I’m Vidar @blacktar Andersen and I don’t talk about myself in the third person.

I missed my shot at becoming sitcom-famous being thrown off the set of “Sex & the City” in NYC 1999, since wrote & recorded a Billboard Hot 100, and created stuff used by billions. (Well, 2 of 3 are actually true – thus far).

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“[Vidar Andersen,] one of the most important persons in the German startup scene.” – Wirtschafts Woche

My Pitching Masterclass – 2024 Edition

Named “Vordenker 2022 – Deutschlands klügste Köpfe”

I’m a Norwegian Internet tech industry veteran who found tech startups to scratch my own itches, help spread education on how to build startups to founders and students as an advisor, investor and as an educator, and helping corporates and organisations deliver better outcomes by achieving innovation 50x faster than traditional ways with my company +ANDERSEN & ASSOCIATES, currently living with wife and kids in the countryside in the CGN/DUS area in Germany – and in airplanes around the world.

If you were on the Internet in the last +20 years, you have already used and seen my work.

I love to solve problems with tech and to help good people succeed. Because I have a compulsion to make stuff suck less.

I was born in 1975 – but people think I’m much younger. That used to be very flattering until I realised you motherf*ers charmers are unwittingly discounting a significant chunk of my +29 years of professional experience on first impressions.

These pages are more or less about what’s been happening in my life since 2011. If you came here looking for details on my previous 15 years as a slave past as an on and off employee working in innovation and digitalisation with global corporations and governments since the mid nineties, perhaps my LinkedIn profile will be more your sort of thing.

[…] Vidar is what some would call “a hustler.” He runs several local meetups in Cologne and works tirelessly. Easily someone I’d count among the people I’d start a company with, given the opportunity. […] – Named one of 5 top people to know in Germany by Liam Boogar, Editor of The Rude Baguette

You may already know me as ‘blacktar’; my trick SEO pony nickname,scener name or gamertag from back in the glory scener hacker lamer days. Yes, I’ve been around for a while. Some of you might also know me from IRC under a completely different nick – but that’s probably still under statute of limitation, so maybe we can talk about that one in 50 years or so.

Some of you might known me as one of the co-founders of Plone, the very popular open source content management system – actually one of the top 2% open source projects in the world – and has been used by high-profile organizations and corporations like NASA JPL, the FBI, the CIA, Deutsche Telekom, Yale University, London College University, Oxfam, Discover Magazine, The Government of Brazil and many more.

I found my own startups to solve my own problems, help large companies achieve better outcomes with their innovation, lecture on startup entrepreneurship to university students to help young people avoid my mistakes and make their own, keynote entrepreneurial events to help spread entrepreneurship to more people and corners of the world and volunteer for the local startup ecosystem as a founder of the Hacker News Cologne Meetup, Startup Weekend Cologne Organizer (retired) and a global Startup Weekend Facilitator (retired) and as an Instructor at Next Cologne (retired) and Lean Launchpad Düsseldorf and Cologne – because someone had to.

First and foremost, I’m a problem solver and a product guy at heart.

When I grow up I want to fund YOUR BIG IDEAS to make the world suck less. For now I invest my time in people like you, helping connect the dots and sharing my mistakes and experiences in the hope that it will help you go further faster.

I’m investing in entrepreneurs by paying it forward, advising and helping early-stage, non-funded startups for free (as taking money from early-stage startups would be bad Karma). Book one of my free Open Office Hours every Wednesday.

I also teach and lecture at universities as a certified Lean Launchpad Educator invited to be trained by Steve Blank and Jerry Engel at Stanford, to help young entrepreneurs make their own mistakes instead of repeating the common. Universities so far include Cologne University, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Islamic Azad University of Qazvin, Iran (Iran’s largest and most successful private tech university), University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland, BiTS Iserlohn, Knowmads Business University Amsterdam, Maastricht University, Dokuz Eyül Üniversitesi in Izmir Turkey, Erasmus University Rotterdam, Cologne Business School (CBS), Northern Institute of Technology Hamburg (NIT), Karlshochschule International University, Cologne University of Applied Sciences and more.

“Vidar Andersen, you rock.” -Robert @Scobleizer Scoble

As a consequence of my activities I’ve received multiple requests from global well-known companies to help them take advantage of the latest in learnings and methodologies from startup entrepreneurship and a more scientific approach to data-driven and predictable innovation.

