Interested in my Pitching Masterclass for your students, startups, or employees too? Get in touch!
It was initially created to serve the Rheinland Pitch back in 2013 to help educate our regional founders and prepare them for raising money – and has been constantly evolving and updated ever since, and today it contains accumulated knowledge and feedback from over 3.000 startups served – and counting.
The Pitching Masterclass Startup, Student, and Corporate Edition used to only be available to applicants to the Rheinland Pitch or people lucky enough to be in an educational institution, incubator, accelerator, or corporate innovation program who had booked me for my in-person, on-location Masterclass.
Some of my happy Pitching Masterclass customers…
Today, in addition to the on-premise editions, my Pitching Masterclass is available to anyone everywhere as on-demand eLearning, featuring +2 hours of video and all the hundreds of slides as a booklet download.
Also available in bundles, especially popular with companies and organisations, including prepaid online mentoring & support vouchers for employees, booked and managed by the teams themselves on demand.
Although it all came together on short notice, it turned out quite alright; People interested in making a difference by getting involved in defence technologies did indeed show up, great speakers could be convinced to share from their knowledge and experiences and take questions from the people attending the meetup, and everybody participating said it must continue – and so it will!
HEADS UP: Join the Defence Tech Meetup #2 on June 25th 1830 location (this time also in DUS) TBA.
See you there!
The Defence Tech Meetup was created for people like you and me, people who are concerned by the geopolitical developments and are looking to get involved to help protect democracy and European values – our future – by helping to build the new generation of “Made-in-Europe” defence technologies.
The Defence Tech Meetup group is available to the public for anybody to join, it’s by no means an exclusive or secret group – but what gets shared at the actual meetups is by default not public, because we want to make sure people feel they can speak and share freely. This is also why members of the Defence Tech Meetup are only visible to other members (and why you won’t find any pictures of the members participating shared in public).
However, as this was the first meetup of its kind, I thought I’d make an exception to give people still on the fence or curious about joining a better understanding of what a typical meetup event looks like.
But the next time, you’ll have to be there in person.
On Wednesday May 14th at 1830 hours CET at Startplatz Düsseldorf, we met up for the very first time.
After a short intro about the meetup’s how and why, the participants introduced themselves and shared their motivation for joining, what they wanted out of the meetup and what they felt they could contribute with in the group.
It was then time for our first invited speaker was Stavros Messinis on video call from Athens, Greece who shared his learnings from founding a defence tech startup and selling it to Delian (nee Lambda Automata) within the course of around two years.
Stavros live from Athens, Greece
Some of his key insights that stuck with me were:
Don’t go “all in” on touting being a defence startup at the get go, start as a “little” dual-purpose project “amongst friends”, don’t create unnecessary attention and scrutiny day one, move fast and don’t break too many things, aka don’t take stupid risks to life and property, think one step at a time
You’ll have to partner with a prime* at some point if you want to be able to sell what you are building and make an impact
Implicitly, to proceed, either you have to raise the money for getting the certifications, licenses, etc or join forces with a prime or neo-prime** who has already cleared all these hurdles, already have license to operate
You’ll have to be present at the industry trade shows where the people in uniform and government officials – the people who buy – are (it may cost you, but it is worth it – it’s how to play the game)
There may be significant difference between how you have been thinking about using your product and how the buyer is actually going to use it (aka is it going on the shelves in storage somewhere, mothballed for years until they are needed in a conflict, only to be brought out and be tested once a year) which may have huge implications on what you need to consider (aka components to whole product life expectancies, corrosion, updates, etc) so you need to talk to the end users in uniform, the boots on the ground
*The term Prime is often used to refer to a handful of large companies (incumbents) that hold contracts for major Department of Defence (DoD) systems and programs. Technically, the term “prime” means anyone who has a direct contractual relationship (in this context with a DoD government entity). **The term Neo-Prime refer in this context to the new wave of defence companies, often still privately held and venture backed, that aims to either disrupt or complement the incumbent primes with new technology, rethinking defence (that have already successfully formed a direct contractual relationship with DoD).
The second speaker for the evening was Lars Mesenbrink from Orrick, one the leading law firms in the world when it comes to technology and innovation.
