Category Archives: pitching

Events, pitching

The Rheinland Pitch is back in the real world!

As you might know, the Rheinland Pitch – Germany’s largest startup pitching event – also had to go online-only since March because of the pandemic.

This Monday, on September 14th we were finally back as a physical hybrid event as a part of the Startup Week Düsseldorf – with a reduced number of audience to comply with hygiene regulations – and streaming live on YouTube.

Four regional early-stage startups pitched a capped audience @ Startplatz Düsseldorf and online viewers.

And the winner is… digiblue

We hope to be able to do more events like this. Stay tuned and check the schedule!

For those new to the Rheinland Pitch; it is Germany’s largest Startup Pitch event that I co-founded together with Lorenz and Matthias Gräf of STARTPLATZ back in 2013.

At the time, we were already all convinced that the region of Rheinland holds great potential for startup founders and that we have some great talents around – but every time they tried to tell their story or pitch investors, it would be next to impossible to understand, let alone fund, what they were pitching.

So we thought about what we could do to improve the quality of the investor pitches in Rheinland. STARTPLATZ provided the venue and the network and I provided the pitch training as given to me by my US American mentors. And the result was The Rheinland Pitch, a monthly event free to startups and the public, where 3-4 selected startups are put on stage to pitch in front of investors, entrepreneurs, media and the general public.

A week before they are put on stage, we invite all applicants (average of 14) to a day of investor pitch training with me for free and then we select the 3 or 4 best to put on stage the following week, every last Monday of the month in the evening.

Every 6 months there is also a grand Summer and Winter Finals where the best-of-the-best are pitted against each other, with semi finals leading up to them. In 2018 the grand Summer Finals was at the Düsseldorf airport and saw an audience of over 1.400 people attending.

The result is an incredibly successful educational platform that has seen over 1.000 startups improving their pitch and gaining the knowledge of what it takes to successfully pitch investors today and an over 100.000 audience that have been educated about what a startup is and how it works.

For more information and how to apply, see http://rheinlandpitch.de

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Events, pitching, startup

The Rheinland Pitch Summer Finals 2017 is a success!

Bigger & better than ever

Yesterday saw the third ever Rheinland Pitch Summer Finals (the two previous finals were also spectacular).

And what an incredible finals it was; Once again supported by Digitale Stadt Düsseldorf and Marketing Club Düsseldorf, a record +1.300 people signed up pre-event, insuring a full house at the spectacular event location at Düsseldorf Airport DUS.

The Rheinland Pitch is Germany’s largest continuously running startup pitching event since 2013. It’s a monthly startup pitching event, where regional startups in all phases are invited to apply. . Our fantastic sponsors insures the event stays free for the startups and it’s free for the audience.

The selected startups (usually 7-12 per month) receive a full day of pitch coaching and help with their pitch decks for free (by me), pitching their results at the end of the day. From those pitches we select the three best to put on stage a week later, in the evening on the last Monday of the month, in front of an audience of press, media, investors, students, entrepreneurs and the general public that selects the best pitch by public voting.

Every six months, we have a best-of-the-best finals where the winners from the last preceding months are put on an even larger stage at an even larger event. At these events we also have an expert jury that counts for 50% of the votes.

We call this the Rheinland Pitch Summer & Winter Finals.

This guy was moderating…

Three best-of startups plus an additional wildcard were pitching…

The audience was engaged and entertained…

More information and images from the finals can be found on the Rheinland Pitch Facebook page.

And the winner is… MySchleppApp – an Uber for towing

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Education, pitching, startup

The Pitching Masterclass goes LIVE

To celebrate that I have now coached over 500 startups at over 40 Rheinland Pitches so far since 2013, we decided to stream one of the coaching sessions (well, the theoretical part anyway) live on Facebook. And as we were having a few Spanish startups attending as guests, this time around it was held in English – which made it all the more accessible to stream.

Now, if you also want the really juicy bits of my Pitching Masterclass – the me helping you improve your pitch deck part – apply to the next Rheinland Pitch for free or sign up for one of my free Open Office Hours if you are a startup, or book me in person if you are an organisation, event or corporation.

Here are the slides I used:

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corporate entrepreneurship, Education, pitching, speaking, startup

Pitching Masterclass & Speaking @ RTL Mediengruppe

Pitching Masterclass @ RTL in Cologne, Germany

Recently I was invited to RTL Mediengruppe to help their journalist school’s InnoLab Week participants pitch their internal ventures with my Pitching Masterclass.

And to speak in front of RTL managers and stakeholders on another topic near and dear to me; How the old game of innovation and growth has changed and how to master the new game at an internal event.

Here are the slides I used for the Pitching Masterclass:

And here are the slides for my talk on the new versus the old game of corporate innovation & growth:

Some impressions from the InnoLab week:

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