Also be sure to check out his site with the latest stuff from Arranofsky’s Black Swan: clintmansell.com

wie etwas schreiben, wenn wir nur noch fühlen können? Und was können wir fühlen? Wir sind so unbeschreiblich traurig über deinen Tod. Und doch ahnen wir, von welchen Qualen er dich erlöst hat.

Du bist so viel für uns. Und genau so viel hast du uns gegeben. Dich kann uns keiner nehmen. Du hast uns gegen die Laufrichtung in deine Gedankengänge geführt. Dort sind wir mit dir die Wände hoch gegangen, auch mal an und durch die Decke. Du hast uns mitgerissen. Wir sind deiner Leidenschaft, deinem Mut und deiner Verletzlichkeit gefolgt. Du hast uns auf den Kopf gestellt und wir haben gesehen, wie schön die Aussicht ist.

Deine Arbeit hat uns bereichert. Deine Menschlichkeit hat uns reich gemacht. Wir baden in einem Meer aus Erinnerungen, aus Bildern. Erinnern heißt Lieben. Wir betrauern nicht den Künstler. Wir feiern ihn. Wir beklagen den Menschen, den Freund, den Ratgeber, den Ratsuchenden. Wir vermissen dich – und wissen dich doch ganz bei uns.

Du bist uns jetzt vorausgegangen, durch den Reißverschluss, den Charlotte dir an einen sattblauen Himmel gemalt hat, und der dir Hoffnung gab, dass alle Schwere und aller Schmerz ganz einfach sein könnten.

Es muss schön sein im Himmel, wenn du dort bist. Lebendig. Kraftvoll. Unruhig. Wir sind hier unten. Einsam. Still. Wir sehen uns wieder. Wir lieben dich. Wir fühlen mit dir. Ohne Worte.

VOXI, TOBI, THOMAS, SOPHIA, SIBYLLE, PATRICK, NICOLE, MEIKE,
MEIKA, MATTHIAS, MARTIN, LEO, KLAUS, KIRSTEN, KERSTIN,
KATHRIN, KARIN, JULIA, JÖRG, JACOB, HORST, HETA, HELGA, FRIEDER, FRANCIS, EVA, CLAUDIA, CHRISTOPHE, CHARLOTTE, CELINA, CARL, BERND, ARNO, ANTJE, ANNA-CATHARINA, ANNA, ALEX

via schlingensief.com

I’ve recently written an article about an initiative by a bunch of entrepreneurial students in Vienna, called STARTeurope, on TechCrunch. I attended one of their events for the first time and had been positively suprised by their efforts and enthusiasm when it comes to Startup Life. Now they’ve partnered with another ambitious, yet already long-standing, project called Forum Alpbach, which assembles bright minds from politics, economics and science in a small austrian village called Alpach.

StartEurope is bascially injecting some “Startup Mojo” into the minds of grey-templed gentlemen, bankers, opinion leaders and like-minded indviduals. By doing so, they attracted some well-known and sought-after individuals from the area of tech and VC. An illustrious round of VCs, successful Entrepreneurs and Industry people. To be precise here’s a list of people that are on the panel and will be available to advise Startups and soon-to-be-entrepreneurs:

Markus Wagner, founder and president of i5invest
Daniel Mattes, cofounders of JaJah
Reshma Sohoni, CEO of Seedcamp
Selma Prodanovic, founder and chief networking officer (CNO) of Brainswork
Christopher Kahler, founder of Qriously and urbian

Moderation: “Die Presse”

I highly recommend any Startup or Tech-interested people living in Austria (or wherever you live) to attend. This thing is entirely free of charge! There’s just one thing I a missing : Aesthetics and Design when it comes to their Logo and CI.

YOOSE, a Berlin-based mobile coupon startup, just launched into their public beta phase. The idea behind Yoose is to provide a multi-level distribution platform for Coupon publishers, such as local businesses or larger firms that plan to target specific campaigns with coupons.

However, it took the company quite a while to deliver its service – two years to be precise. After being a finalist at Seecamp in 2008, they were stuck into a closed beta up until today. This was largely due to the fact that the founders separated and the remaining staff carried on. Apart from this problem, the company had to struggle to acquire partners to distribute coupons that are being bought by advertisers.

Although coupons, and especially mobile coupons in the light of smartphone ubiquity, are a hot topic, Europe still lacks a “coupon mindset”, compared to the US. As Groupon, and ultimately also the Euro Clones such as CityDeal, effectively showed, these times are slowly changing and Europe is adapting a coupon culture. This is still lightyears away from the US, where coupons became a substantial business, both for customers and shops, but Europe is getting there.

Yoose acts in a crowded space, where a lot of still tiny startups, such as Austrian Seedcamp Mini Finalist Vooch or Dealhamster, are competing among three crucial elements: 1. each other 2. potential clients and 3. distribution partners. Especially young companies are caught into the classic “chicken-egg-dilemma”. Acquiring advertisers that book coupons via their platforms demand a certain outreach, provided by partners and third party platforms. Distribution partners, in return, will only offer their reach in exchange for stark revenue shares.

Yoose itself has eventually managed to partner with some German publishers and is now trying to sell their product. Until now the startup sustained itself working as a service provider for various companies. A sometimes dangerous effect of when startups are in need of money and thus outsource their development ressources for quick cash. Other than that they received 25.000€ from an undisclosed early investor.

This Post has been originally published on TechCrunch Europe.

I’ve closely watched Sony’s PR Initiatives for the upcoming Fincher picture The social network. As far as we know it’s going to be the story of how facebook was founded and developed into a behemoth of all walks. I am telling you – this is just the start for a series of feature films based upon successful internet stories.

The trailer for the upcoming movie hast just been released and although it doesn’t give much of a glimpse I am looking forward to this.

