Author Archives: Vidar Andersen

entrepreneurship, Events, hustling, startup

Yossi Vardi let me use his keynote to pitch my startup

Gauss CEO Vidar Andersen pitching Yossi Vardi's keynote audience at Campus Party Europe in Berlin 2012

Recently I was invited with our startup to the Campus Party – the biggest electronic entertainment event with keynotes from rockstars like Paulo Coelho, Yossi Vardi, Don Tapscott and Sir Tim Berners-Lee.

It’s no secret that I’ve been a big fan of Yossi Vardi for quite some time, so it was only natural that I was camping out on a front row seat, super eager to hear his keynote.

Then about ten minutes in, something unpredictably awesome happened; As I was answering Yossi’s question to “what’s keeping people from executing on their ideas?” shouting “FEAR OF FAILURE!” out loud from the crowd, Yossi told the keynote audience that I should perhaps hold the keynote instead of him and then proceeded to let me pitch Gauss to his whole keynote audience! Needless to say I was pretty gobsmacked and humbled.

Watch it as it happened:

I knew Yossi Vardi is truly awesome – still this kind of spontaneous generosity completely blew my socks off and caught us totally by surprise!

So thank you, Yossi – I’m incredibly humbled and grateful! You are even cooler than I imagined. I hope we meet again sometime in the future. You rock! :)

Here’s a bonus interview with Dr. Yossi Vardi from CP Europe 2012:

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entrepreneurship, startup, video

Interviewed by TechHustlers

Recently I got to sit down with TechHustlers‘ (@techhustlers) Eric Strait (@ericstrait) and had a conversation via Skype over the atlantic between Cologne, DE and San Marco, TX.

From the post:

I recently had the pleasure of sitting down with my new friend, Vidar Andersen, & founding genius behind the “people magnet” app Gauss! We recently had the craziest happenstance way of connecting and believe it or not, we meet each other via Glancee, one of his competitors app at SXSW! He happened to be the closest SXSW event attendee staying near my home, so I thought I would connect. Little did I know, he was actually launching their direct competitor app Gauss. Gauss is a mobile app that let’s you discover and connect with interesting people around you. They describe it as a “People Magnet for your pocket.” I would not just say this and just blow smoke up your a$%, but after Vidar demoed Gauss to me, I was blown away at it made Glancee look like an amature! […]

Wow! Thank you, Eric!

Make my day: Get Gauss on the Apple App Store for free and start discovering new people around you today! :)

 

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entrepreneurship, Events, Lessons Learned, News

From Nothing to Something at Betahaus Cologne’s Startup Supper

Recently I was invited to speak and share some of my experiences as an entrepreneur at Betahaus Cologne‘s Startup Supper event.

Startup Supper is an informal evening dinner event where invited startup entrepreneurs share selected stories from their experience and answer questions from the audience.

The subject of my little chat was “going from nothing to something”, about how I got from just an idea to building an actual team and shipping an actual product beta with our startup Gauss – The People Magnet.

Here’s the main points:

  • Search XING, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and events for talent, potential co-founders, line up dates
  • Attend as many tech and startup events as possible in your city
  • Create your own events to attract your people if the existing ones aren’t
  • Have coffee dates with as many potential co-founders as possible
  • Avoid people who overlap your skill set too much
  • Avoid people who are all talk and no do
  • Avoid people who don’t align with your values
  • Try to find small projects to work together on before getting to third base
  • Talk to everybody about everything (screw NDAs)
  • Only promise what you can deliver, no ponies and double rainbows (instead: pain, suffering, hard work and real possible risk of personal bankruptcy)
  • Have a name, a logo and some impressive mockups of what you want to build made before you can expect any traction with potential co-founders and other helpers (paint more salient pictures in the real world to accompany your nebulous dream speak before expecting other people to grasp what you’re talking about, let alone join in on your vision and team up
  • Communicate your needs to everyone, everywhere (this is not the time to be secretive)
  • Offer equal equity split for any potential co-founder(s), save discussions
  • Get into a startup competition event, use it as leverage to get accepted to the next, make sure to shoot it on video, bring your own crew to shoot it or have someone in the audience do it for you with their phone or yours
  • Publish everywhere, nag people, get our of your comfort zone
  • Dont’t give up, keep on going (if you are feeling despaired, you’re only just beginning – keep going)

In summary, it took about six months of searching and dating to attract and recruit the right people. From there on it took a month to build a prototype (MVP) and another four months to reach a public beta stage and another three months before we launched on the Apple AppStore.

Images by Thomas Riedel (@boydroid)

If you’re interested in me speaking at your event, why don’t you shoot me a mail and let’s talk.

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Mobile, News

OneSec – An experiment in crowd funding

As some of you already know, I’m collaborating with a friend of mine on this little fun crowd funding summer project thing called OneSec.

So get out your credit cards and pledge now!

OneSec is an iPhone app that makes shooting & sharing good videos fun and easy by changing the format to one second shots. Less is more!

Check out our campaign on IndieGoGo for the full story.

We thought it would be an interesting experiment to test if crowd funding is a valid option to fund awesome high-quality iPhone apps. We’re iterating our campaign every day and sharing insights what’s working and what’s not. Stay tuned for more insights.

So head over to the campaign and pledge, pledge, pledge as much as you can spare and if you can’t or won’t pay us be sure click all the like and share buttons on the campaign page. That helps too!

Oh, and not to worry about Gauss. That one is still moving ahead at full speed. I’m just doing this as a fun little summer experiment as others have their well-deserved summer break.

 

OneSec screenshot 2

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Education, entrepreneurship, Lessons Learned, News

Lessons Learned – steps2startup at University of Cologne

I was recently invited to speak about my lessons learned as a startup entrepreneur at the steps2startup program at the University of Cologne.

steps2startup is a student initiative at the University of Cologne to help young people interested in startups and entrepreneurship build their network and exchange experiences and ideas with like-minded people. It is important for entrepreneurs to get started on their ideas and build on their business, so they will need as much advice as they can get, this may even mean contacting a trade secret lawyer California firm or a firm in their location so they can see how they can protect their ideas.

It was inspiring to see about 50+ student in attendance at a very busy exam time.

Here are the slides I used:

Continue reading →

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