Philipp Moehring

Category: Seedcamp

  • IDCEE Kiev and thoughts on Europe

    I was in Kiev last week, representing Seedcamp at the Investor Day Central and Eastern Europe. Besides seeing this beautiful city for the first time (autumn colours, wide roads, and impressive Soviet-era buildings), the trip was well worth it.

    I was to give a keynote at IDCEE about the emerging models of early stage financing (think super angels, micro seed, etc.), and I had prepared an elaborate affair of why and how to work with the individual actors. While enjoying the reception the night before, i quickly realised I needed to work on the slides again – there is no such thing as an active angel community or even seed funds in the Ukraine. That’s why I focused on a more general introduction to the topic, less on specific items such as strengths and weaknesses.

    The grass is always greener on the other side

    It is interesting to see with which kind of enthusiasm new models of funding (or rather, fair and entrepreneur-focused models of funding) are greeted in less active markets. I saw the same in South Africa, Singapore, and other places I’ve been to over the last few months. Entrepreneurs are really hungry to prove themselves and go international with outside investors, no matter where they are. Of course, that’s also the attitude we see in teams who come to our events in London from further away. Likewise, all the European teams who are blessed with an at least somewhat working funding market are more than eager to head westwards to New York and the Valley. Over the last years I saw Austrians pitching in Germany, Germans go to London, and Londonites engaging in an endless debate on why the US is a better place to start their business.

    Stop whining

    My take away from Kiev especially (as the situation is really underdeveloped and dire) was that it’s really important to build the local markets and help kickstart your own community. Sitting on a panel on “how to go to the Silicon Valley”, we agreed that the best result of all these moves across the pond would be knowledge, networks, and money coming back home to support the next generation of companies. The worst would be a brain drain that leaves Europe in the dust. To prevent this, it’s really important to network across borders to be less isolated from what is going on in Europe and build an ecosystem that works together. I could go on about all this for a while, but I think the most important point is this: it’s too easy to complain about the risk-averse investors (or the unimaginative founders) – if you don’t help changing the status quo, you shouldn’t be whining about it.

    Stuff from Kiev

    So, here are the slides I promised to put on my blog:

    IDCEE – models of early stage funding

    …And a little bit of my German accent mixed with too much coffee for your entertainment:

    I hung out in Kiev with Mike Butcher from TC Europe, who had some thoughts on the current situation – mirroring IDCEE and the excellent f.ounders event in Dublin, and Martin from The Next Web – his thoughts about IDCEE are here.

  • It’s oh so quiet

    Cause I am busy having a blast preparing Seedcamp Week.

    I can not describe how much fun, work, and emails I have. I stopped drinking coffee for a week because I am high on adrenaline. One apt description is that the people who were showing up in my feedreader are now in my email inbox, so it’s awesome.

  • Come and work with me

    I have the best job in the world, and you can have some of that, too! We are looking for two people (Intern and a General hands-on person) at Seedcamp in London. You will have more fun and you will be more stoked by the cool stuff we are working on than anywhere else, so get in touch and get yourself some.

    Both positions are based in London – feel free to reach out and apply by emailing Philipp. Please include information about your background, experience, your work with startups and tech companies, and everything else you feel is relevant for the job. The job descriptions for the general management and internship positions should tell you more about our requirements.

    via seedcamp: We are growing – and looking for you!

    SRSLY, ask any questions if you are interested. You will be working directly with me, keeping Seedcamp running day and night, organizing cool events, and working with the best people in the European tech scene.

    Can’t be better if you are dabbling your feet in E’ship and are passionate about start ups.

  • My presentation at Imperial College last week

    I had the chance to present Seedcamp at the annual IED business plan competition at Imperial College last week. This competition brings together MBA students from Imperial and designers and others from schools such as the Royal College of Arts to develop a business idea and take it to market. The quality of pitches was very high – also the real world applicability of most businesses was very apparent.

    We saw teams that presented mobile health insurance (through an MVNO setting) in Africa, a coffee machine taking unroasted beans as an input (dying for a sample machine!), cardboard wheels to lug heavy objects (hello ikea), plants and mechanics combined to provide air conditioning (the charismatic winning team), and smart metering technology (focused on design and user experience). No internet businesses, but they listened to my presentation anyways:

    Presentation at Imperial College, July 2010

  • Task management and personal scalability

    I used to do my task management almost exclusively in my email inbox. All the stuff I had open or running at a time would be represented by an email in the inbox, and I know pretty much what I had to do to keep track of my stuff. Over the course of my almost three years at DuMont Venture, I developed a system of folders and subfolders that I could very effectively use to be on top of everything.

