startup Archives - MICHAEL REUTER

The Best Time To Start With Something New Always Is Now

michaelreuter — Thu, 28 Nov 2019 17:39:19 +0000

There are lots of recommendations about when starting a business. Mostly, we are advised to start-up when times are good and we can afford to invest some time and money in building our own self-employed careers. Since I’ve discussed that several times over the last weeks, and, as so often, my view does not fit into the prevailing view, here are my 2 cents: The best time to start with something new always is now!

Most people aren’t self-employed, and most people have never asked themselves whether to start something on their own. Why should they? There is no rule that says “self-employment is the holy grail”. Of course, we know that self-employment can have positive effects on our health, e.g. the likelihood of hospital admissions of self-employed individuals is about half that of wage workers. This finding holds true even when accounting for a potential self-selection of the healthy into self-employment. However, we don’t know whether self-employed — who often simply cannot afford to become ill — are less sensitive towards their (potential) illnesses.

Of my friends and business network, I couldn’t tell whether, in principle, it’s healthier to be paid on a monthly basis or generating sufficient revenues for a withdrawal from the business account. I, myself, have never been employed by somebody else, except as a working student, so I can’t compare. What I do know however, is, that there are some of my friends who aren’t really satisfied with their jobs and like to discuss the start-up and venture capital topic at dinner parties. They then declare to be ready to quit their jobs as soon as the right time has come. Ok, only when is the right time? Answers like “as soon as I have the right idea”, “after I have reached the next step on my career ladder” — or even better — “when the right point of time has come” are given. Sorry guys, not one of you will start her own company. This is nothing else as prevaricating.

As so often in life, you typically know when the right time for something has come, be it to move to another city, to leave your partner, to have kids, or to quit your job and start your own company. These significant moves in life usually are triggered by a real need — in my case, it was my father’s role model, who, earning a decent income as a self-employed steel trader, returned home at 5 pm, went on holidays when it made sense or played tennis with us kids when the weather — and not a boss — allowed it. I felt the need to live autonomously and to decide about essential aspects of my life — and my first company, an online travel agency, followed suit.

Of course, you should have some idea you plan to build your company on. And, of course there should be some visibility regarding market potential, product acceptance, and future revenues, before you start-up. It may be wise to gain some experience working for a large enterprise or a consultancy in order to build your network and not being forced to start from 0. However, if you feel being ready for a change, go for it — start your own business — the best time for that is right now!

There is one alternative I’d like to point out: if you join a company that allows you to act as if you were self-employed, that encourages you to create and pursue your vision of the business, go for that option! With Datarella, we have tried to create such a company — I’d describe our business as a creative venture at the high-end side of technology combined with sufficient business clout guaranteeing that the show goes on. Obviously, joining a company like Datarella could be a valid alternative to start-up!

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Practical, socially relevant technology

michaelreuter — Sun, 30 Mar 2014 13:37:54 +0000

People use the word technology for “everything that doesn’t work yet.” Danny Hillis, a computer scientist and entrepreneur, pointed out that the best technology is unseen: once technologies works, they simply become computers, telephones. cars, etc. People accept technologies, when they regard them as providers of reliable routine solutions of problems, most of them belonging to one if the the “3Ds” categories: dull, dangerous and dirty.
Take robots: as long as we talk about “robots” we imagine some fascinating man-like machines, trying to mimick human behavior as muc as possible. But just “trying”. We don’t see those robots as equivalents to our own race and we don’t expect them to live with us as other humans do. But if you think of robotech vacuum cleaners, a trolley moving beds around hospital corridors, or industrial workhorses used for automated processes in manufactural plants worldwide, they cease being seen as robots. They are simply named after their functionalities. How would you name the CoBot of Carnegie Mellon, which — standing by the lift door — displays a little sign asking passers-by to press the appropriate button for it (Arms are expensive and fallible — so self-navigating robots don’t have them).

