The Lunch at the Circle lunch events and networking group was started almost twenty years ago by Per Karlsson, Laurent Charreyron and Sophie Callies.
Today it is organised by Stefan Norberg, Fabrice Teboul and (still) Per Karlsson.
The purpose of Lunch at the Circle is simply to give people an opportunity to meet in an informal way over lunch to listen to an interesting speaker, to network, to share, and to enjoy. Over a nice meal with some good wine.
Here are the three organisers:
Stefan Norberg, Per Karlsson, Fabrice Teboul, the three organisers of Lunch at the Circle
Theme: International entrepreneurship in the age of internet and disruptive innovation
“Jörgen has 30 years experience from executive and advisory work on four continents with both the public and private sectors. As a tech executive in the 1990s, he was overall responsible for delivery of the systems that powers the ECB and the introduction of the Euro. As a management consultant, he has been involved in regional startup eco-systems from United States to South Africa, and public sector projects such as strategy for new cities from China to Egypt.”
“In one of his recent mandates, Jörgen was the CEO of QuickBit, a fintech company started in 2016 and listed on the NGM Nordic MTF stock market in 2019, and in 2020 he started a London based ‘fintech factory’, combining an incubator, investor and accelerator in one organization, with the purpose of changing the way value moves in international banking.”
Date: Monday June 13
Time: You’re welcome from 12.00. We sit down at the table at 12.30.
Place: //on invitation//
Theme: International entrepreneurship in the age of internet and disruptive innovation
Speaker: Jörgen Eriksson. Jörgen has 30 years experience from executive and advisory work on four continents with both the public and private sectors. https://www.linkedin.com/in/jorgen-eriksson/
Bonus: you get a two-course lunch with wine (or water) and coffee (please let us know food allergies in advance)
Register your participation on this link: //on invitation//
A railway carriage in ruins, copyright BKWine Photography
The first Lunch at the Circle “Season Three” event took place a few days ago. Judging from the feedback, it was a great success. People were keen to meet IN PERSON again.
We had an exciting and unusual speaker who over lunch who explained how he works with hypnosis to alleviate or improve impediments to good performance and normal life. For example stress situations (that many of us are all too familiar with), smoking, vertigo, sleep or food irregularities or other things that may interfere in daily life or work.
Theme: L‘hypnose thérapeutique, comment peut-elle contribuer à l’optimisation des performances ?
Le docteur Laurent TATON est médecin spécialisé en hypnose médicale. Il intervient auprès de cadres du secteur privé et de la fonction publique, ainsi que d’entrepreneurs pour les accompagner dans leur gestion du stress.
Enseignant, auteur, il intervient aussi sur des problématiques individuelles ou en entreprise pour des formations et actions de prévention. Il consulte à son cabinet ainsi qu’au C.H.U. Cochin.
On June 17 Martin McCourt shared his experience about how mergers and acquisitions can play a role in corporate development with the guests at the Lunch at the Circle lunch.
Watch the video interview with Martin below.
Martin was Executive Vice President M&A and on the management board at Gemalto for around a decade and involved in a number of acquisitions, from some 10s of M€ to 890 M USD with SafeNet (in 2014).
Gemalto is a world leading digital security company providing software applications, secure personal devices such as smart cards and tokens, and managed services. It is the world’s largest manufacturer of SIM cards. (source:Wikipedia) Gemalto is now part of the Thales group.
Content curation has become a very “hot” subject over the last couple of months. I remain to be convinced of the value of content curation though. In many cases content curation seems to be a way to avoid having to put a little more thought and effort into writing a proper article (or p”post”). A bit like a glorified and re-branded twitter feed.This is accentuated by the “fake curation” tools that simply creates what is supposed to look like a curated contents from an automatic feed, e.g. from a twitter stream.
In most cases I prefer when someone has taken the trouble to write a post / article and am not very interested in what someone might have “curated”. (In addition, it sounds a bit like museum pieces, doesn’t it?)
But it is very popular.
Someone who is more enthusiastic than me about content curation is Therese Torris, a long-time Lunch at the Circle participant and frequent guest and the author of the interesting blog Return on Clicks.
Content curation does help content discovery. Curation helped me discover and share content on my favorite topics. Numerous reports show that social content curation à la Pinterest brings traffic to brand sites. Curated content embeds brand content into a rich inbound context of external content.
Social content curation fosters customer engagement. Consumers who curate a brand’s content not only send it traffic, they also bring to the brand and its product a much needed validation. Brands like Whole Foods that participate in social curation on Pinterest increase their customers’ engagement.
Corporate curation tools help create a competitive advantage. In addition to public social curation platforms, brands should use scoop.it or corporate collaborative content curation tools like Curata, CurationSoft or Zemanta to listen to their market, optimize their content and collaborate on their content strategy.
But content curation is no panacea for failing content creation. Curated content supplements original brand content, it cannot replace it. If a brand has no story to tell, no original content, no topics to share with its audience and no Social Media strategy, content curation will only increase the overall online noise level.
Do read the full article, on the link above. It is full of useful information!
What’s your view? Is contents curation useful or not?
“How I created Lauritz.com and made it Scandinavia’s biggest auction house”, with Bengt Sundstrøm, founder, owner and president of Lauritz.com
We recently had an exciting Lunch at the Circle event with Bengt Sundstrøm, owner and president of Lauritz.com.