    This was pretty easy, because when I started at DuMont, there was nothing. We built the company up from scratch, so all of the processes and workflows were created by ourselves. We had loads of processes in parralel, but the experience and build up made it possible to manage.

    Lots of new stuff is hard to manage in old ways

    Now, after my switch to Seedcamp, it’s different: Seedcamp is a really fast moving organization with a whole lot of different things to keep abreast of. Not only are there almost monthly mini events that require pretty meticulous planning (each event with about 120 different people), there is the year-long run up to Seedcamp week in September, a huge network of people that need to be informed and managed, and a pile of investors that want to know what’s going on. I was thrown in the middle of it and had to know which way to run once I hit the ground. This requires a really different way of going about self-organization.

    So, without really noticing, I started devising processes for all of the single task groups that I have to manage. This was necessary to replicate the results across similar things like the different events. So basically, I am focusing on finding replicable structures, to make it easy to get used to the new setup. I found it hard to hand over my last job to someone else – too much of it was implicit and learned, not much of it was an actual process. It is really hard to turn a grown structure into something scalable.

    Why should you care about my to-do list?

    Because it is a key challenge in startups: staying flexible and agile enough in the beginning to work with a small group of generalists and moving towards a replicable and scalable structure in the long term to get enough speed on the ground to grow fast. You can observe this every time: Open up a new branch in a store network, start a new product line, or add someone to your customer service team: You need to stay flexible enough to make quick decisions, yet you need to have a process in place to hand over the work to someone else. It’s difficult and most people have failed at least once. If you did fail, however, this will be burnt into your brain and you will do everything to prevent it from happening again.

    Yes, pivoting is not only necessary to find a working business model, it is also very important to grow your company or “personal scalability”. Because making stuff up on the go isn’t very scalable. i will report back once I have found the holy grail to this. I am trying to find it between mind maps, my email tagging system, and a notebook. If you have an idea, let me know.

  • Fresh bookmarks from 22.06. until 23.06.

    Daily reads

    I use the Postalicious plugin to sync notable bookmarks. Comments are welcome.

  • Seedcamp Berlin – bis Dienstag bewerben!

    Wie Ihr mitbekommen habt, bin ich ab Mitte Juni bei Seedcamp in London. Mein erster Arbeitstag ist der 16. Juni, das Mini Seedcamp in Berlin. Trotz der vielen Beschwerden über risikoscheue Investoren in Europa ist Seedcamp leider (noch) recht unbekannt in Deutschland – Ich werde natürlich alles dafür geben, dass dies nicht so bleibt.

    Wer in Deutschland oder Europa an einem neuen Startup arbeitet, sollte sich schleunigst überlegen, sich für das Event am 16. Juni zu bewerben. Es gibt, ähnlich den Vorbildern ycombinator und Techstars, eine kleine Kapitalspritze und eine Tonne Beratung, Kontakte und Zugang zu den erfolgreichsten Gründern und Investoren Europas.

    Zielgruppe für Mini Seedcamps sind Startups, die bereits an einer Idee arbeiten, aber noch keine großen Schritte hinter sich haben – also genau die Firmen, die große Schwierigkeiten haben, Geld und Aufmerksamkeit zu gewinnen. Die Europa-weit stattfindenden Mini-Seedcamps sind eine Art Vorrunde für die Seedcamp Week im September in London, wo eine ganze Woche lang Sessions und Diskussionen zu den wichtigsten Themen wie Finanzierung, Technologie und Firmenaufbau abgehalten werden. Am Ende dieser Woche werden auch die Investmententscheidungen gefällt.

    Die meisten Firmen, die bisher finanziert wurden, haben ein starkes technisches Gründerteam, innovative Ideen in interessanten Nischen und vor Allem unglaublich viel Motivation. Ich habe in den letzten Jahren sehr viele Startups und Teams dieser Art in Deutschland kennen gelernt, es sollte sich also eine große Anzahl von Interessenten finden. Wenn Ihr solche Teams kennt – bitte weist sie auf diese Möglichkeiten hin und drängt sie, sich zu bewerben!