I came across an amazing, disturbing, yet mesmerizing documentary about the controversial bullfight.

More material on its website

People who read this blog might be aware of ordinary forms of financing startups, such as Venture Capital. Rather famous Internet celebrities argue that to a certain extent the VC model is not quite adquate anymore. There is no more need for financing rounds (A rounds at least) in the millions for bootstrapped, tech-driven teams that rely on several well-connected brains and some matresses. As Paul Graham puts it

Moore’s law has made hardware cheap; open source has made software free; the web has made marketing and distribution free; and more powerful programming languages mean development teams can be smaller. These changes have pushed the cost of starting a startup down into the noise.

In the realm of these findings, assuming that the longer we observe the more correct they get, I’ve recently noticed some interesting, new and sometimes disruptive financing models out there. Incubators, such as my pals at i5invest, often being determined as a not viable startup financing and operating model, or HackFwd‘s “referrer model” can potentially close this gap. Seeing successful entrepreneurs turning into angel investors and having 100s, if not 1000s of new projects/startups every day, the timing for such funding approaches seems right.

HACKFWD

With major Buzz Lars Hinrichs recently launched HackFwd – a “pre-seed investment company looking to support Europe’s most passionate geeks“. Having a strong network throught his successful company XING, Hinrichs tries to free friggin good developers from their day jobs and help them launch tech companies. At large this isn’t anything new, but what makes it special is that this is basically the first time that such an endavour takes place in Europe. And that’s really good.

As Hinrichts points out in a beautiful Introduction Video to HackFwd, not a single Alexa Top 100 company came out of Europe. This, however, has multiple reasons. The utmost reason is, that Europe lacks, or has been lacking, a Startup and Venture scene. Companies are sold too early, failure is desicable and there’s no coherent and evolved investor scene, particularly angel investors. This is nothing new, yet it’s a major reason for the above. We are getting there and we are probably also going to be better than our US pals. Martin Varsavsky often pointed out reaons why starting a business in Europe is feasable.

What I’d like like to bring in is Hackfwd’s referal system. This is obviously already happening all the time – but below the line. It’s rather unlikely that you get funding by submitting your business plan to Sequoia’s public e-mail adress. People who know their shit, introduce founders and connect fellow investors. Now this has been iterated to a transparent model. Referrers take a 3% stake in the company, whereas Hackfwd takes a staggering 27% of your stock for 1 year of funding. Inequality and fairness ought to be discussed in another post.

HACKER ANGELS

A syndicate of renowned excellent programmers turned entrepreneurs and millionaires, a couple of days ago, announced a vague angel investor formation targeted towards individuals that are starting companies (Mostly US based as it seems now though) called Hacker Angels. As vague as their website is, as contemporary and up to date is their approach. Fuck business plans, decide individually, meet the team, see the product.

We’ll see how Hacker Angels is going to develop aside from its early buzz they got, due to the celebrity status of its founders. From the outside it’s, in a less organized way, targeting the same entrepreneurs as HackFwd is: Hackers and Techies. However having a great tech infrastructure and grea tech people on the team (c’mon – this is still a tech space we are all talking about), nobody should underestimate the power of good sales people, Marketing gurus and other business-related co-workers. Those are the guys who are eventually bringing in the money and that are turning a tech startup into a profitble company that might raise further rounds of funding and eventually ends up in some form of exit, be it a trade-sale or an IPO.

INITIAL FACTOR

Still unknown and secretly being developed Initial Factor is another interesting model for financing startups – at least what I’ve heard so far. Successful entrepreneurs, Angels and Product people teamed up to incubate, finance and help to exit companies.

Not really tech-driven, but a more Samwer-like approach that enables companies getting off the ground, growing and building a sustainable business throughout Europe. I haven’t heard any figures or facts regarding Initial Factor but it might be something Europe’s tech scene needs.

Seedcamp, Europe’s equivalent to Y Combinator, was a late, but first, step of moving into interesting financing models. Backed by some major VCs, well-connected individuals and therefore a good reputation among Euro Startups, they are taking a 8-10% stake in the company for a little more than what YC puts into the team.

We’ll see how those companies evolve over the years and which startups come out of them. An interesting development nevetheless.

At this point I’d also like to mention a great great article by the even greater Economist – An overview, a hymn and a cold and strategic look at Europe’s web scene.

via @sacca

I’ve had experience with several startups (and corporations called hospitals) and one thing I’ve noticed is, that founders or early employees are rarely dumbasses. This is different in corporations.

small vs. large

Working or being in a larger collective of people (in this case co-workers) often entails working in groups, hiding behind collegues or simply checking facebook more often than Outlook. Primarly this is due to the fact (a genuinely good one) that workload is being decentralized, organized and distributed among individuals that are trained for specific tasks. Being really good at a particular thing allows one to stay away from tasks where one is not that well educated. Education and training for this task is an excuse for not having to do other shit at the cubicle around the corner.

At startups there are no cubicles. There are screens that are visible to all of your collegues, the length of a lunch break is no more secret and updating your facebook status might be even part of your job.

working vs. doing

This stark contrast and a startup’s work transparency are a fundamental argument of why startups usually have great people – at least in its early days. There is simply no possibility to hide behind collegues or stick to your thing. One has to engage with others, discuss, argue and bring in valuable input. The term “working” might even be totally misleading here – it’s rather some sort of doing.

The process of which people are attracted to startups ought to be authentic. Looking for co-founders or your first 2-3 employees via job boards et al. is an affront to startup culture. This process has to evolve from ideas, to invidivuals, to teams and eventually to great products with people on it, not working, but doing.

What about the rest?

There's a shit load of big companies out there
that are hiring like crazy.