From data to your heart’s desire

Fun, Musings, , ,

20140227-150543.jpg

Isn’t that fantastic? 50,000 women have – voluntarily – got pregnant in the last 18 months with the help of an app! At least this is what fertility startup Ovuline‘s CEO Paris Wallace said this week.

The Ovia fertility app has been downloaded 300,000 times and users are adding 1 million data points every two and a half days. This makes Ovuline’s fertility panel the largest in the world.

In the big data world, the more data a company has about users, the more more accurately it can predict their behavior. In Ovuline’s case this means, the company helps to guide women through their pregnancy. Users of the app know when they’re fertile or, in the case of its new pregnancy and they get instant feedback (which is something many other quantified-self apps still fail to do). For instance, the app can tell a woman whether her specific ache is normal and what percentage of other women also have it during this phase of their pregnancy.

Many people, especially here in Germany, are wondering about any privacy implications of using quantified-self apps. My pretty simple  take on that is: as long as you are not personally affected; i.e. you talk about doing sth. ‘in theory’, you miss the case when stressing privacy concerns. If you are a woman with a strong desire to have a child, and you can choose between a long and strenuous fertility therapy, or using apps like Ovia, Glow, Clue or Kindara – you won’t think twice!

And fertility is just one use case of many. Not being able to get children is really bad, but being able to prevent the next heart attack is even more important. At this point, let me quote QS co-founder Gary Wolf: “Self-quantifying will become a social responsibility.”

Women using a fertility app act autonomously and do not wait for – or have to trust in – external support by some fertility therapies. The new paradigm of the Quantified Self is that the individual can act and change things herself. It enables human beings to care for themselves. For me, this is the most important aspect of QS.

The photo was made on a party with beautiful kids (and their parents).

Hack Schooling – A Better Education Model For Our Kids?

Musings, , , , ,

If you are a parent of school kids like me you’re most probably wondering whether this kind of schooling is the best possible way of education. Most of us would agree that there’s a lot of improvement potential in nowadays western school systems. Ok, there are private schools – but, in most cases they are expensive and – at least in Germany – the educated contents have to be exactly the ones defined by governmental bodies, federal state wide so-called curriculums.

Most of my friends would agree that today schooling means to change an innocent, curious, creative human being to an indifferent, uncritical, obedient content specialist. Too harsh? Maybe. But we might agree on one thing: we all feel that our kids deserve some better schooling than they actually get. Then let’s watch this TED Talk of Logan Laplante, a 13 year-old boy who was taken out of the education system to be home schooled instead.

Fascinating, isn’t it? Whatever you might think about this “extreme” form of schooling – taking your kid out of school and do everything at home – it certainly has not harmed Logan. If you are interested to learn more about alternative schooling you might start with this talk of Dr. Ken Robinson to which Logan refers.

What are your thoughts about schooling and the actual educational system? What duo your kids think? Do you have the impression that school is preparing them in a good way for their adult lives?

A simple recipe: Success is the absence of defeats, not a victory.

Musings, ,

20140202-192206.jpg

What are you as an entrepreneur focusing on in your daily struggle to success? Are you looking for a victory or are you making sure not to be defeated? Be aware of this simple recipe: Success is the absence of defeats, not a victory. A victory is the inevitable result of preventing defeats. This is my central statement.

What does that mean for your startup? Let’s have a look at a critical aspect in the life of an entrepreneur: The often long and windy road to getting funded.

The art of how to get investors on board is definitely one of the – if not THE – most actively discussed topic in the startup sphere. Having been sitting on both sides of the table – as an entrepreneur and as an investor – I don’t think that there is something as a perfect pitch. Most entrepreneurs sift through gazillions of recommended slides and styles. Many VCs have their preferred pitch styles – some even expect you to build your presentation based on their frameworks.

My experience: there are as many perfect pitches as there are audiences. I have seen – and prepared – pitches marked as “super” by one investor and torn apart by the next one. In other words: the best possible pitch is the one which persuades the individual(s) sitting on the other side of the table at that very moment.

But – how to prepare such a pitch? Or – is there such a pitch – or shouldn’t you prepare as many decks as you have invitations?

