entrepreneurship, Events

Entrepreneurship – Nature or Nurture at Maastricht Week of Entrepreneurship 2013?

I was honored and delighted to be invited to moderate a day of discussing if entrepreneurship is something you need to be born with or something you can nurture, something you can teach everybody, at the Maastricht Week of Entrepreneurship 2013 and interview the father of the Lean Startup, Steve Blank live on skype in front of an full university auditorium.

62681_10151453587804472_389404648_n

The Maastricht Week of Entrepreneurship is Maastricht’s largest entrepreneurship event. Happening yearly, the ME Week brings together over 200 students and entrepreneurs for an exciting 5 day program highlighted by workshops, presentations and lectures. Participants get inspired, network, share practices, and ask for advice.

Here’s a fun little excerpt from the interview with Steve Blank. He was kind enough to help us send greetings to Startup Weekend Giza in Egypt:

Moderating the panel debate on entrepreneurship, nature vs nurture

960140_10201537257937331_1539071419_n

As a bonus for you, I recorded this interesting talk by Paul Campbell on corporate innovation and entrepreneurship:

entrepreneurship, Events, pitching, startup

There’s a new startup event in Cologne: Introducing the Rheinland-Pitch!

As you probably know, I’m passionate about pitching – because we SUCK at pitching here in Europe! So when the new Cologne-based incubator STARTPLATZ asked me if I would be interested in getting involved in a new program to help our regional startup entrepreneurs becoming better at pitching, I wasn’t hard to convince.

So say hello to the Rhineland-Pitch!

The Rhineland-Pitch is a pitch competition event held at STARTPLATZ every last Monday of each month that aims to heighten the quality of our regional startup pitches by providing intensive training to the applicant entrepreneurs and letting the winners pitch to a select and exclusive audience of entrepreneurs, press and investors.

A week in advance, all applicants get a one hour intensive crash course on pitching and after a rapid-fire elevator pitching session, the winners get an additional and immediate four hours of individual pitch training from yours truly.

At the end of the individual training sessions there’s immediately another selection process where the entrepreneurs present the pitch they’ve prepared and the best get invited to the Rheinland-Pitch event the following Monday.

So what do you win except for the glory? Well, a chance to pitch in front of and meet with investors, get critical feedback – AND a video of your final pitch to boot! (So you better make your performance count!)

And it’s all for free! So apply now for the next Rheinland-Pitch May 27th!

Last Monday April 29th saw the first ever Rheinland-Pitch and here are some impressions from it:

Some stats from the first round:

17 applicant teams
7 teams with the best elevator pitches received individual pitch coaching
5 teams made it through to the Rhineland-Pitch event

And the winners are:

See Thomas @boydroid Riedel of NERDHUB’s gallery for more photos of the event.

And check out this bonus video to learn more about the competition, coaching and selection process:

If you didn’t make it the first time, practice and try again! See you there!

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

804383_10152670108370444_1139098333_n
Continue reading →

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.

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!

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.

903353_538447516207356_1680894521_o

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!

Hello, I'm Vidar Andersen

This is my soapbox about tech, startups, entrepreneurship & me.

Author Archives: Vidar Andersen