Angel investors have the most sexy name in the industry. They provide startups with money when nobody else does. Some aren’t actually angels, but that is another story… Many people ask me if I would like to invest in their startup. Time for some reflections on what to look for in angel investors. 1. The most important…
I am a master of the to do list. I’ m quite good at getting stuff done. Both in business and in private life. I do even better with my long term goals: Write them down, forget about them and a couple of years later they are achieved. I don’t mean this ironically. It is…
When the iPad was presented 3 months ago, the web prophets were not very enthusiastic. No flash and so on. Now it’s the big hype. In 3 months at the latest we will have the Android Pad and next Christmas the masses will have a device from Medion. But still hardly anyone understands what is…
There are four excellent companies who dominate how we search, how we shop, how we communicate, and which gadgets we use: Google, Amazon, Apple and Facebook. The first three of these companies also are among the top 5 of the Fortune Magazine’s 50 most admired companies in 2010. (Facebook is not in this list and this…
I admit to be totally biased as I am naturally a big fan of the power of reviews. However, I need to highlight this little feature in the new Qype personal page called ‘Insider Tips’. It does not show me the reviews of my friends, but it shows me places that are liked by people…
I spend quite some time these days coaching friends, former colleagues or fellow entrepreneurs about “what should I do next“. There are some interesting parallels in these discussions. Strikingly, the self-imposed limitations of what people feel they can do constrain people’s choices in an amazing way. And this is true for any income group. Despite…
Spent – Sex, Evolution and Consumer Behaviour by Geoffrey Miller I’ve been postponing to write about this book simply because I still am overwhelmed. Geoffrey Miller works in the field of evolutionary psychology which brings him extremely close to the currently very fashionable field of behavioural economics. And I am extremely intrigued to learn why…
When I founded Qype more than four years ago, I always dreamed that this should be a Pan-European business, not just a German one. I remember vividly how hard it was, particularly in the UK, to get early traction. Since then, we have launched in a total of 8 countries. Today, the Qype team surprised…
I recently read the book “Cradle-to-Cradle,” which is an international bestseller. Brad Pitt was quoted as “one of the three most important books I have read”. Michael Braungart takes a committed stand against the ethics of renunciation in the German sustainability movement. Against the existing paradigm of eco-efficiency (“fewer pollutants, fewer resources, fewer people”), he…
I deliberately took a while while to decide how I want to work and where to get involved. I pondered to join a VC (too far away from the business) and looked at direct investments in other people’s ideas (sometimes felt I could come up with better ones myself). I enjoyed the last couple of…
