Category Archives: pitching

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, RTL Journalistenschule, 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.

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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Events, pitching

Prepping Startups for the (FINAL!) Pirate Summit

Today, I was honored to be back helping the startups walking the plank at this year’s (and also the final one – RIP 2011 – 2023) Pirate Summit prepare giving feedback on their pitches – one week out before they walk the plank!

I’m also moderating the Walk The Plank pitch competition, so see you there!

And if you haven’t gotten a ticket yet, have a look at the ticket page – there should be tickets available for most kinds of budgets (if they are not sold out yet!).

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pitching, startup

Rheinland Pitch turns 10 years old!

Who would have thought… From very humble beginnings of the Rheinland Pitch – to becoming Germany’s largest startup pitching event!

Over ten years ago, in early 2013 Matthias & Lorenz Gräf and me where sitting at what would soon open as STARTPLATZ in Cologne, DE discussing how we could help the founders in the region be more competitive when pitching startup investors.

And keeping with the unpretentious “no frills” spirit of the Rheinland Pitch, we thought it didn’t feel right to be celebrating ourselves – but someone had acquired some festive balloons. ;)

We were (and still are) convinced that the region is a great place to found a startup and that we were (and still are) encountering many competent founders with great ideas here.

However, back then there were two pressing issues of concern:

  1. Every time we listened to their pitches, we didn’t understand what they were about
  2. The general public was not well informed about what a startup is and how it is different from other types of more traditional new businesses.

So we came up with the idea to create an event that would be open to everyone and:

  1. Curate and highlight the most interesting startups in the region
  2. Provide training to the applying startups so they will be more competitive and on their own terms
  3. Bring more mainstream acceptance and understanding of startup entrepreneurship
  4. A regular event as a platform to catch up with and network all sides of the community

I think we’ve succeeded beyond anybody’s expectations. In fact, we didn’t have any particular expectations back at the start. We just said, ok – let’s do it. And a month later the first Rheinland Pitch event was held to a standing-room only full house.

And the rest is history.

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