I’m back also this year mentoring startups at the (rebranded) Young Entrepreneurship Summit run entirely by students at Constructor University in Bremen, DE.
About YES
“The Young Entrepreneur Summit is the ideal springboard for you to project that unique idea!
Contest your idea, benefit from the expertise of successful entrepreneurs through our one-to-one mentorship process, and win thousands of euros to kick-start your venture!
Here at Young Entrepreneur Summit, we guide you from your first business idea towards your very own company—from vision to venture.
From the first application round, you will be provided with valuable advice from experienced founders and entrepreneurship professionals and get a chance to participate in webinars that introduce you to the most important aspects of founding your own business.
The best ten teams will be paired with a personal mentor to guide them through the last application round and prepare them for their pitch during the final event on the Constructor University campus.”
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
Intro
Welcome
About your instructor
BEFORE YOU START PITCHING
First thing first
The Basics
Your competition today
Capital available today
HOW TO RAISE MONEY
Funding sources available to you
What investors are looking for
How the funding game works
When should you raise money
How to find investors
How to contact investors
PITCHING
Pitching TL;DR
The three pitch types
The High-Concept Pitch
The Elevator Pitch
The Pitch Deck (The Funding Pitch)
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
And what a spectacular Rheinland Pitch Winter Finals 2024 it was in KOMED, Cologne!
This year, based on the experience and feedback gathered from doing this for over 10 years now, we mixed it up a little to make it even more interesting for the audience – and to give even more startups the exposure: We decided to try three different categories with three startups pitching in each.
The categories were Sustainability, Generative AI, and Female Entrepreneurship. The finalists were:
Sustainability:
Beaverdesk
Innovative Robot Delivery
Fainin GmbH
Generative AI:
Panos AI
Cityscaper
LABNODE
Female Entrepreneurship:
KOHO Smart
Campus Cruiser
Qizify Learning
And then the startups pitched…
The jury considered each pitches, asked questions… With the Rheinland Pitch finals format we have a panel of expert judges that count for 50% of the weight of the votes together with 50% of the audience.
The audience asked questions…
The audience also voted…
And then it was time for the classic networking break with Currywurst.
Networking is at least half the value of the event.
And it wouldn’t been possible to put on a flawless event without a lot of great helpers!
I of course have zero special insights into the matter (other than mostly publicly available information – growing by the hour – and having lived some), but that has never deterred me from mouthing off my opinions (and being substantially more right than wrong) in the past – so here are my two cents on the latest Open AI developments that you never asked for.
The Doomer vision of General AI, created by generative AI
The board (read: e.g. Ilya Sutskever or one Adam D’Angelo, who is also behind Poe, a ChatGPT competitor — of all things to have as an independent director — Toner, or McCauley) has had plenty of time to explain, but have so far chosen not to. Until I learn otherwise, I’ll assign ego and zealotry – two of the universe’s most destructive forces – as the reasons for this mess.
As long as there is no public explanation from the board as to why exactly they fired the co-founder CEO Sam Altman, I am going to assume the reason is one big f*ing nothing burger — and they know it. (Happy to change opinion if facts to the contrary appear — which I think is unlikely at this point, but would make for a great plot twist).
I guess the most likely scenarios so far are a) The Decel faction of the board getting cold feet about the current speed of things b) D’Angelo feeling snubbed by ChatGPT’s new AppStore stealing Poe’s thunder c) A combination of both, with or without an active coup conspiracy — although I lean heavily in the active conspiracy direction; Envy, spite, and zealotry (aka ego), are in my experience the usual suspects when it comes to the motivation behind cataclysmicly stupid decision making.
