The last GSW I attended was Seoul in 2011, and I have been to the ones in Trondheim, Madrid, Cape Town, Reykjavik before that. I met YouNoodle co-founder Rebeca Hwang (Stanford BASES) in Trondheim, who met fellow co-founders Bob Goodson and Kirill Makharinsky (Oxford Entrepreneurs) at the GSW in Buenos Aires the year before. Here they decided to start YouNoodle, as they saw a huge common need of inspiring and connecting student entrepreneurs. Bob is now co-founder of Quid in San Francisco, Kirill is founder/CEO of Ostrovuk in Russia, and Rebeca and myself re-founded YouNoodle in 2010. New company, new team, but the same dream of a connected world of opportunities for top student entrepreneurs.

MIT Global Startup Workshop gave us all the inspiration we needed to take the leap and do something big for global entrepreneurship. Today, YouNoodle's Podium software powers entrepreneurship competitions at Stanford, Cambridge, and Princeton, among others, and our platform is also the backbone of Start-Up Chile, Intel Challenge, and IBM SmartCamp. We just launched our beta Facebook app for student entrepreneurship groups, and we are toying around with a mobile app for entrepreneurship meetups too. Without GSW, YouNoodle would have never happened, it's as simple as that.

2011 MIT GSW was such a turning point, both for my personal life and for my startup life. At that time I was only an undergrad student from Seoul with one idea in my head and nothing else. During the GSW, I participated in the Elevator Pitch Contest and I was able to pitch my idea to students, entrepreneurs and VCs from all over the world. The connections I made there led me to apply for Mass Challenge, a startup accelerator, and eventually I made it to the final round of accelerator as one of 125 finalists among 850 participants. All 5 members of my startup, StyleShare, flew over to Boston to participate in MassChallenge, and under the mentorship of the very people I had met at GSW 2011, we managed to launch the first beta version of StyleShare for the international community.

Those 3 days of MIT GSW were so inspiring and it was all thanks to GSW that I was able to meet entrepreneurs who helped me and gave me the opportunity and courage to make my idea of StyleShare happen.

I co-founded Podio, a web-based collaboration tool that allows teams, companies, and organizations worldwide to manage their work online. At the GSW in Iceland (2010), I was able to pitch the idea for Podio to hundreds of entrepreneurs and investors from around the world during the Elevator Pitch Competition (which my team won), and I received helpful feedback and was able to develop strong friendships with young entrepreneurs that I stay in touch with even today and continue to visit in Iceland, Portugal, and Boston.

After GSW 2010 in Iceland, I launched Podio in San Francisco and grew the company to over 25 team members from 14 different countries, working from two offices (San Francisco and Copenhagen). In just the past year, progress has been phenomenal: We went on a world tour discussing the "future of Work" with our potential customers, and Podio now has 40,000 organizations that use the tool, and over 50,000 apps have been built by employees in 170 countries around the world, hundreds of those shared in the Podio App Store. Furthermore, Podio now speaks 7 languages, and we have been voted the "Best Business or Enterprise Startup" in Europe during the TechCrunch Europas competition.

A lot has happened in the two years since GSW 2010 in Iceland, and I'm definitely glad that I attended it.

Last year was the first year I attended the GSW, and, at the time, my company was nothing more than a really cool idea. While the preliminary market research was solid and the concept interesting, I was not really sure I would want to dedicate the next few years of my life to this particular project.

Upon registration, I got an email offering to take a free consultation sessions with Stephen Brown, founder of Innovate4Growth. I signed up for that, and it was great to have a chance to sit down for a one-on-one coaching session with someone who has actually worked with successful entrepreneurs. Then, during Thursday evening’s cocktail party, I had a short conversation with Bill Aulet, and he gave me his card and asked me to get in touch with him next time I were to go to Boston. I took him up on that offer and ended up attending the t=0 Entrepreneurship Festival at MIT last Fall.

Over the months that followed the GSW, I was able to stay in contact with people who motivated me and helped me further refine my proposal. This Winter, I finished the last of my business school courses, and submitted the proposal to the Seoul Global Center. My application was accepted, and as of this January I have moved into the incubator in the Seoul International Finance Center to work on my company full time.

The best aspect of the GSW is that the community of organizers and speakers seek to build meaningful relationships with the attendees. When people here give you a business card and offer to help, they really mean it.

I run Xtreamis, an online media startup based in Buenos Aires. We started in late 2010 as a university spin-off, a video-stream indexing service called “Stream Roulette”, which eventually evolved into a B2B content syndication platform.

GSW 2011 was my first, and it has catapulted me into an intense entrepreneurial lifestyle. It allowed me to build an amazing global network of contacts, who personally introduced us to our first clients and largest competitors. They also happen to be responsible for the greater part of 520,000Km worth of business trips during this past year. It was they who provided the most valuable thing I received at the GSW in Seoul: feedback with a global perspective. The GSW community pushed my company to rethink our business model and pivot into the B2B segment.

These kind of workshops are real stepping stones, they provide opportunities and empowering experiences. Personally, the MIT GSW has given me the confidence and global mindset needed to actively help within my community and to act as an advisor for various other projects.