No – I don’t think you have to do that. What you should do is to prepare a flawless pitch without any major deficiencies. More you can’t do, and more you shouldn’t do: most of you will have lots more than 20 pitches before the first investor gets excited. That said, the best thing you can do is to prepare in the best way you can: Know everything about your market, your product, your SWOT, your competition,  and your potential investor.

That’s it. Just present a solid, flawless pitch in a persuading manner and the rest will follow. If not, it wasn’t the right investor. You don’t need to win this pitch, but you absolutely have to NOT LOSE it! Remember: Success is the absence of defeats, not a victory. Victories of all different kinds will be the natural result of not being defeated.

The photo was made during a run in beautiful Forstenrieder Park, south of Munich.

Entrepreneurs – The Can-Do Guys

idee.vc, Musings, , ,

Founder Institute

Having been an entrepreneur for over 20 years, I did not have to think twice to agree becoming a mentor of Founder Institute’s Munich chapter in 2013. When FI director Jan Kennedy discussed the first semester with me, I had a flashback to the times of my first startup: a travel agency which morphed into one of Germany’s first online travel agencies ever in 1995.

In those days, my co-founder and I did not have any clue of “How To Found A Startup?” – nobody was even talking about “startups” or “entrepreneurship” – we just became self-employed instead of starting in management jobs at Henkel (in my case) or Deutsche Bank (in my co-founder’s case). We started with no money (speak: bootstrapping) and changed our way to do business several times (speak: pivoting). A business plan? No way! We did not need one! Our business was growing slowly, but steadily. We hired our first employees and started a second company for packaged incentive trips.

In 1998 everything changed really quickly: we were awared “Best Online Travel Agency” and a few months later we sold a minority share of our company to Telegate AG, Munich. In order to get this deal done, we finally had to write a business plan – our first one. But we did not have to pitch to an investor, yet.

Typical investor pitches were involved in my second startup, the social news aggregator YIGG. That was 2005 – and then we used terms like VC, startup, pitch deck or liquidity preference as if we had grown up with them. We had our experiences with international VC companies and term sheets built by top US law firms, before. This was a complete new world for us – very different from the 1990s – and pretty demanding, since we had to build our business and to negotiate this finance stuff with the big guys.

And yet, we were just focusing on building our own business, but we had not to pursue other jobs to keep the money rolling in. And exactly this is what most Founder Institute entrepreneurs are doing: they build their companies while staying in their day jobs. We all know people lamenting about high workloads in their jobs – a typical FI entrepreneur invests 25-30 hours a week on top of his normal workload. Got it? This is a hell lot of work! This workload alone has minimized the largest first semester ever of Founder Institute from 37 accepted teams to 25 teams right after the very first week.

Founder Institute Review Session Dec 2013
Photo: FI Review Meeting, Munich, December 2013 (Michael Reuter)

When my mentor colleagues Sevket, Norbert, Lorenz, Stephan and I met for the first FI review session in December, we were sold on the progress of all teams compared with their first presentations in early November. All of them had developed their basic ideas into sharp keynote slides, presented in a determined, dynamic style. Most of them have persuaded us as future entrepreneurs and many of their ideas could evolve into real startups.

Sure, we mentors all had something to criticize, we all habe our doubts on many of those ideas. But – as Ben Horowitz says in his brilliant piece “Can-do vs. Can’t-do Culture“:

The people who focus on what’s wrong with an idea or a company will be the ones too fearful to try something that other people find stupid. They will be too jealous to learn from the great innovators. They will be too pigheaded to discover the brilliant young engineer who changes the world before she does. They will be too cynical to inspire anybody to do anything great. They will be the ones who history ridicules.

Given the task of building a start-up while pursuing a 40-hour- job, I really like what the FI entrepreneurs accomplish (it helps that Munich’s FI chapter is perfectly organized by Jan Kennedy and Jan Küster). I think it’s one of the greatest challenges of today’s working environment to create and build startups. I love being a member of the mentor team at FI Munich and I invite all would-be-entrepreneurs to jump on the bandwagon and join FI – we want to create 1 million jobs, after all!