That is why in early 2013 I founded +ANDERSEN & ASSOCIATES to be able to respond to the demand, as they find I have something valuable to bring to the table with my unique combination of startup, educational, and corporate experience – helping them establish scalable and predictable innovation at speed as an internal process and by using their own people.

Hanging with Prof. Tom Byers of Stanford University, faculty director Stanford Technology Ventures Program. I’m a longtime HUGE fan of Tina Seelig’s and his Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders program.

Because of pitching professionally for around 30 years now and having shared from my pitching experience preparing applicants for the Rheinland Pitch improve their pitch and make sure they know what investors are looking for since 2013, I also released my popular Pitching Masterclass to anyone, anywhere, anytime!

I guess it’s because of all of this I also often get invited to speak or moderate at events and conferences on the topic of startups, corporate innovation, entrepreneurship and education.

Some have noticed that I often wear shorts on stage (even in winter) when speaking – and I’ll let you in on a secret: it’s not an image thing, it’s a circulatory system and self-preservation thing. To prevent my brain collapsing under the burning heat of the stage lighting and often a lack of AC, wearing shorts and a t-shirt is a survival strategy. (Full disclosure, my collapsing circulatory system made me bomb at two keynote performances in my career; the opening of the Digital Church in Aachen & West Visions  Duisburg – so sorry for the performances, but I guess also not so sorry as the content was still in there #shrug).

“Most of the time I think of myself as a failure.
When I’m optimistic, I think maybe I’m just a late bloomer.”
– Dave McClure

Although still a Norwegian national, in March 2014 I was invited to SxSW as an ambassador for the startups of the state of North-Rhine Westphalia (NRW) and the country of Germany.

‘The Rude Baguette’, at the time a leading European tech blog, named me one of the top 5 must-know people in the German startup scene.

In June 2013 I was invited to Stanford to receive the Lean Launchpad Educator training by Steve Blank and to speak about the Cologne startup community. And to include the whole Cologne startup scene in bringing the number one startup entrepreneurship curriculum from Stanford to our local universities (that and because of the fact that my bank accounts were frozen and there was a warrant for my arrest at the time) we crowdfunded the trip in 12 hours.

One educator, Vidar Andersen @blacktar crowdfunded his airfare to the Lean LaunchPad Educators Conference http://t.co/RJJxtmZ8uh Wow

– steve blank (@sgblank) June 20, 2013

In 2012 I was awarded a GEAP scholarship by Deusto Business School at Deusto University in Bilbao, Spain.

Faculty and mentors included startup legends like Chris Shipley – founder of the DEMO conference, Diane Greene – co-founder of VMWare, Doug Solomon – former CTO of IDEO and current IDEO Fellow, Alex Cruz – CEO of Vueling and Dave Siffry – founder of Technorati.

In 2011 I founded “Gauss – The People Magnet” (one of the very first social discovery apps for the iPhone) which got me invited to LeWeb 2011, SxSW 2012 by TechCocktail, London Web Summit 2012, Monaco Media Forum, and more, landed us on the front page of The New York Times and on CNN naming us possibly the next big thing after Facebook, Business Insider, TechCrunch, Forbes, and numerous other international renowned media. We also won the “People’s Choice” award at the Nordic Startup Awards 2012. Yay, vanity metrics.

It was sort of a big deal at the time. Despite of all of this, it ended in early 2013. It nearly broke my back.

“[…] Social discovery on location is hot right now, see Highlight, Glancee, Sonar etc. It’s an early market so these guys [Gauss – The People Magnet] have a good as chance as any if they get it right.” – Mike Butcher, TechCrunch.com

Here’s a video of the beta Gauss app that was available on the Apple AppStore:

And here’s another sneak preview of the next iteration that never shipped:

I wrote a post about why I founded Gauss – The People Magnet. It was an amazing learning experience and a crazy roller coaster ride leading me to all sorts of interesting places. I also posted a write-up of my learnings for anyone crazy enough to try to do another social discovery startup.

Oh, and I’ve created a number of world and web industry-firsts for F500 enterprises, governments and GOs in my days as an on-and-off salaryman 1996 – 2010, most of which under NDA and behind firewalls.

