Category Archives: News

entrepreneurship, Events, News, pitching, startup

Startup Weekend Amsterdam

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I recently attended Startup Weekend Amsterdam because:

1.) It’s just a whole lot of damned good fun!
2.) SWAMS has got to be one of best Startup Weekends anywhere
3.) I recently founded Startup Weekend Cologne so I had to attend a Startup Weekend as a requirement – Stay tuned for more!

James Digby (@digbyj) kicking it all off:

James Digby kicking off Startup Weekend Amsterdam #swams

Then the awesome legendary Steve Blank (@sgblank) made a cameo appearance and I just had to ask him if he invests in European startups – On which he retorted I should first take some of his classes. Hah, so we meet again, Steve! I think I’ll have to take you up on that one! :)

UPDATE: I did take Steve up on that one. :)

The AWESOMENESS! Steve Blank surprise keynote at Startup Weekend Amsterdam! Hi again @sgblank :) #swams

So exiting that we’re all standing on our chairs!

And now we're so excited we're standing on our chairs! #swams

The amazing SWAMS location, Pakhuis De Zwyger:

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Easygiving.co winning the grand prize for thinking big; A non-profit charity where 100% of your donations go to the cause:

Check out http://easygiving.co non-profit for 100% of your charity going to the cause! #swams

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And of course I couldn’t help pitching myself and accidentally ended up winning the Startup Weekend Spirit award for our team http://lunchroulette.co for completely p0wning the judges and capturing the audience but also by telling the story of the learning made, how we invalidated the business model of some other guy’s idea I had originally joined, how the team then collapsed and the idea owner going home, leaving us basically a couple of hours on the last day to come up with this.

@blacktar: Never lunch alone again! Meet new people over chow: http://t.co/mOjUtEU0 Sign up and we'll match you with a lunch date near you! #swAMS

W00t! Good times!

I’m incredibly excited about bringing Startup Weekend to Cologne!

Here are the slides I used:

UPDATE 2013:

Almost exactly one year after i presented Lunch Roulette at Startup Weekend Amsterdam, I was visiting the new Facebook HQ in Menlo Park and found out that they had implemented some of the ideas for their staff internally.

Hah! Even the logo looked uncannily familiar! I’ll take that as validation, thank you.

See for yourself:

Internal Facebook memo on the wall at the HQ in Menlo Park, June 2013.

Internal Facebook memo on the wall at the HQ in Menlo Park, June 2013.

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News

I’m going back to school!

Recently I had the great humbling fortune to be awarded a scholarship for the Global Entrepreneur Accelerator Program at the Deusto Business School in Bilbao, Spain.

So next week I’m going to be in Bilbao knee deep in global entrepreneurship acceleration! Yay! :)

I’m incredibly humbled to receive such an honor and super excited to going back to university and meeting a lot of new awesome people!

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My old school I dropped out of way back in the last century sure didn’t look like this…

UPDATE:

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Faculty and mentors included startup legends like Chris Shipley – founder of the DEMO conference, Diane Greene – co-founder of VMWare, Doug Solomon – former CTO of IDEO and current IDEO Fellow, Alex Cruz – CEO of Vueling and Dave Siffry – founder of Technorati.

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Events, Lessons Learned, News, startup

Gauss @ SXSW 2012

Gauss arrived at SXSW in Austing, Texas:

To pitch at Frank Gruber’s (@FrankGruber) TechCocktail SXSW Startuplife Showcase:

Where we met and pitched awesome people like Don Dodge (@dondodge) and Ben Parr (@benparr)…

And got invited to the incredible Startup Weekend VIP party by Déborah and James:

And got interviewed by the wonderful StartupLive:

And Harald Neidhart (@hneidhardt) of MLOVE:

Got invited personally by his awesomeness himself, Robert Scoble (@scobleizer) to the Rackspace / Startup Bus party:

Ate late night post-party pizza with the awesome people of SendGrid:

Thanked the amazing Gary Vaynerchuk (@garyvee) in person for retweeting us:

Pitched the legend Steve Blank (@sgblank):

Who loves Gauss and called it a killer app:

And gave us a signed copy of his new book with this awesome testimonial:

Hung out with the awesome twitter master Calvin Lee (@mayhemstudios):

Hung around the Austin Hilton pitching all sorts of awesome people, including Micael Yavonditte (@mikeyavo) who hated us – but which is sort of OK since he hates all location based services – including Foursquare:

And so much, much more.. .

Check out the Gauss blog for more.

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News

We’ve been selected to showcase at Tech Cocktail’s SXSW event! (We need YOUR VOTE!)

I’m incredible excited and humbled to share with you that our bootstrapped startup Gauss – The People Magnet has been selected to showcase at the prestigious Tech Cocktail #Startuplife Celebration event at SXSW in Austin, TX on March 10th!

We’re honored to be selected for this group of highly esteemed startups!

VOTE!

for the People’s Choice Award! (Many of those other startups are well-funded and supported so we ned all the help we can get!)

Head over to this page, scroll down, check the button next to “ and click the button labeled “Vote” at the bottom of the page.

EVERY DAY!


Help spread, tweet and share the message and VOTE for your favorite bootstrapped startup for the People’s Choice Award! Thank you! <3

If you want to talk, meet up, hang out and perhaps grab a beer or a coffee with us at SXSW, chat us up on twitter @getGauss, say hi on Facebook or drop us an email, call or iMessage us at +4915140133149.

 

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WTF: Social Capital

I recently had the pleasure to hold a WTF lecture at the Knowmads business school in Amsterdam.

The subject of my talk was social capital, the difference between bonding capital and bridging capital, why I believe we need more of the latter and how I share the belief that we live in a network economy; I believe it’s no longer about what you know or how you know – It’s about how many types of people you know.

It’s a subject near and dear to me and one of the reasons I’m co-founding Gauss – The People Magnet.

Knowmads is a business school that educate young creative entrepreneurial spirits. Check out this video to learn more:

Thanks for having me over, guys! It was a hoot! I hope we can do it again some time. :)

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