Lars’ talk was a primer on how to stay out of legal problems in Germany when building defence tech and he was happy to also give us permission to share his slides and graciously spent a lot of time after his talk to answer our many questions.
Some of the key takeaways for me was “know your investor” and “know if you classify as a weapon or dual-use (and dual-use has to be real and credible, not made up by you)”. Furthermore:
You as a founder / c-level are liable if it turns out that the money is coming from a nation state, entity, or person on the blacklist
Check with the Deutsche Bundesbank if the investor is OK or not
Theoretically you also need permission (must at least notify authorities at this threshold) for anything over 10% of foreign (non-German) ownership, but in practicality (and in the eyes of the law) there is no actual threshold and it could kick in with 1%, depending who you are selling equity to (aka are they on a list?), better to ask authorities up front as the investment (transfer of ownership) will not be legally binding (invalid) until ownership officially cleared/permitted
It doesn’t matter if your company is registered in say the UK, if you or one of the other central (aka founders or C-level) people are registered as living in Germany because there is precedence for applying the same German rules to your company if you/they do
Now taking wishes and requests does not guarantee it can and will happen already at the next meetup, but we’re going to make an effort to touch on the topics – if feasible and with enough people interested.
Don’t forget to join the Meetup group and attend the next Defence Tech Meetup event in person on June 25th 1830 hrs CET, at a location in DUS yet to be announced – so save the date now.
I’ve got some news as I can’t sit on the fence any longer in light of the geopolitical developments.
I’ve been searching for ways to get involved, to meet and connect with likeminded people who also wants to do more than to silently observing our European values, democracy, and security eroding, people who want to get involved, people who actively want to do something.
However, I couldn’t find anything – so I’m starting the Defence Tech Meetup – I hope to build a community of people willing and able to contribute to protecting democracy, European values – our future – by helping to build the next “Made in Europe” defence technologies in any shape, way, or form.
This is for doers, hackers, developers, founders, tinkerers, engineers, builders, and people of all sorts to meet and find the people you need to build it with, find other ways to contribute, find real actual problems and needs to build solutions for.
In short, the goal is to gather like-minded people to create a community where you’ll find whatever you need to get involved – and once you’ve gotten involved, that it will serve you as a place for help and inspiration to help keep you going.
I hope it can also serve – in a very modest way – to help make building defence technology in Europe, for Europe and our allies, gain the urgency, attention, recognition and respect it deserves (especially in Germany, where for obvious historical reasons the defence industry has been a controversial and touchy subject).
Get in touch if you want to start a Defence Tech Meetup yourself – wherever you are. I’m happy to share resources and contacts, help you set it up and get it going. After all, this is an idea, it’s not about a specific person or a specific place. The more, the merrier. It’s all open source and free – take it and run with it.
Meetup #1 is already scheduled for May 14th 1830 hrs CET at STARTPLATZ Düsseldorf and the first speakers are already secured:
Speaker 1: Stavros Messinis(Greek, founder “Smart Flying Machines”, exit to Delian Alliance Industries, formerly Lambda Automata) on founding a defence tech startup to exit in less than two years.
Speaker 2: Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP (Orrick, one of Europe’s Leading legal firms for innovation & technology) on “How to stay out of jail (when building defence tech in Germany)”.
How can you help? If this is for you, register with the Meetup group and show up for the meetups! Not for you? Help get the word out, share this publicly wherever you think appropriate, feel free to forward to companies, organisations, individuals you know this would resonate with – that would go a long way!
The Meetup Format
Introduction: New members introduce themselves, background, skills, complete with ask (what do you want out of the meetup) and give (what can you contribute to the meetup), 60 seconds standup
Talk 1 (e.g. current challenge(s)/need(s), updates or perspectives, on premise or beamed in over Zoom, defence industry representative, NATO, national defence forces, frontline allies, analysts, authors, organisations on the ground, etc)
Q&A session with speaker(s), open mike, first comes…
Mingle & Network, intermission
Talk 2 (e.g. “lessons learned”, from defence tech entrepreneurs, engineers, industry, defence forces, elected officials, frontline allies, etc)
Q&A session with speaker(s), open mike, first comes…
Vote, show of hands: Are we doing this meetup again?