Education

At around the ripe old age of nine I started my first entrepreneurial venture; putting on a magic show and charging the neighborhood kids for admission. Not very novel perhaps, but in retrospect it probably says something about my urge to fleece my friends create and manipulate people tell stories.

Moderating the Advance Day for Startups 2015 in Cologne, and – little did I know – meeting my future wife, mother of our children. featuring the legendary Morten Lund. (Image copyright: Mediencluster NRW / Heike Herbertz).

I was a student of the liberal arts (I wanted to become a film director), although I later discovered I am more of a “hard” sciences kind of guy by nature. Curiously, I come from a line of male engineers on my mother’s side and sometimes I suspect I was nudged as I was growing up towards the liberal arts by my mother as a subconscious drive to distance me, to differentiate me from her father. Cue field day for shrinks.

For years growing up, I thought that getting a university degree and graduate at a film school of some repute would be my express train to fortune, fame, and changing the world. I thought that making movies was how I would be sharing my ideas and views, exerting agency in the world. Little did I know…

It quickly became painfully clear to me that university was not the promised land after 19 years of obligatory educational hell in a small town in the sticks that I had imagined for myself. It was just more of the same that I already had learned to hate – everything that is still wrong with education today;

Reading an arbitrary selection of books and views and then feeding what you read back to an arbitrary authority figure for an arbitrary and highly subjective grade. The absurdity of this “educational” methodology is even more clear to me today as a somewhat more reflected adult grumpy old man. To me, this isn’t learning. To me, real learning comes through experience – through hands-on testing, trial and error.

In my second year at university, I did a calculation on the student debt (yes, education is virtually free in Norway – but living isn’t by far) I would have accumulated on graduating versus the probability of becoming the next Steven Spielberg or David Lynch – and fell into a deep disillusioned depression.

Then reality set in the commercial Internet hit Norway in 1996 and I dropped out to cash in. I figured if  people I knew to be dolts were making money with this Interwebz thing, then so could I. And the rest is history. No regrets.

Yes, I think education as we know it today is f*ed. And to the point of taking action to help changing entrepreneurial education in my local environment.

I then went on to found blacktar.com in 1997, co-found the Plone CMS, together with Alan Runyan and Alexander Limi in and around 2000 and in 2010 I founded the Social Media Lunch Cologne (retired) to connect social media professionals, 2011 the +200 members strong community of the Hacker News Cologne Meetup (retired, probably one of the largest HN meetups in the world at the time) to find my kind of people at a time where the startup scene of Cologne had yet to come together, and Gauss – The People Magnet (failed) was founded to find my people at scale. 2012 I brought Startup Weekend to Cologne (because nobody else had) and became an instructor for Startup Next trained by Steve Blank and Bob Dorf (because I wish someone had taught me these things earlier) and more.

Curiously, I also co-founded ‘OneSec – An Instagram for one second videos‘ (failed) partly on a lark, partly as an experiment in crowd funding – and about half a year before Vine happened. And I did an ICO (well, technically more of an initial TOKEN offering) in 2018, exactly at the time of the Chinese crypto crackdown, that I still can’t really talk about to protect the guilty whales on the ground – and more.

Past Professional Career

Since 1996 I’ve perpetrated a ridiculous amount of hours creating software to make work suck less, from behind NDAs and corporate firewalls, prostituting contracting for governments, national companies and global corporations. Yes, I am guilty of doing work for governments, big telcos, big oil & gas, the military industrial complex, big tobacco, and big publishers. (The latter probably being the worst to work with – their spoilt gate-keeping mentality blocking any sense of reality from seeping in).

“The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.”
– Nassim Nicholas Taleb

I’ve mostly worked for small upstarts on and off with my own entrepreneurial breaks as a founder in between. It conditioned me to a “normal” where wearing multiple hats, filling multiple roles, being accountable and responsible – and just getting shit done regardless of previous skill set or job title, learning by the seat of my pants – because there were no one else there to do it for me;

One moment I’m doing menial tasks like brewing coffee, the other twisting my brain coming up with solutions to problems never before solved, with technology never before implemented in such a way, pitching global corporations and governments for millions in contracts, then winning said contracts and developing all these new things imagined. I never knew “work” as anything but this.

