Another great event I attend will be the Pitch Camp x.0 at the Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin next Tuesday. Reshma Sohoni, CEO of SeedCamp, will coach me how to successfully present our business idea to investors and customers. I’m very excited about this event, because at the evening there will be a competition between the participants.

Wish me luck dear friends and have a good time!

Martin

PS: Thanks for inviting me! It’s a great pleasure to me!

This is an internal presentation by the famous company Sequoia Capital which went incidentally public:

Today we had a meeting with Suhas Gopinath. Suhas is CEO of Globals Inc, a global Indian company. He is the world’s youngest CEO – he was 14 years when he founded his first company and now he is 22! Despite his success he talks to other entrepreneurs on the same level and he is very open minded.

Suhas visited the UnternehmerTUM and wanted to talk to young entrepreneurs so we met. He told us his founders story and he spoke about his successes but also about his failures. Afterwards Sebastian presented him SnipClip and finally we and the others startup teams discussed our greatest failures.

I think it is important and by the way very exciting to talk about failures instead of success. You learn from failures and learning from other people’s failures is very efficient. I will blog more about our failures in the future! Remind me, if I forget it!

Addendum: I forget to mention who organized the event: the Students for Global Momentum Initiative (the UnternehmerTUM hosted it). Thanks also to the India@Campus program who initiated it! Both initiatives are organized by students from the TUM and the LMU in their spare free time.

Have a good time!

Martin

Is Google calling itself a data octopus? This search results suggests yes:

If you are in the virtual goods business like we are then this is a must-read article by Eric Ries, the CTO of IMVU:

I was invited to the Virtual Goods Summit yesterday, and got to see quite a few interesting speakers and panels. It got me thinking about what decisions are essential when building a virtual goods product.

Read the full article: Lessons Learned: Three decisions to make on virtual goods

Here it is live from Vallendar:

• Tough times are coming: the financial crises is becoming an economic crises
• The main objective for startups must be profit instead of growth
• transaction based models and paid services / content are becoming hot
• keep your burn rate as low as possible
• survive the next two, three years
• it will be hard to get venture capital, however some VC companies are investing because of the crisis
• the crisis is not a risk, it’s an opportunity
• It’s the best time to start a company because competitors will be rare 

To summarize: great event for young founders!

If you wake up one day in such a company: then run!

Today I had the second chance to see and listen to Mark Zuckerberg. He visited the Ludwig-Maximilians-University of Munich (the university where I studied). He gave a talk about the history of Facebook and the future, especially about the future of Facebook in Germany.

The strategy of Facebook is to grow more rapidly as the competitors, mainly StudiVZ. He spoke about three activities:

1. the Facebook ambassadors, which are similar to the CampusCaptains of StudiVZ
2. the German app contest. The winners are Doodle, iPersonic, Schnick Schnack Schnuck, Biergarten and a tool for tracking the Bundesliga results (don’t remember the name)
3. The campaign “Share your story”: Facebook users send in a video or photo slide show of how Facebook did changed their life or made the world better

To summarize: it was an interesting event, but I’m looking forward what Facebook is planning next to win the German users! Until then have a good time!

Martin

It’s unbelievable! Thanks to our partner the UnternehmerTUM we are invited to present SnipClip to a jury of US venture capitalists at the Intel + UC Berkeley Technology Entrepreneurship Challenge! There are just twenty other teams and one team from Germany. Last year the German startup Navaris Medical won the challenge and received 25.000 $ as well as a huge press coverage. One of the Navaris team members was a colleague from Manage&More, so the expectations are very high.

It will be a tough challenge! So wish us luck dear friends! And have a good time.

Martin

Today I was invited to the Facebook-Party at the headquarter of Amiando. Both companies presented the first application of Facebook Connect in Germany (and I think even in Europe). Now you can use Amiando’s ViralTicket-System with your friends on Facebook. Felix, the CEO, showed us a nice demo. Great work, Amiando!

There was also a Q&A with Mark, the founder of Facebook. I was surprised. He is a small guy – sorry, Mark, if you read that, but I’m not the only one who was surprised! Maybe this is because we think of stars like Mark that they must be also tall? 

What is more surprising: he is a very sympathic guy without any attitudes. I didn’t had the time – or he didn’t had the time – to talk to him for long, but maybe there is another chance tomorrow. Mark will speak to the Facebook ambassadors.

Good night and have a good time!

Martin

PS: Thanks Felix for invitation!