Suggestions, if yes vote, topics & speaker(s) for the next meetup, improvements, etc collected.
Mingle & Network, open end
All meetups are under Chatham House Rules: Anyone who comes to a meeting is free to use information from the discussion, but is not allowed to reveal who made any particular comment in public – unless explicitly allowed to do so.
No media recording allowed: Unless explicitly permitted by everyone captured on the respective media.
Recently I stumbled upon some oldposts sharing what I had been reading (between 2010 and 2012). It’s been a while since then – and I don’t think I’ve shared much of what I’ve been reading (or re-reading) since.
On the one hand, it seemed to be a prohibitive long list to write by hand – so I haven’t bothered to do so (until now). On the other, since all of my reading purchases have digital receipts of one kind or another, creating an updated list of reading seemed like a tempting opportunity to test how far AI has come (or not), using a real life menial task consisting of several steps, including several sources, and different types of data – something so tedious and time-consuming (and for no payoff to speak of) that it needs outsourcing of one kind or another to actually get done.
TL;DR
Coaxing ChatGPT took an inordinate amount of trial and error to get to do anything useful (and consistent) at all, but after a lot of painfully crappy results I got to a point where the process was somewhat manageable, making the process significantly faster than using manual labor only – but still requiring some manual labor nonetheless.
When ChatGPT was asked to do the work, it refused to. Constantly. And when it did do some work, it lied. Randomly. And when it actually produced usable results, it worked slower than an intern with a hangover. Also, doing random spot checks, I found that books were missing, inexplicably dropped along the way, some summaries were hallucinated, some links where swapped with placeholders, etc.
Key Insights
It helped a lot to break down tasks into the smallest single step, do not bundle steps in a chain (do not use and and and), complete one step, move on to a new instance for the next step, prompt for new task and input output of previous step in this new instance. Counterintuitively, it seems the less ChatGPT 4o knows about the whole, the better the results. So much for artificial intelligence.
Also, try repeating the same menial task with same prompting in multiple different instances – it doesn’t matter how or what you prompt, Chat GPT *will* (sooner or later) go off the reservation regardless. It might just suddenly work in one of the instances (by using exactly the same prompting that failed in 10 of the other instances) – it’s a crap shoot that makes for an entirely sucky user experience.
For identifying the books I’ve read since, I dug up the digital receipts from Audible, Amazon, and Apple and made screenshots of them for speed. However, 4o sucked at OCR. Not so much the fidelity of the results but for speed, or complete lack thereof. ChatGPT took ages to complete a batch of images, broke down or provided hallucinations if the batch was larger than say 5 images – and even then it randomly failed or lied. So I ended up just using manual select, copy, and pasted the relevant texts to ChatGPT via Apple’s vanilla “Photos” app for OCR of the same screenshots because although that included manual work, it sped up the processing more than an order of magnitude – and the results were consistently correct.
To wit: OpenAI is the most overvalued startup in history – I keep asking myself why I pay them; ChatGPT as a product experience is (still) very bad.
The links to Amazon and Audible do include affiliate tags. (If you don’t want to feed the Bezos machine, you probably know how to get it somewhere else). However, I’ll never get back even a fraction of the time it cost me to wrangle ChatGPT to do some actual boring menial work.
Now what have you read that I haven’t (but should)?
Read on below for the +365 items that made it to the list.
Recently I had the honor and pleasure to be invited to hold a keynote speech for Alumniportal by Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD).
I spoke a bit about five things I wished that I had known before starting out as a startup founder.
Here they are – in no particular order.
ChatGPT’d screenshot from the online event
About the DAAD:
The DAAD is the world’s largest funding organisation for the international exchange of students and researchers.
Since it was founded in 1925, around 3 million scholars in Germany and abroad have received DAAD funding. It is a registered association and its members are German institutions of higher education and student bodies. Its activities go far beyond simply awarding grants and scholarships. The DAAD supports the internationalisation of German universities, promotes German studies and the German language abroad, supports countries in the Global South in building and improving their higher education systems and advises decision makers on education, foreign science and development policy.
