Category Archives: entrepreneurship

entrepreneurship, Events, News, startup

Announcing the very first Startup Weekend NEXT Cologne ever!

W00t! The startup news of Cologne just keeps on rolling. Only recently Startup Weekend Cologne was announced and it seems we (Lukas Strniste (@yeromee), Puja Abbassi (@puja108), Till Ohrmann (@tohrmann) and me (@blacktar) together with Startplatz (@StartPlatz) were stupid crazy enough to bring Startup Weekend NEXT to Cologne too. And that already NEXT WEEK!

Startup Weekend NEXT is a non-profit, but there’s tickets you’ll have to book to help cover the costs of this 3 week intensive educational program.  We do however hope to be able to join up with some of the local startup patrons to subsidize your tickets.

Startup Weekend NEXT is only open for teams of 2 or more people and is a 3 week intensive educational programme involving a lot of hard work for the participants. This is a program for dedicated startup entrepreneurs.

So what the heck is Startup Weekend NEXT?

tl;dr – Something freaking awesome for startup entrepreneurs!

Now read on to find out why!

Standard
entrepreneurship, Lessons Learned

On why I co-founded Gauss – The People Magnet

Today I read an insightful post by Paul Graham on how to come up with startup ideas, roughly summarized as “don’t think of startup ideas – start solving your own problems” and alternately as he puts it “live in the future and build what seems interesting”. It inspired me to share with you why I co-founded Gauss – The People Magnet.

tl;dr – I’m living in the future, building something interesting, solving my own problem.

Gauss - The People Manget

Now keep reading to get the full scoop!

Standard
entrepreneurship, Events, News

Annoucing the 11th Hacker News Cologne Meetup

UPDATE: We’re back in control of the meetup.com group. Please note that no decision has been made to continue using meetup.com as the Hacker News Cologne community platform going forward. That’s up to you to decide at the next meetup. As Apple says, “We like to have options”.

Guys,

The rumors about our death are yet again greatly exaggerated.

In light of our meetup.com group being p0wned today, I thought I’d announce the next meetup here. It’s business as usual for Hacker News Cologne and we’re looking forward to see you all again at SolutionSpace on November 28th at 1900 CET. This time we’re relying on you and not meetup.com to get the word out. You know what to do.

We’re super excited to bounce back with a couple of awesome talks!

Kyle Ellicot (Head of Products, BigChampagne at Live Nation, Co-Founder and President of Heavy Cloud Media Group and Co-Founder of TechHustler) will be skyping in from the US to talk and take your questions, confession-chair-style.

And that’s not all! Greg Cooper, Y Combinator alum and Co-Founder of the awesome Interstate will also be joining us in the flesh to share some stories from his experience and take your questions.

At the next Meetup we’ll also discuss and decide an alternative community platform to meetup.com – which I think we can all agree left us somewhat wanting in security and reliability department, albeit rich on drama and adventure. Now you’ll get to decide where we go next.

As always, bring your own lightning talks and projects to show and tell and keep recommending new topics and speakers!

For now, we recommend avoiding meetup.com completely and staying tuned to the HNCGN Meetup organizers’ twitter accounts (@maikloewen @blacktar @francis_dierick) and blogs (http://www.maikloewen.com https://blog.vidarandersen.com and http://fr.anc.is/) for the latest news until we meet up again.

We also insist that no personal attacks be launched agains the hijacker of the HNCGN meetup.com group – Let’s show them what we’re made of by keeping it calm and clean.

Looking forward to see you all again at the next meetup!

Vidar & Crew

Standard
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:

Standard
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! :)

 

Standard