EY Cyprus hosted Cyprus Seeds’ workshop “Perfect Pitch for Fundraising” at its Jean Nouvel offices in Nicosia

  • First workshop organized by Cyprus Seeds and hosted by EY Cyprus
  • Keynote speaker was Dr. Linda Plano, world renowned consultant and professional coach

EY Cyprus hosted the “Perfect Pitch for Fundraising” workshop which took place on Wednesday, April 24th, 2019, at the EY Nicosia premises. The workshop was organized by Cyprus Seeds with the active support and involvement of EY Cyprus. This was the first of a series of workshops organized by Cyprus Seeds, offered to all the research groups who either applied or expressed interest to the Cyprus Seeds 2019 Program.

Cyprus Seeds is a non-profit organization set-up in Cyprus, in July 2018, with the mission to help commercialize innovative academic research taking place in the universities and research institutions in Cyprus, by providing seed funding, in the forms of grants, mentoring, business skills training and networking. EY Cyprus is one of the donors and partners of the program as it strongly represents the EY values: supporting entrepreneurs to bring positive change in this transformative world.

The keynote speaker of the workshop was Dr. Linda Plano, a world-renowned consultant and professional coach on pitching with impact, from Boston, USA. Dr. Plano is the founder of Plano & Simple which provides practical, actionable coaching to high tech entrepreneurs to help them raise funding from investors or attract customers. She has worked with nearly 1,000 entrepreneurs and start-ups around the world, of which some have raised over $1 billion.

During the workshop, Dr. Plano highlighted the importance of pitching and she offered to volunteers real time coaching for a perfect pitch of their projects. As Dr. Plano suggested, “pitching is a skill executed daily by all successful CEOs, whether in one-on-one meetings or from the stage. It is a skill that serves anyone with ideas well throughout their career”.

In her remarks, Maria Georgiadou, Managing Director of Cyprus Seeds, highlighted that the evaluation process of the applications received has started and will be completed in mid-May. Projects will be selected based on written applications, as well as web interviews with an evaluation committee of international subject-matter experts.

Stavros Pantzaris, Country Managing Partner of EY Cyprus also commented: “As an influential global organization, EY has the potential to bring about considerable positive change through our capabilities, our people and our initiatives. Supporting Cyprus Seeds is giving us the opportunity to be part of a program that impacts academic entrepreneurs, helping them grow their research projects into successful businesses and thus contribute in our vision of building a better working world.”

 

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