Philipp Moehring

Author: Philipp

  • Email Ninja-ing

    Email is all the rage – both Fred Wilson and Brad Feld wrote about the necessity to properly use email as a re-call to action for web service users. I agree, since your email inbox is what your work life often revolves around (yes, this sounds sad). If you have someone’s email address, and you can write a halfway personal text, you’re bound to get a response.

    The downside of all the services we are now using is the incredible surge in email volume. Whenever I catch a glance at someone’s inbox and see it overflowing with GroupOn emails and Facebook message alerts, I cringe. Some people wear an overloaded inbox as a badge of honour, but it’s really not practical. So, here’s my short list of how to make email bearable when dealing with craptons of emails (like I unfortunately do).

    First – three facts:

    Inbox “0”…

    …is a nice concept, but not the holy grail. If you try to get that number down to zero and nothing else, you are haunted by a special case of ODD – and it will not make you more productive at all.

    Email as todo list…

    … is a terrible concept, but unfortunately a fact of (working) life. If you have a boss, investors, or a coworkers, they will give you stuff to do via email. As they also wait for an answer, your inbox essentially becomes your to do list, and sending a reply ticks a task off the list.

    Rules and training…

    …are necessary to make this work. My system won’t work for you, probably, but at least it contains some nifty ideas on how to avoid overload.

    Three easy steps to eliminate crap from the inbox

    Separate addresses for ham/spam

    Use a separate email address to sign up for stuff like web services, newsletters, and non-essential things. This is the blanket solution to keep annoying stuff out of your inbox.

    • Get a short, anonymous, easy to remember (and spell) gMail address. *
    • Change all your web services to send to that address (takes forever but is worth it – I got mine about 6 years ago, and am now exclusively using that to sign up to stuff).
    • Set it up as a subfolder in your main gMail account (you use gMail, right? You better). Set it up via IMAP so you can also send and reply from within your main account using that address.
    • Make a filter in gMail to skip your inbox and apply a label that you set up in your sidebar.
    • If you get tons of emails from services like Twitter/FB, consider setting them up to be marked as read automatically. You will still see them when you glance through the label folder.

    Bam. You probably just eliminated 50% of your inbox volume. Rinse and repeat.

    Archive religiously

    Archiving will not delete your mails, instead you keep everything in “All Mail”.

    • Add the “archive” button in gMail and use it for everything you get done. Keeps the original inbox light.
    • Use the “send and archive” button (in gMail labs) to skip an extra click. Use keyboard shortcuts for bonus points (“e” archives current, “[” archives and goes to next, “]” to previous email).
    • To archive your current inbox (you kinda have to), go to the last page of emails, ‘select all’, and gMail will ask yuo if you want to select your whole inbox. Do it, and ‘archive’. Your first whiff of inbox zero. Then go and ‘move to inbox’ whatever you still need to work on.

    Set up filters and tags

    The extra email address is the first filter, but you can get many more working for you. Especially if you are on a few mailing lists you don’t want to miss. I found it worthwhile to use filters and tags:

    • Group / task / job (admin, expenses, travel) – filter to apply tags and color code them. I.e. an automatic expense tag (using a +expenses@ address, see below) is very convenient so i know what to print when i do expenses once a month.
    • In private, use it to set up your different personas – for companies you deal with, your projects, and maybe groups of people you mail to. Makes it much easier to find stuff.
    • Make sure to clean up tags once in a while so they don’t clutter your sidebar.

    That’s all you need – you won’t miss stuff and you will be much more efficient in finding things. Priority Inbox does some of it automatically, but setting it up custom made lets you tailor what you want to see or not much more easily.

    I usually end up with about 3-5 emails in my inbox at the end of the day, and have a pretty good email response time. You?

    * An alternative to a separate email address is a Yourname+Something@gmail setup. gMail allows you to set unlimited +anythingyoulike and will deliver them straight to your inbox. It works, but is much more filtering and still gives out your real email address.

  • My talk at The Next Web / LeanCamp2011

    I was fortunate enough to be invited by Salim Virani, the main thinker behind the LeanCamp movement in London, to join a LeanCamp session at the NextWeb Conference in Amsterdam last week. Salim promised…

    a fast-paced, multi-faceted conference track, emulating the Leancamp unconference experience, exploring the world of Lean, Agile and Design-led business.

    …and so it was delivered. I think this was one of the most fun and engaging speaking gigs I’ve ever done, even if the group of attendees got smaller towards the end (announcement of the startup rally, a 3-day conference, and the dutch sun outside did their part). The speakers were great, and the amount of input for myself was so useful that I would have been happy to just watch.

