Category Archives: Education

Education, entrepreneurship, pitching, startup

My Pitching Masterclass now available to anyone, anywhere, anytime

Pitching Masterclass – 2024 Edition: Now available ONLINE!

As you may or may not already know, as the co-founder of the Rheinland Pitch, Germany’s largest startup pitching event founded back in 2013, I’ve been preparing and training the applying startups how to pitch investors.

And with training how to pitch, I don’t mean how to put on a song and dance in front of investors – I mean how to actually find investors, how to contact investors, what investors are looking for, how the funding game works, and the contents of what and how to actually pitch investors successfully – with my in-person Pitching Masterclass.

So far I’ve trained over 3.000 startups how to successfully pitch in person.

Over the years I’ve also been booked by companies, events, organisations, startup programs (like incubators and accelerators), and universities and colleges, to help their employees, members, startups, and students improve their pitching skills.

Happy customers include KIT ( Karlsruher Institut für Technologie), Cologne Business School, Heinrich Heine Universität Düsseldorf, Reifenhäuser, Bertelsmann, Budapest Enterprise Agency, USAID, DMEXCO, Web Summit, Pirate Summit, Medien Gruppe RTL, ottobock, Zentis, Founders Foundation, 0-1 Booster (Japan), Startup Nano (Portugal), Startup Braga (Portugal), IHK, DigitalHUB Aachen, DigitalHUB Düsseldorf, DigitalHUB Bonn, DigitalHUB Cologne, Reifenhäuser, etc.

But until now, you’d have to be able to attend an in-person Pitching Masterclass to enjoy the benefits.

As the Pitching Masterclass has been evolving and updating – and the aggregated collective wisdom of the thousands of startups I’ve been working with for over the last 11 years – I thought it was a damned shame that you could only access the knowledge if you were somehow able to attend an in-person Masterclass.

So to be able to help as many people as possible to pitch investors for raising funds, I’ve now created and released a 100% digital version of the Pitching Masterclass open for anyone, anywhere, anytime!

So, got startup? Get smart, get funded: Enroll today.a

Also available: in German!

Also available: Corporate Edition

And that’s not all; I’ve also created a different version for employees wanting to secure buy-in from stakeholders for their innovation ideas and for companies wanting to train their employees to be better at pitching new innovations internally. Spoiler alert: corporate innovation ventures are not startups and they need a different approach to securing funding and support. This version includes a framework for getting to yes, for securing buy-in from stakeholders and an additional very useful alternative pitch format to the classic pitch deck just for corporates. Here’s how to learn more about this corporate edition.

Also available: Unlimited Edition

Both versions of my Pitching Masterclass are available either as a single user for startups and employees AND as an subscription edition with unlimited users for companies, organisations, startup support programs, and educational institutions who want to make it available to all of their employees, members, startups, or students on-demand. Here’s how to learn more about the unlimited users options.

Contents

What you can expect is +2 hours of video and +370 slides with these topics and contents in a user friendly web-based learning interface:

INTRO

  1. Intro
  2. Welcome
  3. About your instructor

BEFORE YOU START PITCHING

  1. First thing first
  2. The Basics
  3. Your competition today
  4. Capital available today

HOW TO RAISE MONEY

  1. Funding sources available to you
  2. What investors are looking for
  3. How the funding game works
  4. When should you raise money
  5. How to find investors
  6. How to contact investors

PITCHING

  1. Pitching TL;DR
  2. The three pitch types
  3. The High-Concept Pitch
  4. The Elevator Pitch
  5. The Pitch Deck (The Funding Pitch)
  6. Final words

ADDENDUM
20.1 Startup metrics
20.2 Pitching Tricks
20.3 Further Resources
20.4 AirBnB’s first (successful) pitch deck
20.5 Acknowledgements

DOWNLOAD
+370 slides as PDF

AFTER THE PITCHING MASTERCLASS
What’s next?

Enroll today!

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Education, entrepreneurship, Lean Launchpad, Lean Startup, startup

Guess who’s back (in Aachen)

Guess who’s back, guess who’s back, guess who’s back… at the digitalHUB Aachen e.V. for the seventh year in a row now, again supporting the 2023 batch of 12 incubated startups with a custom version of the Lean Launchpad (LLP) program.

Together over the years we have been able to achieve an incredible 87% survival rate of their incubated startups.

So what is the Lean Launchpad (LLP)? It’s the world’s premier early-start support program that originated at Stanford and Berkeley over 10 years ago and has since spread to top universities, GOs, NGOs, startup support programs, and corporate innovation programs world wide. It applies an evidence-based process, going from beliefs to facts. It lets the idea evolve by exposing it to unbiased feedback from the market at incredible speed instead of applying a top-down linear creationism approach (that rarely – if ever – works out) at a snail’s pace. It’s 20% theory, 80% hands on experience, and 100% peer dynamics, 100% reality-based, 100% engaging.

The LLP has been tested by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) – a 7 BILLION USD public fund that finances commercialisation of publicly funded research in the US – and found so radically effective for increasing the fundability of early-stage ventures that the LLP has been mandated into US law: If you want funding from the NSF, you first have to attend an LLP program – it’s the law.

The good thing about the Lean Launchpad is that it has no lock-in, no licensing model, or other such nonsense. And you can send your own faculty, staff, and employees to be trained and certified as an LLP Educator at great universities around the world once you’re comfortable with the program and would decide to move it in-house.

Let me know if you want to know more about the Lean Launchpad (LLP) and how it can help radically improve the outcomes of your students, startup support program, or corporate innovation program – Phone: +4915140133149 Mail: v@plusandersen.com Zoom: https://ohours.youcanbook.me/

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corporate entrepreneurship, Education, entrepreneurship, innovation, speaking

Lean Innovation Masterclass @ “Innovation Valley Garzweiler” Kickoff

Honored to be invited to hold my “Lean Innovation Masterclass” teaser workshop at the “Innovation Valley Garzweiler“ kick-off event in the amazing Hugo Junkers Hangar in Mönchengladbach last week.

As you might know, Germany has decided to end using brown coal as an energy source – and that even faster than initially planned: 2030 instead of 2038 – and this will obviously have an effect, especially in the regions where they are depending on the coal, for cheap electricity to industry, a major source of employment, stability, and prosperity.

To help alleviate the transitional pain, public funds have been made available and regional projects have been formed to support the affected regions in many different ways.

One way is to support and stimulate innovation, to enable an environment that can facilitate the creation of new exciting opportunities for the industries of the future – a second industrial revolution if you will — for when the coal that powered the first industrial revolution and has been generating unprecedented prosperity (and unprecedented damage to the planet) comes to an end.

That’s where I and my company +ANDERSEN & ASSOCIATES come in; I was there to give a teaser overview of some of the methodologies anyone can use (startups as well as established industry) to create disruptive innovation at 50 (!) times faster (and with less resources) than previous methods – to inspire and also to showcase what is indeed possible today; what is actually actionable and teachable.

Special thanks to WFMG – Wirtschaftsförderung Mönchengladbach, Zenit GmbH, and Zweckverband LANDFOLGE Garzweiler for inviting me and to all of the very enthusiastic and motivated participants that came to my fully-booked workshops.

Looking forward to be of further service to the region going forwards!

(And yes, that is an actual original Junkers Ju 52 airplane inside the event location – Hugo Junkers was born in Rheydt in today’s Mönchengladbach.)

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