Excited and honored to be back yet again as a mentor for the WHU Accelerator program!
“The WHU Accelerator is an equity-free intensive program for WHU students, alumni, and staff designed to provide rocket fuel for your new ventures.”
From the WHU web page
“WHU – Otto Beisheim School of Management is a leading German business school with an exceptional national and international reputation. WHU offers academic programs and continuing education for executives throughout their career.”
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:
So we came up with the idea to create an event that would be open to everyone and:
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.
Honored to be invited to hold my “Lean Innovation Masterclass” teaser workshop at the “Innovation Valley Garzweiler“ kick-off event in the amazing Hugo Junkers Hangar in Mönchengladbach last week.
As you might know, Germany has decided to end using brown coal as an energy source – and that even faster than initially planned: 2030 instead of 2038 – and this will obviously have an effect, especially in the regions where they are depending on the coal, for cheap electricity to industry, a major source of employment, stability, and prosperity.
To help alleviate the transitional pain, public funds have been made available and regional projects have been formed to support the affected regions in many different ways.
One way is to support and stimulate innovation, to enable an environment that can facilitate the creation of new exciting opportunities for the industries of the future – a second industrial revolution if you will — for when the coal that powered the first industrial revolution and has been generating unprecedented prosperity (and unprecedented damage to the planet) comes to an end.
That’s where I and my company +ANDERSEN & ASSOCIATES come in; I was there to give a teaser overview of some of the methodologies anyone can use (startups as well as established industry) to create disruptive innovation at 50 (!) times faster (and with less resources) than previous methods – to inspire and also to showcase what is indeed possible today; what is actually actionable and teachable.
Special thanks to WFMG – Wirtschaftsförderung Mönchengladbach, Zenit GmbH, and Zweckverband LANDFOLGE Garzweiler for inviting me and to all of the very enthusiastic and motivated participants that came to my fully-booked workshops.
Looking forward to be of further service to the region going forwards!
(And yes, that is an actual original Junkers Ju 52 airplane inside the event location – Hugo Junkers was born in Rheydt in today’s Mönchengladbach.)
Excited and honored to have been invited to mentor participating startups in the Jacobs Startup Competition (JSC) founded and managed by students at the Jacobs University (now known as the Constructor University) in Bremen, DE.
By popular demand, I’ve jotted down some details about my updated “cinematic” Live Streaming Studio V3 setup and gear. I’ve also shared some Lessons Learned at the end of this article that might be helpful if you also want to achieve a more professional or “cinematic” look for your streaming or Zoom calls.
UPDATE 2025: On my color grading in 2025
UPDATE 2024: On my color grading in 2024
UPDATED to Lighting & Look v3.1: Above, a screenshot from my current v3.1 setup.
See for yourself in the video below what v3.0 actually looks looked like when recorded and check out the comprehensive list (constantly updated) of the gear I’m currently using to achieve the look on this page.
I’ve since added back some contrast, some more definition or 3D-ness, by returning to a higher ratio / difference between key and fill light for the v3.1 as opposed to v3.0 that had a tad too little definition (and was a little too heavy on the red/warm side), as seen in the video below.
Of note, video compression in conferencing or streaming software tend to smear the image a whole lot (that’s why I have the camera output set to be so sharp – more details in = more details out when compressed in Zoom), and depending on the conferencing software and the operating system, things happen to your saturation and gamma – so it can take a bit of trial and error, aka brute-forcing, to get to a color grade and look that makes for a usable correction LUT for your setup outside of DaVinci Resolve, considering the whole signal chain.
Fun fact: One of the other changes from v3 to v3.1 is the choice of microphone. Can you hear it? (One costs 1.600,- Euros, the other 117,-). I’m actually now using the cheap-ass microphone(!) instead of my (still beloved) Neumann. Check out this list of gear for the deets.