Germany’s largest pitching event rolls on: Recently, the Rheinland Pitch‘s regular “Summer Finals” edition took place at the University of Applied Sciences Düsseldorf (HSD) in co-operation with Gründungszeit HSD!
Photos by Manor Lux.
Recently I had a blast prepping the startup finalist for the C3 pitching competition, back again at the Gateway Excellence Startup Center at the University of Cologne with my Pitching Masterclass, Startup Edition.
Interested in my Pitching Masterclass for your students, startups, or employees too? Get in touch!
It was initially created to serve the Rheinland Pitch back in 2013 to help educate our regional founders and prepare them for raising money – and has been constantly evolving and updated ever since, and today it contains accumulated knowledge and feedback from over 3.000 startups served – and counting.
The Pitching Masterclass Startup, Student, and Corporate Edition used to only be available to applicants to the Rheinland Pitch or people lucky enough to be in an educational institution, incubator, accelerator, or corporate innovation program who had booked me for my in-person, on-location Masterclass.
Today, in addition to the on-premise editions, my Pitching Masterclass is available to anyone everywhere as on-demand eLearning, featuring +2 hours of video and all the hundreds of slides as a booklet download.
Also available in bundles, especially popular with companies and organisations, including prepaid online mentoring & support vouchers for employees, booked and managed by the teams themselves on demand.
Recently I had the pleasure to be back at the Igniton+ Demo Night, this time experiencing the startup that I’ve been (b2b SaaS for early stage sales & pitch) coaching in the 19th batch of the Ignition+ program from Digihub Düsseldorf & Rheinland winning “best pitch” of the batch.
UPDATE: Following the tradition set by the startup I coached in the previous batch, OSPHIM – Layer Performance went on to be awarded “Digital Start-up of the Year 2025” by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy, BMWE) for their outstanding digital innovation! FTW!
Congratulations Laura and Lukas of Layer Performance! Perfectly delivered pitch, very well deserved!
(BTW, if you too want to improve your pitch, you can enroll in my Pitching Masterclass online – available anytime, anywhere.)
Recently, I was invited to mentor the teams participating at the 10th anniversary Startup Sprint Düsseldorf (think Startup Weekend, sans a global network).
I was also asked to do a little impromptu TL;DR on pitching, prepping the teams for what they could expect; If you can tell me which problem or need you are solving, for whom you’re solving it, and how – like a 6 year old child can understand – you’re already 80% on your way, 100% better than most! (want to learn how to pitch your startup successfully to investors? There’s my pitchingmasterclass.com for that! :)
Mad props to Ingo, Georgis, Peter, & team for keeping the volunteering up all these years! (And thanks for the shout-out, Peter – nice gesture to an OG! )
Recently I was invited to the Gateway Exzellenz Start-up Center at the University of Cologne, Germany to prepare the finalists of their “Startup Your Idea Contest” to pitch at their final event.
My Pitching Masterclass was initially created to serve the Rheinland Pitch back in 2013 to help educate our regional founders and prepare them for raising money – and has been constantly evolving ever since, and today it contains accumulated knowledge and feedback from over 3.000 startups served – and counting.
Until now, the Pitching Masterclass Startup Edition and Corporate Edition was only available to applicants to the Rheinland Pitch or startups lucky enough to be in an incubator or accelerator or corporate innovation program who decided to book me for my in-person, on-location Masterclass.
Today, the Pitching Masterclass is also additionally available, both the Startup and Corporate Edition, to all startups, students, and corporate innovators everywhere as on-demand eLearning at https://pitchingmasterclass.com, featuring +2 hours of video and all the hundreds of slides as a booklet download – also bookable in packages which additionally includes online mentoring & support vouchers for your teams.