    Covering ground with short interactive talks

    The setup was great for such an intense topic: the set of talks that would have lasted a day at other conferences were condensed into a swift 2-hour session with lots of interaction and quick turnaround. There was a short introduction into lean startup thinking from Justin Pririe, who told us how SaaS juggernaut Mimecast (well above 20 million in revs) is using lean startup practises to stay fast, and by Salim himself, who talked about identifying the right business models for specific markets (for extra points, he talked about Garmz, a Seedcamp company). Patrick, one of the heads behind the great business model generation book talked about the ways the team used different approaches to selling the book, building a company around it, and how he sees classical business plans (spoiler alert: he doesn’t particularly like them).

    Personally, I found the more technical talks on feature injection (by Chris Matts), UX and UI (titled “don’t forget the humans” by Ian Collingwood), and A/B Testing (interview with James Gill from GoSquared) surprisingly interesting and learned a ton. Thanks for keeping it light, guys. Rob Fitzpatrick rounded the whole session off with a primer on metrics and measurability – great stuff for startups, I hope we’ll see the slides.

    Note to all conference organisers: This is a great way to give attendees a deep dive into a relatively new topic and is a safe way to avoid the boring speaker trap while keeping up the momentum. After all, I only talked for about 15 minutes.

    Lean Startups and Seedcamp

    It’s a bank holiday in London today, so I can make this longer: why was I actually invited to this session, being all VC-y and boring?

    I collected a couple of examples of the newest Seedcamp portfolio companies to show how the learnings of the lean startup movement can be applied and used in very practical ways.

    5 Reasons we love lean startups

    1 – Validation is possible

    Lean Startups are all about validating hypotheses, and from an investor’s perspective, this means one thing: No need for large sums of money down the drain before a product-market-fit is established. I gave the example of Robot Media, who had some pretty incredible traction in the Android market even before Seedcamp decided to invest. If you can show that a market exists for your type of product (with only a fractions of a finished product), you will be liked – because you already de-risked large parts of your business plan.

    2 – Capital efficiency

    One more recent addition to the portfolio is vox.io, the dead simple “telephony for the 21st century” provider. Tomaz and his Slovenian team built a great product with very limited ressources – this was possible because of singular focus on the goal to build the most simple phone for the browser. Obviously, location is a plus here, and this is where many of the Seedcamp portfolio companies excel: a cost-effective development base in the home country (often eastern Europe), with management or sales in London, New York, or even the Valley (also see Brainient, Zemanta, and Profitero).

    There was a discussion in the audience about outsourcing product (to cheaper locations), and there’s a big difference: as my colleague Carlos wrote, you should have the tech ability in your team, as it will make you faster, more efficient, and of course independent. This approach is perfect for the Seedcamp teams who have cost-effective development at their home base: they get all the benefits of a technology hub like London without the nagging problems of extremely costly development talent. Also, you can only build a product-centric culture when you have the knowledge in your own team, ‘eating your own dog food’.

    3 – Existing tools and ressources

    GIScloud built a very powerful platform for professional geo-information systems in the browser, and are able to develop new features incredibly quickly. Do they have more engineers than for example Bing Maps? No, but because they rely on open source technology, existing frameworks, and widely tested solutions, they can do what they do quicker and cheaper. Almost none of our portfolio companies work with costly licenses or develop everything from scratch – speed and efficiency, again.

    4 – Measurable success

    A powerful product exhibiting the right kind of metrics can show you very early on if and why a product is used in a certain way. This is a powerful pointer when deciding on the right monetization strategy (or refinements thereof). Nuji started with an incredibly simple product, allowing you to simply tag products on the web that you like. By measuring user data, it was clear how the usage pointed towards a curation method, and how a business model could be developed around the specific user actions.

    5 – Scalability

    The ultimate quest for a startup is to develop a scalable business model with tested assumptions. This is part of a more formal business plan (sorry, you will really need one), and will be asked for by any serious investor before your series A.

    When I met Tamas and Andreas of Garmz for the first time (way back when I worked in Germany), they had a great idea and some bold assumptions about the fashion market and its customers. There were many parts of their business model that needed to be verified and de-risked (do designers care about having their own garments produced? Will people let us know about what they want to buy? Will they accept unknown designers? Will they give us their credit card details before the production is done? How many items will be returned?). Two years later, they can finally prove their thinking around their ingenious model*, because they have tested these assumptions in the market and are ready to scale.

    Get this to London!

    So, a great conference in general, and a great group of speakers in particular. Maybe this will be repeated in London – reach out to Sal @leancamp, and he will surely put it together. I will choose new examples, promised.

    *Garmz’ ingenious business model hinges on another lean startup method: customer development and the pre-sales establishment of product-market-fit. By getting designers to feel out the market with their fashion designs, the team knows which products are most liked. If these are then mocked up as samples, and people leave their payment details, not much can go wrong.

  • If you care what I do while I travel…

    …check my tumblr. Pics and more.