Over lunch Bengt told us about how he raised the money to start his business in three hours with a quick phone call to his banker, how he does not waste money on Google Ads (but instead use them effectively), what his next strategic moves will be and what the key difficulties are in creating an online auction house. But he did not tell us why he still does not have any serious competition in his business. Because, he says, it is a puzzle to him too.
Here’s a short video interview:
Bengt Sundstrøm is the owner and president of Lauritz, Scandinavia’s biggest auction house. In 1998 Bengt bought the small auction house of Lauritz Christensen Auctions, founded in 1885. One year later Bengt launched the online auctions on lauritz.com. It has since grown to a business with a turn-over of around 100 million euros. The business model is very different from other well-known internet auction houses (e.g. eBay). All bidding on Lauritz is done online but they also have brick-and-mortar viewing locations across Scandinavia where you can go and look at the items on sale. They also have a staff of over one hundred valuation experts. This mix of online auctions, valuation expertise and physical presence has been the key to Laurtiz’ success, says Bengt.
The last Lunch at the Circle event for the season will take place on Wednesday June 27:
Managing your brand online with Bernadette Martin and Julie Vetter.
It will be slightly different than usual: 1) we will have two speakers and 2) the lunch will be in a different place, see below.
Here’s the outline:
Would you hire someone today without googling their name? Would you do business with someone without checking their web site? Didn’t think so. But how do you look online? Bernadette Martin and Julie Vetter have built a business around managing one’s online identity, online personal “brand”, and online image and reputation management. What will people find out about you? What tools do they use? And how can you make sure that they find an online picture of you that looks the way you want it to look? Bernadette and Julie will illustrate it with some surprising examples.
Bernadette Martin, founder of Visibility Branding, is a personal brand and e-reputation strategist, speaker and author of “Storytelling About Your Brand Online and Offline”. More info on: http://visibilitybranding.com
Julie Vetter, founder of Hoi Moon Marketing, has over fifteen years experience in helping to create the online presence of over 50 clients in the fields of travel & leisure, transportation, hi-tech, wine, real estate, medical, and health. More info on: http://hoimoonmarketing.com/
When
Time: Wednesday June 27
……
Participation (and full details) on invitation only.
Growing your business outside your home country without burning your fingers, with Tom Thorelli, founder of Thorelli & Associates
Earlier this spring (what spring?) we had a lunch with Tom Thorelli, an american lawyer based in Paris. Tom is a specialist in helping companies develop new business in unknown markets, in particular to open up new business in the US, without falling into one of the many legal traps there are. Legal questions are of vital importance in the US and it is not easy to understand for an outsider. It may concern contracts, intellectual property (IP), patents and a host of other things. Tom explains:
The US market in particular, but also other foreign markets, are a challenge. It is easy to make mistakes, to think that things work as “at home” when you do business there. Many business that try and penetrate the US market, or other foreign markets, make simple and silly mistakes that can be avoided. Tom Thorelli has worked with many French (and European) companies to help them get established and win business in the US – without getting fingers burned – by taking the market and the competition seriously, by understanding contracts and legal issues, by knowing how to negotiate, and how to protect one’s interests. Tom will explain do:s and don’t:s based on his practical experiences from helping many foreign companies to success in the US.
Tom Thorelli is founder and managing partner of the Thorelli & Associates Law Firm in Chicago (Illinois). Tom is of Swedish origin (yes, again; I don’t do this on purpose!) and currently lives in Paris. And two days after this Lunch at the Circle event he will try to run the Paris marathon.
More info on: www.thorelli.com. “The law firm has five lawyers, four of which are located in Chicago. The focus of the firm is in protecting intellectual property rights; negotiating contracts; structuring companies; providing a full array of immigration service; and dispute resolution.”
“How I created Lauritz.com and made it Scandinavia’s biggest auction house”, with Bengt Sundstrøm, founder, owner and president of Lauritz.com
Next Lunch at the Circle event is on Thursday May 31, with Bengt Sundstrøm, owner and president of Lauritz.com. Register for this event now!
Bengt Sundstrøm is the owner and president of Lauritz, Scandinavia’s biggest auction house. In 1998 Bengt bought the small auction house of Lauritz Christensen Auctions, founded in 1885. One year later Bengt launched the online auctions on lauritz.com. It has since grown to a business with a turn-over of around 100 million euros. The business model is very different from other well-known internet auction houses (e.g. eBay). All bidding on Lauritz is done online but they also have brick-and-mortar viewing locations across Scandinavia where you can go and look at the items on sale. They also have a staff of over one hundred valuation experts. This mix of online auctions, valuation expertise and physical presence has been the key to Laurtiz’ success, says Bengt.
The Lunch at the Circle event on February 16 was with Emilie Gobin, CEO and co-founder of Usine á Design.
A design and web entrepreneur: “how I created l’Usine @ Design”
Emilie Gobin is co-founder and CEO of Usine-à-Désign, an e-shop that sells custom made designer furniture directly to consumers at affordable prices. She will tell us her story: from how she started the company, over the challenges of raising over a million euros in capital to get it off the ground, to dealing with designers (you know!). In short, the story of how a young and successful French entrepreneur manages to survive! Emilie will speak in French.
