Honored to be invited to speak with Indian entrepreneurs, sharing a bit about the essence of Lean Startup and Customer Development at the Entrepreneurship Cell IIT Kharagpur conference.
Today, helping Moldovan startups – 2020 Edition
Today I met with the current batch of 10 startups at the Moldovan XY Accelerator program, answering questions and giving feedback.
Thank you Traian Chivriga for inviting me.
I miss visiting Chișinău in person & eating Mamaliga.
Talking about corporate innovation and the pandemic
Recently I was on Fabian Böck‘s BOECKBX podcast and talked a bit about corporate innovation and the effects of the pandemic on businesses – including my own.
Have a look and listen.
TL;DR
Based on my own experience working in outsourced innovation with governments, organisations and some of the largest companies in the world on and off between 1996 and 2010, I do not think it is a good idea to outsource (business model) innovation.
That’s the whole premise of my company, +ANDERSEN & ASSOCIATES.
From the +ANDERSEN mission statement:
“… we enable companies to manage and run innovation for tomorrow inside their own company, using their own people today.
Because innovation in your company will never happen by outside consultants.
It has to come from your most valuable assets – the people you already have on the inside.”
On (tech) leadership
Recently I was on the Tech Leadership podcast and spoke a bit about my experiences and my leadership philosophy.
Have a listen to the episode.
The Rheinland Pitch is back in the real world!
As you might know, the Rheinland Pitch – Germany’s largest startup pitching event – also had to go online-only since March because of the pandemic.
This Monday, on September 14th we were finally back as a physical hybrid event as a part of the Startup Week Düsseldorf – with a reduced number of audience to comply with hygiene regulations – and streaming live on YouTube.
Four regional early-stage startups pitched a capped audience @ Startplatz Düsseldorf and online viewers.
We hope to be able to do more events like this. Stay tuned and check the schedule!
For those new to the Rheinland Pitch; it is Germany’s largest Startup Pitch event that I co-founded together with Lorenz and Matthias Gräf of STARTPLATZ back in 2013.
At the time, we were already all convinced that the region of Rheinland holds great potential for startup founders and that we have some great talents around – but every time they tried to tell their story or pitch investors, it would be next to impossible to understand, let alone fund, what they were pitching.
So we thought about what we could do to improve the quality of the investor pitches in Rheinland. STARTPLATZ provided the venue and the network and I provided the pitch training as given to me by my US American mentors. And the result was The Rheinland Pitch, a monthly event free to startups and the public, where 3-4 selected startups are put on stage to pitch in front of investors, entrepreneurs, media and the general public.
A week before they are put on stage, we invite all applicants (average of 14) to a day of investor pitch training with me for free and then we select the 3 or 4 best to put on stage the following week, every last Monday of the month in the evening.
Every 6 months there is also a grand Summer and Winter Finals where the best-of-the-best are pitted against each other, with semi finals leading up to them. In 2018 the grand Summer Finals was at the Düsseldorf airport and saw an audience of over 1.400 people attending.
The result is an incredibly successful educational platform that has seen over 1.000 startups improving their pitch and gaining the knowledge of what it takes to successfully pitch investors today and an over 100.000 audience that have been educated about what a startup is and how it works.
For more information and how to apply, see http://rheinlandpitch.de