  • On the road again – hope to see some friends on the way

    We are taking some of the Seedcamp winners of 2010 and 2011 on our now annual road show to the USA in March 2011. With a total of 14 companies, we will tour both East and West Coast, and end up at SXSW to meet up with the rest of the international tech scene.

    We will start off the trip on the east coast, visiting two of the most important tech hubs, New York and Boston, where we will also host 2 Seedcamp-format mentoring events to mix and mingle with local entrepreneurs, investors, and product experts. The New York event will be hosted by our friends and sponsors at Google. The Boston event is going to take place at the Hubspot offices (with a lot of help by our friends from Atlas Ventures).

    After a weekend break in Tahoe, we will spend the second week in the Valley, visiting, amongst others, Facebook, 500startups, the Google headquarters, various VCs, and meet the tech scene of the valley. We will host mentoring events at Google and our friends at i/o ventures. We will also go to the Northwest to visit two giants of tech – we will see both Microsoft and Amazon Headquarters, to get inspired by what was built in only the last decades.

    The grand finale will be at SXSW in Austin, Texas, where we will probably end up exhausted, happy, and with pockets full of business cards – a Seedcamp on the road, with loads of new friends and contacts to be made.

    Our Seedcamp US trip

    I am about to leave on a two week whirlwind of a trip to the US, where we’ll take the Seedcamp winners of 2010 and 2011 to meet local investors and entrepreneurs. My first trip to the US in a long time, and my first trip to the West Coast/Valley ever. I’m beyond excited.

    Besides meeting some friends in New York and Boston, I will see some London folks in Tahoe and some of the Berlin and Lausanne connections in Austin at SXSW. If you are somewhere close, let me know, so we can meet up!

  • Was mache ich überhaupt bei Seedcamp

    Mit Joel abhängen und Videos drehen:

    Philipp Möhring (Seedcamp) im Interview: “Deutschland hat einen zu kleinen und großen Markt”

  • Ein Post, den ich eh schreiben wollte.

    Je suis dans le news.

    Momentan sehe ich die folgenden Makro-Trends, ohne auf einzelnes einzugehen: Online-Offline ist ein Thema, das immer besser umgesetzt wird, wobei sich Startups auf die Nischen konzentrieren müssen, die nicht von den Big Boys wie Google und Groupon angegangen werden. Big Data in allen Bereichen wird immer wichtiger, und erlaubt noch viel Innovation. Die Software”-isierung” von klassischen Technologien wird fortschreiten, und alles geht in die Cloud.

    Mein Interview auf Seedfinance.de: Philipp Möhring von Seedcamp: “Entscheidend ist die ökonomische Logik und internationale Skalierbarkeit!”.

  • VC vs startup career – Quora blogging

    As many others, I’m becoming addicted to Quora – loads of deep and good information and insights on interesting topics.

    Here’s my (admittedly biased) answer to the question “What’s the case for working as an associate at an early stage venture capital firm rather than a startup?”

    Some of the skills you develop at an early stage investor are very similar to what you do in a startup – and some are very different.

    Why would you work for a venture investor in the first place?

    • You get tons of exposure to what is happening in the market. There is no better way of developing an overview of trends and movements than at an early stage VC.
    • You are actually working in a startup yourself. Early stage firms are small teams, have limited amounts of capital, need to be very flexible, and require massive amounts of work – that’s very similar to a startup. You are project managing, recruiting, marketing, developing website and similar things – for your own firm and for all of your portfolio.
    • There is no better way to build a network – no matter if you want to startup yourself or want to continue being an investor.
    • You are not dialling for dollars (cold calling potential investments), because early stage firms work different than later stage – you have to meet people. Also, to understand businesses in the early stages is totally different than looking at numbers and growth rates in established businesses.
    • An associate role is much less analytical and theoretical than in a large fund, and usually much less business/finance focused. This is the case for most of the folks in early stage though: you need to have a very good grasp of operations to run successful investments (more hands on, advice, etc in early stage than later).

    (a lot of these answers coincide with the original answer, also check back there)

    Why would you not start a startup instead?

    You need some different skills than as a founder. It’s a great job (the best, in my eyes), but definitely not an easy one.

    • You need to handle 10-30 different companies, understand different markets, have totally diverse contacts, and a good overview of all of this.
    • Skills include much more of broad knowledge, less specific and deep domain expertise. For some, this comes more naturally.
    • You might be on the look out to start something longer term, with a lot of insights.
    • You have ADD, in which case the dynamic nature of the job fits your personality really well.

    Negatives:

    You have to say “no” a lot. It could make you hesitant of starting your own (but then, why are you in the startup world).

    Depending on the firm, you can get used to a lot of money coming your way, resulting in the same challenges you have as a consultant or banker: It is really hard to start a company after getting used to a paycheck.

    I am an associate for Seedcamp in London, a micro seed fund in London. Above reflects my own experience, so feel free to deduce from that.