Now, Open AI is not operating in a vacuum. Open AI does not have monopoly on creating AGI; Other projects are trying to develop AGI — safely or otherwise. If AGI will happen, it will happen — with or without Open AI and with or without Open AI playing it safe & slow. Applying Game Theory would tell you Open AI would be playing a heavily biased game (which I guess you could also call hubris or ignorance — or of you’re a decel, “acting on [your religious sci-fi fantasy cult-like] conviction”). Ok, so now someone else developed AGI — what now Open AI? Congrats, you’ve become irrelevant. Who cares if you warned the world, who cares if you developed safe guidelines, who cares if you developed a “safe” neutered AGI now? I think this is also why I don’t lean towards “decel” as the real or only motivation behind the ousting, but it may have been used as an argument by the coup faction to sway the zealots on the board to make an insanely stupid decision.
Also, applying Game Theory 101 to an aftermath of ousting an “everybody’s darling” CEO with no outside or bottom up support, indicates a thinking (or perhaps just a complete lack of thinking?) that they could somehow survive this (which I guess means they have the legal paperwork to back them up — for now) — and to be fair, if the direction for Open AI is to regress into a [somewhat irrelevant] research organisation, I think they’ll achieve it quicker than they could ever dream of — and I also think they’ve already potentially achieved one of the fastest & largest destruction of value in history in the process — at least for now.
Update: I’m not the only one noticing the board flunked Game Theory 101 – Kindergarten Edition
The board governing the roll out of super-intelligence couldn’t understand game theory enough to think 1 step ahead in a coup of their beloved leaders. pic.twitter.com/lF46OXQ1dw
Also, as a Norwegian, I’ll never pass on an opportunity to dunk on Swedes ;), so I guess I should also assign some blame and shame to the harebrained economist Nick Boström for fueling the AGI danger scare – I’m only half joking, though: Boström has been highly influential in turning Musk and others into doomers with his (IMO stupid and also in blatant disregard of Game Theory basics) book “Superintelligence”. And the kicker being Boström now has come to regret his scaremongering doom & gloom. Heuristic: Never believe a word an economist is saying. Ever.
Now, Sam and Greg “joining” MSFT sounds like MSFT creating an interim CYA (Cover Your Ass) vehicle (aka a story at the moment, not necessarily anything set in stone yet) to protect their AI interests (and more importantly, their share price) until situation gets further sorted out – MSFT is not exactly known for creating great products and daring innovations, so I don’t see how those two people would thrive under the MSFT (or any) corporate yoke for the long run. I’d bet against it.
I think MSFT definitely won the narrative so far, but I’m not so sure about actual value (did they sign / formalise anything yet?). Anyways, MSFT with Nadella taking a stance of seemingly extreme optionality was a good move, perhaps the only move to preserve any upside potential.
Update 2: Proof that clown car will keep on clowning: Ilya Sutskever has regrets. Regrets of the actions of the board that he was supposedly in control of. Give me a fucking break. I just can’t… How was / is any of this possible?
I deeply regret my participation in the board's actions. I never intended to harm OpenAI. I love everything we've built together and I will do everything I can to reunite the company.
That said, hindsight of course having perfect vision, there was bound to be an enormous amount of friction building between the intentions of the founding of Open AI as a safety-first non-profit and the commercial entrepreneurial ambitions and speed of someone like Altman as the CEO — not to mention between egos, not to mention from having what seems like a competitor as an independent director on the board, perhaps.
I can’t remember who said it on X/twitter, but I agree with their sentiment that the board might have still been a floppy kludge that Altman as CEO and co-founder didn’t pay too much mind to tighten up since “no CEO was ever fired by a board for being too successful”.
Now, what’s next for me as an Open AI / ChatGPT customer? What can we expect going forward? Neutered nanny ChatGPT v4 forever? Greatest come-back since Steve Jobs? I think it’s time for me to look into the current state of the alternatives again, regardless.
Although I don’t feel this soap opera is canceled just yet. I expect at least one more season of twists and turns. Stay tuned — I have a feeling The Sam & Greg Show can still surprise us.
Update: Yes, they did. Although, not so much of a surprise as a big ado about nothing in the end.
Today, I’ve chatting with HeyGen founder Joshua (I dig startup founders who do Customer Development!) – about one of the best AI tools yet for your videos (the one you’ve seen me use recently).