I helped write, pitch, negotiate and win multi-million Euro bids to tender – and manage these projects – before the age of 25. I have wasted spent +25.000 hours of my life – and counting – solving problems with tech, with software. In the majority of my professional career I had precious little life outside “work”. It’s a sad fact. However, it mostly did not feel like “work” to me – mostly just a continuous stream of problems to be solved in new and interesting ways. Usually with something named “employer” or “politics” getting in the way of taste, of quality, of true excellence – of making a real dent.

Somehow I survived the roller coaster Internet bubble ride v1.0 unscathed (I guess solving real problems for real companies helped) and without ever receiving a dotcom cent.

Yes, there were obligatory options. Yes, of course they all went bankrupt. Yes, I’m not bitter.

I don’t know about you, but I never liked being told by others what to do – especially by dispassionate, meritless suits. And I don’t take orders and I take issue with rules, so early in my professional career I thought I’d be happier becoming the suit in management telling others what to do instead of being stuck with executing their politicalized ill-advised compromises, their product decisions by committee, fueled by technical ignorance and incompetence serving only their agendas of personal promotion – or worse; just for cashing out that monthly paycheck.

Thus I climbed the proverbial well-lubricated salaryman pole and became “the man” – and realize that I hated being it. Not so much for telling people what to do – I still love that find that a useful application of my talents – but for the shift of focus and responsibility from innovating and creating something new in the world to just manage and optimize the status quo and minimizing risks and costs.

Not so much for the pay – it surely was nice – but it sure wasn’t “Fuck-You Money”. And after reaching a certain threshold, I learned that the rise in monthly salary didn’t make me any happier. Nor was it worth the time of my life wasted.

Nor did it help me change the world in any meaningful way.

My Biggest Mistake

In hindsight, staying an employee for so long and playing along in the rat race game is the biggest mistake I’ve made in life so far. But on the other hand, I wouldn’t have been where I am – who I am today – if it hadn’t been for those experiences and the opportunities given to me along the way to work on big projects for big customers together with great people.

“I don’t care if you’re a billionaire. If you haven’t started a company, really gambled your resume and your money and maybe even your marriage to just go crazy and try something on your own, you’re no pirate and you aren’t in the club.”
– Michael Arrington

But somebody told me “just because you’re good at something doesn’t mean that you should be doing it” – and it stuck with me like a mind-virus, growing over time. So in 2010 I decided to stop.

And thus I returned to my entrepreneurial natural self and quit the salaryman life for good.

“I am down to 10 US dollars but have developed a theory which will go down as Thompson’s law of travel economics. To wit: Full speed ahead and damn the cost; It will all come out in the wash.”
– Hunter S. Thompson

Since then, I’ve received several generous offers to come back to the world of slavery employment. I hope to prove I’m right in turning them all down. I’m unemployable by now, anyways.

Don’t let these things or anything you read on the intarwebs fool you – I am used to be a notorious underachiever. I am was a professional – albeit in retrospect highly productive – coaster.

Further Trivia

Most of the time I feel like an introvert that’s somehow successfully masquerading as an extrovert so I guess I’m probably more of an ambivert – if that’s actually a thing. And to everybody’s surprise (especially my own) I score crazy high on Autism, Asperger, Bipolar Type 2, and ADHD tests. However, I think that says more about how fucked up the sweeping definitions and how blunt the diagnostic tools are. That said, I’m certainly “neuro-atypical” or “neurodivergent” – whatever the hell that means.

I guess I consider myself hacker in the classical sense. I can code hack, design, and sell hustle. However, most of the time I consider myself more of a hack. Yes, some residual impostor’s syndrome still remains; I regularly have to remind myself of what I’ve actually done so far, because I tend to forget or discount it. I don’t feel insecure, it’s just that I keep discounting or disregarding past achievements (I’m close to clinically deprived of nostalgia – contrary to what you might believe, writing this page takes a lot of effort, because I don’t really care much about past accomplishments, and I don’t really want to – but it serves as my reminder of the road travelled to get to today), focussing on future possible achievements, constantly having a feeling that “I’m not there yet” – although I suspect I’ll never going to get “there”, wherever and whatever the hell that means. There seems to be this future-focussed drive that needs to be fed. It’s always been there.

I see numbers as colors – and for a long time I thought everybody does. I only discovered later in life that there’s a word for it: Synesthesia (Wikipedia).

