Stephan UhrenbacherWriting about Entrepreneurship, some Green Stuff, some Learnings

Recently I am spending my reduced work hours doing two very different things.

1. Educate myself on the current status of sustainable entrepreneurship. Meetings with people from NGOs such as Greenpeace, communities dedicated to sustainable or social projects (Utopia, betterplace.de, reset.to) but also Clean Tech funds, startup investors and green entrepreneurs.

I have given myself some time to see where the biggest lever is for me.

2. At the same time, I am being approached by quite a few, mostly German, startup CEOs and founders for business advice, and sometimes funding. While I struggle to make coaching a viable business model, and this takes up too much time, the feedback I get for this has been actually extremely rewarding.

It is amazing how efficient a two hour coaching seems to be when you have just gone through the same questions yourself and often have done the same mistakes just a couple of months before:
- what is the core of the business?
- what do you do better than anybody else?
- who are your customers?
- how do you acclerate revenue
- structure of the team
- where to look for funding
- what do investors expect?

While I will be continuing to distill the most effective form of engagement for me with some of these companies,
I will try and distribute some of my experience via this blog.

Finally getting to talk to people again. Discussing ideas, market developments, the underlying trends, barriers to entry, business areas worth disrupting and all these things just plain fun for me.

I will get bored eventually as I prefer to do things instead of talking about doing things, but for the moment I enjoy the conversation. Most of it, at least. People have been trying to drag me into their ventures and ideas and a surprising number of people, even good friends, have pitched business ideas and concepts that are just not for me.

So, here is what I find interesting:

(1) Businesses that make life easier for everyone
When I started working on  TravelChannel in 1998, I wanted to make it easier to book flights. We build the first engine that could compare flights in two totally different pricing mechanisms – the official IATA tarrifs and the so called grey market in one go, enabling people to find the cheapest flight.
Qype was started from  a similar starting point: If everyone starts telling everyone about their experience in restaurants, butcher shops or dentists, then there will be less bad experiences.

Bigger examples that fit this category. Google, Flickr, Facebook, you name it.

(2) Business that make markets more efficient and disrupt the status quo
The fun being involved in DocMorris, Europe’s largest mail oder pharmacy that delivers prescription drugs and allowes people to save was that it worked against the existing distribution structure with it’s extremely high cost to the public.
Qype also is ideally positioned to challenge existing near-monopolies like the yellow pages in each market to give local businesses more efficient advertising.
Other examples that make markets more efficient: Ebay, of course. But also craigslist, hitflip , nestoria and many others.

(3) Businesses that help us to reduce emissions
Together most other people on this planet, I am convinced that we are in a massive climate crises ,  and that mainly our carbon emissions are at a suicidal level.
I am therefore  – like many other entrepreneurs I know – particularly interested in businesses that help us reduce our carbon emissions. This is where I do most my research at the moment.
So I will try to combine my background – a degree as mechanical engineer -  with my experience in business-to-consumer internet and starting up companies.
Here I am not alone. Look at people like John Doerr, Shai Agassi, the Google guys with google.org – lot’s of inspiring examples.

In summary: Useful, disruptive, saving the environment. These are the discussions I enjoy and the businesses I will get involved in.