Philipp Moehring

Category: Travel

  • The Calm before the Storm

    Whenever I fly, I have this weird, impossible Matrix-like feeling of being a super secret agent going on a mission. Mind you, I do fly quite a bit, and I am not even close to doing anything secret (or super). I love this feeling though, because for some reason being wedged into a flying (!) aluminium tube with a couple hundred people around me leaves me feeling more alone than anything else. Not lonely, just on my own. Really at peace and satisfied.

    Most of the times, I leave London somewhat stressed and/or overworked. This is either because I’ve got a weekend away or some holidays coming up and needed to finish stuff last minute, or, in the case of Seedcamp related travel, there’s an event we’re holding somewhere in the world. As soon as I get to the airport, I am in this weird bubble of matrixy nothingness, because I can’t do anything but relax: either I am off for a couple of days, or it’s too late do do anything about anything that could go wrong. Thanks to my dad: he taught me how to really not be fazed.

    In this particular case, we’re heading straight into the tornado: 4 weeks in the States with about 30 Seedcamp entrepreneurs, 20 companies pitching around the clock, about 400 people to meet over the next weeks, and 8 cities to spend time in. I did this last year, and it was the best experience since I joined Seedcamp about two years ago.

    Think class trip with Philipp as a teacher. Yeah. funny image.

    Anyways, let’s do this.

    Disclaimer: Probably I only ever get that weird on flights because I watch silly movies and suffer from reduced oxygen access. No problem. Still Neo.

  • One hell of a year. Thanks, all!

    Careful: boring blogpost about my year ahead.

    I’ve spent the past two weeks at home, in Germany. I finally had some time to wind down, relax a little, and read. I haven’t managed to come even close to my goal of 80% couch time, but it’s all good.

    As everyone, I’ve had a bunch of “oh, and what are you up to now” conversations – lovely. This year, I resorted to a “oh, mostly work – but it was quite busy”. and busy I was:

    iCal in Lion looks fugly, but it gives you a stress indicator. Fair enough.

    That tiny little bit of white in January was back when I was in Argentina for the break. The rest of the year – oh well:

      • – Seedcamp Events in Tel Aviv, London, Berlin, Paris, Barcelona, New York. I skipped Prague, Ljubljana, and Stockholm, but it was fun nonetheless.
      • – Our huge US trip in March to the East and West Coast, with SXSW to top it all off was definitely the biggest strain on my sanity (and nanny-capabilities with 15 startups in tow).
      • – Seedcamp Week in September – wow, what fun. And not much sleep.
      • – A trip to San Francisco, Valley, and Mexico in October. Awesome fun with tons of new people in Kundavi, and of course the inevitable brain overload from the valley. Tomaz and Jakob at Vox.io were kind hosts in SF, I will have to make this a regular somehow.
      • – Some smaller excursions to Germany, including the Pirate Summit, which will hopefully become a fixture in the European startup events calendar. Go Team!
      • – Weekend getaways to the English coast, the Isle of Wight, and of course France for skiing with the ICE crew.

    I tend to judge a year on the basis of travel and change, and change there was as well:

      • – Isa moved to London in March and we moved to a beautiful new apartment in summer. I kid you not, it’s possible to live in London and have a quiet home.
      • – We (Seedcamp) moved office to East London, which is awesome because lunch is more fun (less bankers and lawyers).
      • – I tried all possible mobile phone operating systems and am back on an iPhone. Boring.
      • – I started running. Somewhat. Sometimes.
      • – We invested in 25 companies over the course of the year. This means crazy many new friends, work pals, calls, meetings, but most of all, it means an amazing set of people to work with beyond my team. It’s probably why I can bear it all.

    So, all is the same, all is new – and here’s to hoping that 2012 will rock as much or more. Q1 already looks like it will.

    Happy new years and stay who you are. Because there is one thing that did not change in 2011:

      • – My friends are awesome.

  • What if my local startup scene is lame?

    I got several emails after Seedcamp Ljubljana from entrepreneurs who were looking for advice and mentoring. Apart from direct advice, the most common question was “where can I get mentorship and advice in my home town?”

    I copy pasted this 3 times, and I think it’s a great, if not the only real way to get things kicking off if your local startup scene is lame:

    • I’d check local meetups, open coffee, hackernews meetings, conferences, meet other entrepreneurs and founders, hackers, and bloggers.
    • If that doesn’t exist – build it yourself, get some entrepreneurs together, start a movement, share insights, tips, learnings, travel to places (some slovenians did a cool trip to the silicon valley with 20 people and crashed startup parties), everything else you can think of.
    • Check out university programs, talk to professors, students, guest lecturers, researchers, they often have insights of what is going on. Throw a local event to get cool founders from other places to your town
    • The upside: If you can make yourself the leader of that movement, you will open lots of doors, meet investors, and other, travelling entrepreneurs that come to your area. You are now the boss of your new, cool, local startup scene.
    I am sure you have more ideas than I have. All in all, this should only take about 5-10 years.

    Update from the comments: I still think that travelling to technology hubs, conferences, and meetups in other places is crucial to build your personal and professional network. If you are in Europe, you should go and spend a week in London, Berlin or Paris every now and then to be part of what’s going on there. The energy and connections are hard to beat.

  • 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.

  • I am addicted to my Kindle

    I bought a Kindle about a month ago, and it was the best gadget purchase in a long while. I read about a hundred pages per day on it, because I take it everywhere (and I always think “it’s awesome” when I see it lying on my table).

    I actually pre-ordered it when it was announced, but reneged on my decision to get the 3G version – which stupidly put me at the back of the waiting list when I reconsidered.

    Why is it awesome

    Reading on it is great. Period. I prefer it to a book now – here’s why:

    • It’s smaller and lighter than a book and fits in a coat pocket easily. I just have it with me all the time and take it out on every bus or tube ride.
    • It’s better to hold in one hand than a book. You can grab it at every corner and you dont have to awkwardly bend the spine by spreading your fingers.
    • The screen is perfect for text. Forget an iPad for reading a book (or lots of them, for that matter) – it will strain your eyes.
    • You have all that stuff with you – books, magazines, articles. I always travelled with at least one non fiction and one fiction book, and got the economist and some fun magazine at the airport. Lots of dead trees to lug around – not anymore.
    • I use Instapaper like a madman now. You can bookmark long articles on the web and they are automatically synced. My own personalised magazine, and givemesomethingtoread.com has great content (hat tip to Johannes).
    • Do not think iPad vs Kindle – purpose, size, weight, value, and most importantly the screen are not comparable. You buy this to read books. Think discman vs iPod.
    • Doing only one thing means you are focused, and it carries over from a paper book. You can’t do anything but read with that, either.
    • I love buying books, and paper, and the smell, and all that. I am not missing it at all. I own a ton of vinyl, but I love my iPod – you get the point.

    Features and 3G Version

    I’ve yet to put a value on a lot of features like notes, clippings, and the 3G usage. I am only reading on it, and I am already hooked. The question of 3G or not is not really important – if you can afford the extra 40 pounds, just get the 3G version, I am sure you’re only gonna miss it when travelling a lot.

    I like simplifying my life, and scratching the huge bookcase from my moving list feels great. Get your partner one for Christmas (I hope Isa doesn’t read my blog).

    Oh, and check out my case:

  • 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.