I owe whatever streak of creativity you think I might possess to my father’s genes, a recognized artist and an award-winning veteran Creative Director of the Norwegian ad industry, and every single entrepreneurial one to my mother, a feminist pioneer inventing and founding her own independent and innovative businesses in a time where women – even in Scandinavia – were still expected to be stay-at-home moms – or at the very least take boring menial jobs.

I have no role models or idols except for perhaps my late engineer uncle. He was gone much too soon. I like to think that some of his passion for tinkering, building stuff and genuine child-like interest in other people lives on in me. I will forever miss him.

“Crazy magnetic viking guy. […] OK. You should come and do the talk instead of me. Stand up!” –Yossi Vardi, the kindest man I’ve met so far on my journeys, that time he let me pitch my startup in the middle of his CampusParty 2012 keynote speech.

I got my first computer around 1983. It was a used Dragon 32 (because my parents didn’t know the difference from the Commodore 64 I so lusted for). It lead to harder substances like the Commodore 128D, Amiga 500 and ultimately to the top of the heap with an Amiga 4000 before I caved and turned wintel PC (yes, I actually used my Amiga for 5 years after that company went bankrupt) in 1999, and later turning a total Apple convert in 2009.

I’ve never had a landline telephone in my adult life, got my first mobile phone in 1994, and I haven’t owned a TV since 2004.

I am a sceptic, an atheist (probably more of an anti-theist in the Hitchens sense – religion is the dumbest, most destructive thing humans ever invented), member of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, a card carrying member of the EFF, and I can shoot (and fieldstrip) a rifle or a handgun – and hit my targets somewhat consistently. You can tell I’m a big 1st & 2nd amendment fan (albeit not a citizen of the USA) and I do support gun regulation as compatible with the 2nd amendment.

I’m into people who are working on making a dent, removing gatekeepers, trying to actually change the world. Some call them artists, some call them founders.

Music is my hot hot sex.

Entitlement, non-artists (aka people who don’t experiment, experience and risk some level of personal failure), people who have no understanding of, or no operating proficiency of tacit knowledge, lateral thinking (aka learning by doing), people blindly following recipes and checking boxes with no underlying knowledge or understanding of why, are my biggest turnoffs.

I’m trilingual; Norwegian, English, and German. Sometimes I think in one language, speak in another, write in the third – and dream in them all simultaneously.

“Let’s face it. It’s the tension of life that keeps the light in a man’s eyes, and keeps the foam in his nuts. It’s really the only thing you cannot afford to lose.”
– Hunter S. Thompson

Let’s Connect

I started this blog in 2007 with no agenda other than participating in this global village, the global conversation. Then “Social Media” went corporate, pissed in their own well, state-sponsored adversaries weaponized it – and everything went sideways.

Here’s my E-Mail

Here’s my Phone: +49 151 40 133 149

Here's how to put Bitcoin in my Wallet:
1PWp8EDUBeRoJKTYX6SGsca4sp3rxsqPEG

Here’s how to put Etherium in my Wallet;
blacktar.eth

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Caveat Emptor

I would like to state – for the record – that the content published on this blog are my own private opinions and may contain adult colourful as well as childish and confusing language.

There be all sorts of cookies, muffins, and analytics in them here blogs – Continued use of this blog equals your acceptance and compliance. It’s also hosted in the US – so this is probably all the warning you’re about to get right here. Better bring your own tinfoil hat. Buy hey! ‘Dem cookies be free of carbs – so enjoy. Om nom nom.

I hope it’s self evident and makes sense to you that I can’t and won’t take any moral or legal responsibility for any external stuff that I link to. Duh.

“[…]I have a secret love of chaos. There should be more of it. Do not believe-and I am dead serious when I say this-do not assume that order and stability are always good, in a society or in a universe. The old, the ossified, must always give way to new life and the birth of new things. Before the new things can be born the old must perish. This is a dangerous realization, because it tells us that we must eventually part with much of what is familiar to us. And that hurts. But that is part of the script of life. Unless we can psychologically accommodate change, we ourselves begin to die, inwardly. What I am saying is that objects, customs, habits, and ways of life must perish so that the authentic human being can live. And it is the authentic human being who matters most, the viable, elastic organism which can bounce back, absorb, and deal with the new.” – Philip K. Dick

All Gatekeepers Must Go