Every technology is as good as its practical — or social — relevance. This is, what Neelie Kroes, European Commissioner for Digital Agenda, refers to in her contribution to a discussion about digital privacy. And this is ‑in my opinion — the biggest challenge of technology startups all over the world. In the aftermath of the dotcom bust more than ten years ago, a new generation of entrepreneurs has been leveraging mobile technologies to all sorts of more or less useful applications. As seen in the last ten years, the crash of the internet boom has not exactly brought an end to the internet, e‑commerce or any other online business. If anything, the key players of those times are stronger than ever, with amazon as the poster child of a company having read its own obituary several times, but still being alive and well. In this light, the recent discussion of a bubble (in the technology business) should be assessed carefully. Most probably, many of the actual tech startups won’t survive their first liquidity droughts, and many will fail just because nobody needs their products or services.
And that’s where the above mentioned practicability comes in: if a product or service is practical and has social relevance, it will be used. If it only provides a nice-to-have feature but is nicely designed, it will only be used by the fans of that special feature. If it’s neither well designed nor does it provide a practical benefit, your startup presumably won’t survive.
With our own startup, Datarella, my business partners and I launched the app explore and we are trying to build a socially relevant service for smartphone users based on the app.
The three pillars of explore are:

Everybody can use explore. The app itself is free and there is no need of using an additional gadget like a fitness band, or else. It’s in the user’s smartphone – with her all the time.
It’s absolutely easy to participate: explore asks the right questions at the right time – nobody must be overly creative and fill in an empty diary – the user just answers short questionnaires in under a minute.
The user gets individual personalized recommendations to change her behavior, if necessary. No standardized programs, but individual advice.

We think that with explore we match our own expectations of developing a technology which is practical and socially relevant.
Do you know other examples of socially relevant technologies? Be it an app measuring your radiation exposure, preventing wildfires or more. Please share them with me!

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Entrepreneurs — The Can-Do Guys

michaelreuter — Sat, 04 Jan 2014 21:45:48 +0000

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.

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!

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Über die Startup Hochburgen Berlin und München

michaelreuter — Wed, 18 Sep 2013 19:15:24 +0000

Die Sendung Notizbuch des Bayerischen Rundfunks ist heute im Thema “Startup Hype in Berlin” dem Grund für den aktuellen Run nicht nur deutscher, sondern auch internationaler Firmengründer und Investoren auf die deutsche Hauptstadt nachgegangen. Und da man als Münchner Sender nicht wirklich ausschliesslich über Berlin sprechen kann, ohne die eigentliche Hauptstadt, München, zu erwähnen, durfte ich auch ein paar warme Worte über die hiesige Startup Szene verlieren.

Mein Beitrag ist rund 5 Minuten lang und beginnt mit einem kleine Lapsus des Moderators Oliver Buschek, der so von Berlin fasziniert war, dass er mich ebenfalls dort verortet hat.

Das schönste aber am Beitrag ist, dass es mir gelungen ist, mit meinem Urlaubs-Relax-Foto auf die Website des BR zu kommen — ein bisschen Sommerfrische im aktuelle äusserts herbstlichen München schadet auch nict.

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Auf einen Espresso: Björn Bähre, Unternehmer

michaelreuter — Fri, 08 May 2009 07:48:03 +0000

Björn Bähre ist der Archetyp eines Unternehmers. In den letzten Jahren hat er als Gesellschafter von result zahlreichen Unternehmen geholfen, zu internationalisieren. Seit geraumer Zeit betätigt er sich auch als Business Angel und unterstützt Unternehmensgründer bei der Entwicklung ihrer Start-ups. Damit es ihm nicht allzu langweilig wird, produziert er mit Kollegen Videoart unter dem Label logentheater. Und dann gibt es da noch die kleine Hannoveraner Kneipe mit dem eigengebräuten Bier,

May 8, 2009

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Auf einen Espresso: Claudia Helming, DaWanda

michaelreuter — Thu, 07 May 2009 15:59:40 +0000

Claudia Helming ist Gründerin und Geschäftsführerin des Berliner Start-ups DaWanda. Mit 25 Mitarbeitern betreibt sie den “Marktplatz für Einzigartiges” in Deutschland, Großbritannien und Frankreich. Jeder, der kreativ genug ist, Klamotten, Accessoires, Möbel usw. selbst herzustellen, kann seine Produkte über DaWanda verkaufen.

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