Recently, I was invited to mentor startups in the Ignition+ accelerator program by DigiHub Düsseldorf Rheinland, DE.
Currently, I’m helping Osphim, a startup in the recent batch for the next five months. Osphim is helping the injection moulding industry to achieve +70% more efficiency – so if you’re in the industry or know someone in this industry, get in touch; We’d love to hear from you and learn more about your current challenges and future goals!
Recently I was honored and excited to be invited back to Reifenhäuser.
We’ve worked together on some interesting digital innovation projects (under NDA) in the past and it’s always a great pleasure to work with their talented people.
This time, they arranged for my “Pitching Masterclass, Corporate Edition” to be held for the participants of their internal “summer school” program.
The “Pitching Masterclass Corporate Edition” teaches employees how to get internal buy-in from the necessary stakeholder for their innovative ideas to generate additional or new business for their company.
It also teaches how to better understand their stakeholders, how and why pitching inside a company is very different from pitching investors as a startup – and provides a framework (taught at Harvard Business School) for navigating and overcoming potential internal resistance.
The “Corporate Edition” also provides an additional alternative framework and pitching format (used successfully in a very large and infamous company) to the classic pitch deck.
If your company or organisation would be interested in improving communication between your decision makers and idea people to massively improve innovation outcomes and increase employee job satisfaction – please feel free to get in touch to talk about how I can help you too.
If you’re at an educational institution like a college or university, a startup support program like an incubator or accelerator, or an event featuring startup pitches – get in touch to talk about how I can help you too with the “Startup Edition” of the Pitching Masterclass to help manage the quality of output and massively improve the fundability of your participants.
The Pitching Masterclass was initially created to serve the needs of the Rheinland Pitch 11 years ago to help educate our regional founders – and has been constantly evolving ever since, and today it contains accumulated knowledge and feedback from over 3.000 startups served.
Until now, the Pitching Masterclass Startup Edition and Corporate Edition was only available to applicants to the Rheinland Pitch or startups lucky enough to be in an incubator or accelerator or corporate innovation program who decided to book me for my in-person, on-location Masterclass.
Today, the Pitching Masterclass is also additionally available, both the Startup and Corporate Edition, to all startups and corporate innovators everywhere as on-demand eLearning at https://pitchingmasterclass.com, featuring +2 hours of video and all the hundreds of slides as a booklet download – also bookable in packages which additionally includes online mentoring & support vouchers for your teams.
Recently I was honored and excited to be invited to the new publicly funded (to help counter the energy transition woes for the regional – and the German as a whole – economy) and innovation project called Startup Village by Brainergy Park outside of Jülich, Germany to check out the second batch of their ZEBRA green tech and impact “accelerator”.
It’s a huge investment with the capital – and a huge area – already committed to building out a massive innovation campus, and I do enjoy experiencing new startup initiatives outside of the major cities in this area of the German state of North-Rhine-Westphalia first hand. So much is happening outside of Cologne and Düsseldorf that is often overlooked.
It’s still very early days (not many buildings completed yet), but keep an eye on this area and do visit if you have the chance – even getting there can be quite the adventure…
And if you’re a green tech or impact startup, maybe you want to apply for the next ZEBRA batch?
Recently I had the honor and pleasure to be invited for jury duty at the 17th batch of the Ignition+ program by DigiHub Düsseldorf and help decide who would get further funding.
And the winner was… Co-reactive “Correcting greenhouse gas emissions with CO2 reacting to solids”!
A while back, I posted about my Live Streaming Studio V3.1 setup, because many people wanted to know what gear I’m using and how I get the “cinematic” look on a live Zoom call. To achieve that look, one of the things I had to learn from scratch was how to color grade.
BTW, do you need help with creating a great custom “look” for your film or video production, your camera, or your podcasting or stream? Give me a ping, and let’s talk. I sure as hell wasted an idiotic amount of time and money making all kinds of mistakes in the beginning, so I’m happy to help you avoid that.
Here, I’m sharing a bit about my further digging myself into a hole adventures into color grading with Blackmagic Design’s DaVinci Resolve Studio (free download of the non-studio version). It’s an incredible piece of software. (If you’re thinking about ditching Adobe Premiere – just do it! Go for it. I’ve never regretted it for a second).
This is not a primer on color grading. It’s just me dumping writing up and sharing what I’ve learned that works best for me so far. If you too wish to start (or continue) on a color grading learning journey with DaVinci Resolve, Cullen Kelly’s YouTube channel is probably the best place for that.
The following assumes you’re already familiar some of the concepts of color grading – or at least have a faint interest in how to create a cinematic image with digital tools. (If not, this post will bore the living daylights out of you is not for you.)
What started as a necessity during the lockdown era (aka building a professional-looking online tele-presence) turned into a rediscovery of my passion for the cinematic image. (Fun fact: Many might not know that I actually started out studying to become a film director – but I dropped out after only two years as university and studying film wasn’t really my thing. And then the commercial Internet happened.)
And as a person most likely somewhere on the spectrum, of course I can’t, I won’t, and I don’t stop digging until I’m getting somewhere interesting, somewhere where I can feel a sense of mastery and understanding of the full stack (lighting, lenses, camera, cinematography, sound design, microphones, color grading, post production, what not), aka being able to make predictable outcomes – and making those outcomes look cinematic and pleasing (to me). It’s become sort of a new obsession hobby of mine (in addition to helping other startup founders go farther faster, of course).
Still digging.. .
Read on below for this long non-startup (but still full of tech geekery) post.
