I was recently honored and thrilled to be invited by Hans van Gent and Mike van Hoenselaar to produce this year’s StartupBus Europe BeNeLux bus bound for Pioneers Festival in Vienna, together with Magnus Petersen-Paasche, after my previous stint with Startupbus.
And after a lot of preparations, we finally went on the road last week – and what an EPIC trip it was: It took us from Amsterdam to Pioneers Festival in Vienna via Antwerp, Cologne, Berlin, Prague and Munich – all within 72 hours!
As I’ve been around the world pitching my own startup at some of the world’s most prestigious pitching events, one of the ways I’m paying it forward to our local startup ecosystem is by teaching our startups how to pitch at the Rhineland Pitch in Cologne, Germany – a tier one startup pitching event that aims to educate our regional startups and raise our pitching quality to better compete worldwide.
If you want to practice your own pitch, I’ve shared the slide deck I use at the free pitch coaching session each month below. And don’t forget to apply for the next Rhineland Pitch – See you there!
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.
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
As a bonus for you, I recorded this interesting talk by Paul Campbell on corporate innovation and entrepreneurship:
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.
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!
Recently a band of merry men, also known as some of the key figures of the Cologne startup scene (and hangers-ons), boarded a plane and flew over to London to visit the scene there and advocate for our ecosystem there.
Above, Oliver Thylmann, Thomas Bömoser, Sebastian Wiehe, Thomas Bachem, Fabian Jager, Manuel Koelman, Thomas Grota, Jan Kus ,Julian Hansmann, Alexander Peiniger, Till Ohrmann, Ali Mokhtari, Lukas Strinste, Marion Reichel, Carlo Matic, Vidar Andersen (missing: Malte Delbrück)
We want to kick-off this blog with a brief summary of our recent trip to London, where we found out that not only Cologne, but the whole of NRW needs more attention.
Last week (Jan. 30-31) we went on a little trip to London with some startup pirates. The idea started in November last year, when Phil Moehring (yes, he’s from Cologne, NRW!) fromSeedcamp visited us in the Clusterhaus for a little presentation & invited us to their main Seedcamp event in January, so we hacked together a schedule for a two day visit and went from an initial five committed tech people from Cologne to a stunning 17 entrepreneurs, a few investors & corporates – and thus Pirates on a Plane (#poap) was born.
So we got on a plane, flew over to London and, with the help of a lot of intros from Phil, sat down to talk to a few startups, investors & corporates.
We learned about the local regulations, the UK VC situation and Tech City, thanks to Mathias Loertscher & Ray Coyle from OC and Andrew Humphries from TechCity UK.
Take-Away:
Lawyers & government employees can have an entrepreneurial background!
Seedcamp / Websummit Party
We met some of the newly funded Seedcamp participants and some of the brightest lights of the UK startup scene. #nophotos, or maybe one #explainsitall
A little tired, but highly motivated crowd arrived just in time at Moo HQ to have a short tour through their production facility and got a great presentation about the up & downs of moo.com by Lisa Rodwell, moo’s Chief Revenue Officer.
Last stop before flying back to Cologne. We met Sean Seton-Rogers and learned more about the ProFounders “micro VC” investment approach and how the UK & London startup ecosystems works.
We had an amazing time, represented Cologne, hopefully raised some awareness about the region and connected with a lot of great people. But most importantly, we became more closely knit as a group and came back with a bag full of ideas and highly motivated to accelerate the regional tech ecosystem. It’s true that we were there for a purely educational and business-related trip, but I wanted to see if we could have a bit of non-work-related fun too. So, a few days before we left, I was suggested this article to read for things to do around London, especially Shoreditch. I was thinking we could’ve maybe seen some places if we had had the time. But maybe next time!
That said, we would love to get in touch with you. We want to know about your story, your startup.
This blog is not a one-man show, currently we are a group of >15 people and we’re open for you to help get this ball rolling. Come join us!
