Monthly Archives: April 2013

entrepreneurship, startup

On NEXT Cologne Q1 2013

So we brought Startup Weekend NEXT to Cologne as one of the first few cities in the world back in December 2012 and now the second cohort of the program in Cologne recently finished.

Here’s a little update on how that turned out.

Startup Weekend NEXT is an intensive five week educational program to help more startups survive by having the startup teams getting out of the building and into the real world applying customer development and business model generation to help validate their startup idea and find their product-market fit.

 Julia Tide, founder of Petomino presenting on Canvas Day

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entrepreneurship, startup

Navy vs Pirates

Recently, thinking about what Steve Jobs said “It’s more fun to be a pirate than to join the navy”, it occurred to me that it’s a great metaphor to explain the difference between an existing company and a startup.

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An existing company is like the navy, executing – not necessarily people – but business plans, following established processes and procedures, using well described (road) maps, taking well-calculated and minimal risks – punishing anyone who doesn’t follow the rules.

A startup is like a small band of pirates searching for the treasure of a repeatable and scalable business model drawing their own maps as they sail on, building measuring and learning, taking a lot of risk – rewarding those who break and disregard the rules to get the gold.

So you want to know more about the differences between startups and existing companies? Check this out!

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entrepreneurship, pitching, startup

Your pitch sucks.

What?

Pitchcademy is a new service that teaches you how to pitch like a pro. Record a video of your pitch directly in your browser, get reviewed and scored by a network of professional coaches within 24 hrs. Rinse, lather & repeat!

UPDATE – Pitchcademy morphed into the Pitching Masterclass over the years:

Why?

If you’re a startup entrepreneur, chances are you’ve already been to a lot of pitching events and you may even have pitched investors yourself already. You may have noticed that most pitches at these events – especially if you’re in Europe – suck!

Now take a minute and think about your own pitch: Are you completely confident that your pitch doesn’t suck? It’s always the others that suck – riiiiiiiiight?

Well, Francis Dierick and I certainly have made our fair share of bad pitches. We’ve been around. But along the way we picked up a couple of tricks on how to improve our pitches and learned a lot. At least enough to win several competitions and get invited to events as pitch coaches.

So we thought that we should share the secrets we picked up. We think everybody should have the chance to nail that perfect pitch. That’s why we decided to introduce Pitchcademy.

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Pitchcademy teaches you how to pitch like a pro. Record a video of your pitch directly in your browser, get reviewed and scored by a network of professional coaches within 24 hrs. Rinse, lather & repeat! Try it now for free!

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