go for €3,000 to €5,500. The ROI difference is staggering when you compare the cost per meaningful conversation. That’s the difference between simply spending money and investing smartly. Building Sesamers has taught me that helping startups find the right events is only half the equation. The other half is helping them understand how to maximize ROI once they’re there. Good props aren’t a marketing expense; they’re opportunities to meet customers, investors and partners, and strike up engaging conversations.

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New Materials 3 days ago

Lios Group, the Irish startup behind SoundBounce, was a winner of JEC Composites Startup Booster 2018, and has been making significant strides since taking home the award.

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New Materials 1 week ago

Tree Composites aims to accelerate the energy transition with innovative composite joints.

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