by Anastasiia Mykolenko
This year’s the entrepreneurs’ gathering took place on August 25-29, in a quiet and forested area near Rudiskas, Lithuania. Participants of the CYCLE Freedom Entrepreneurial Camp came all over the world to share their entrepreneurial spirit.
The goal of the Camp is ‘to help young people take the next steps in their life journey, explaining the entrepreneurial perspective and giving them practical know-how they won’t find anywhere else’. For that purpose, a dozen entrepreneurs gave speeches about their challenges in business, provided some valuable tips and insights, and conducted small-group brainstorming sessions.
This year’s CYCLE welcomed participants from the US, Australia, Lithuania, Belarus, Ukraine, Russia, Poland, The Netherlands, Kurdistan, Germany. They were hosted in a cozy wooden cabins at the calm and remote Lithuanian hotel ‘Aerodream’. All the sessions were held here during the day and the bonfire parties were organized at night.
Vadim Fiddle, as the main organizer of the event, led the first brainstorming sessions on the essential concepts of entrepreneurship, such as ‘partnership’, ‘the business goals’, ‘success’, etc. After these productive round-tables, the participants were introduced to Alex Gibb, a portfolio entrepreneur with investments in E-commerce, Fintech, chatbots, machine learning, Edtech and beyond, who shared his global startup experience.
Every day participants met successful entrepreneurs, who spoke about their business path and opened up about their failures and fears. That was particularly valuable for all attendees, as such an approach showed true difficulties and revealed ways to succeed when being your own boss. The inspirational speeches were given by Mitch Thrower, a financier and Founder and Chairman of Events.com; Yagub Rahimov, CEO and the Founding Partner at 7Marketz Group – the leading global blockchain and Fintech media holding; Lobo Tiggre, a writer, entrepreneur, and investor; Jurgen Van Pletsen, a long-time entrepreneur from Australia with unique knowledge in business growth and marketing; and many others brilliant speakers. Jacek Spendel, President of Liberty International, gave a speech about libertarianism, its goals and its place in global politics. This lecture was exceptionally valuable, as it helped the participants to realize the actual difference between ‘libertarians’ and ‘librarians’ by the end of the Camp.
The most intense part of the training consisted of the group discussions with a task of scaling real start-ups or mature companies, resolving challenges facing these companies. Each group included participants with existing businesses. They led the group work, which resulted in the presentations of the reports on the last day. These reports included various aspects of building team chemistry, profit-sharing agreements, etc. All the groups were encouraged to continue working on the projects after the Camp. This year’s projects covered the topics of international business and trade, proposed by Vadim Fiddle; an environmental start-up ideas, presented by Nicolas Henriksson – a young, but exceptionally intelligent and promising participant from Germany; the revolutionary marketing approach, which was worked on by the group of Jurgen Van Pletsen; the design-oriented networking platform realization, that was discussed in the group of Lithuanian entrepreneur Arminaz Kazlauskas; and a web-development area was successfully presented by Dovydas Navickas and his group.
Such intense activities were perfectly diluted by the early-morning yoga sessions, kindly organized by Virgis Daukas to keep the participants energized and balanced during the Camp.
Needless to say, that this year’s Camp provided every participant with a huge dose of motivation, priceless networking opportunities and awakened everybody’s entrepreneurial spirit, which will be cherished and shared further on the next Camp.
