Recently I held a talk about the new metrics, KPIs and management tools large companies can use to achieve innovation as a process as a part of the ongoing talk series on Corporate Entrepreneurship at Startplatz, Cologne.
Here are the slides I used:
Yearly Archives: 2015
The Very First Startup Weekend Maastricht is an EPIC success!
This weekend saw the very fist Startup Weekend Maastricht – and what an EPIC weekend it was! This time around I was invited as a coach to help the participants flex their entrepreneurial muscle and help out my wonderful friends on the organizing team with supporting the regional ecosystem
The hands are doing the talking: The thin vs the broad side of the wedge
Visit their Facebook page for many more great photos and videos from the EPIC weekend that was Startup Weekend Maastricht!
Sjoerd Jansen, a participant on the winning team, wrote a post-event blog post. Here are some quotes:
Introducing the free & open Lean Launchpad Düsseldorf
So I recently retired from facilitating and organizing Startup Weekend and Startup Next.
But fear not. I’m not going away and I’m not about to stop caring about entrepreneurial education for startup founders in our region. On the contrary, I’m ramping up my efforts.
That’s why I have chosen to offer the Lean Launchpad (LLP), the world’s premier pre-accelerator program from Stanford, Berkeley and hundreds of other universities and used by numerous F500 companies, FOR FREE to early-stage startups.
I’m retiring from organizing and facilitating Startup Weekend & Startup Next
I’m officially retiring from facilitating and organizing Startup Weekends and Startup Next, effective immediately. (You can still invite me as a coach, though).
Waving goodbye (SW Tourism Tehran, Iran 2015)
So long and thanks for all the EPIC awesomeness. I’m forever grateful for the experience and the people I’ve met on my journeys and the chance to have an impact on entrepreneurship and inspire individuals worldwide. It has certainly added more than a 10x meaning and value to my life.
Note: For those of you who don’t know, Organizers and Facilitators of Startup Weekend work on an entirely voluntary basis – aka for FREE. Keep that in mind the next time you are participating at a Startup Weekend or when you’re organizing a Startup Weekend with a facilitator shipped in from out of town.
So why am I retiring now?
A Blast from the past – An internal memo from my last startup
After pitching Steve Blank at SxSW 2012, co-founder Kit left, Arne right
This morning, I accidentally stumbled on an internal memo from me to my co-founders and advisors from my last all-in startup venture, getGauss.com, from almost exactly four years ago.
“Gauss – The People Magnet” was one of the very first social discovery apps for the iPhone. For the more technical inclined, it was also a freaky cool cloud backend to mine people’s interests and networks to combine new insights with proximity and context. It took us through a roller coaster ride, from the front pages of The New York Times, CNN and TechCrunch to almost personal bankruptcy in the course of about two and a half years.
In the name of radical transparency, I thought I’d share it without comment with the public. I’ll let it be a testament – for good or for worse – of my startup CEO communications skills. I’ll let you be the judge. Anyways, it’s an interesting time capsule from a startup in the midst of the exploratory phase. At this point, we were three months in and already had an MVP and constantly experimenting with new features and learning what users were doing and wanted to be doing and all the while trying to keep up with Facebook, Twitter, Google and Foursquare API changes that where rampant back then.
Here it goes: