I recently got a call out of the blue from Gruenderszene, a subsidiary of Business Insider. They asked me rather personal questions. In the end, this turned out to be a nice story.
Please read the original version in German here.
Category: Press Clippings
Stephan Uhrenbacher in the press
in Wired UK: Taking startups cross borders
This text is a slightly longer version of my contribution to the May 2012 edition (http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2012/05/how-to/scale-into-other-markets) of WIRED UK
Taking companies across borders is incredibly rewarding and also sometimes very challenging. Here a brief summary of some lessons learned. There is no right or wrong for all businesses. For some models you need to build a local salesforce, sometimes you can get away with just having a great central Search Engine Marketing team. Sometimes you need to do both.
Most companies chose to have product central at HQ and sales regionalized in other markets. This is tried and tested and works well if your product is „one size fits all“ like a Facebook or Google. The limits to this system of a strong HQ and relatively weak satellites start to show if local tastes and preferences differ too much, or if the sales process has to be adapted massively.
I have seen many satellite offices where people did feel marginalized and unhappy because they had no influence on product direction or felt that top management did not understand their regional needs.
Some recipes to reduce international friction:
- Get local the local staff to work from the central office.
If you are in an attractive location like London or Berlin, you can get the people from other countries into your HQ. We have done this for 9flats in Berlin. Currently, we have 14 different nationalities working at 9flats. We have French, Italian and Spanish people who moved to Berlin to do local marketing in their home markets. Hence if something is not right for Italy, people will go up to the development guys and tell them until they fix it. - Hire key people from other countries.
At Qype we had an English CTO, French COO, and today we have even a British CEO for Qype, a company headquartered in Hamburg. At 9flats, our CTO is Mexican and our head of sales is from Russia. I like the culture this creates and it has worked very well for us. - Check you assumptions.
People might say similar things but their different cultural context will associate totally different meanings. „Consider it done“ means something totally different in different cultures. I was often surprised, that our spanish colleagues often had a more germanic approach to work than the Germans. And language is more stressful than most people admit: I found that people do get tired more quickly if they have to run meetings in English.
Entrepreneurial Fads
It is surprising how quickly entrepreneurs tune into the latest trends. As a group, we seem to do no better than other humans in our judgement. Remember “Second life”, or the now gone “beta” era? Here is a personal collection of fads that I grow tired of.
- Everything in the cloud.
Fact is: I travel a lot. Whether it is on the train, on the plane, or any time I spend in other European countries: More often than not, I don‘t have high speed internet connection. So good bye, Google docs. Goodbye Apple mail. The success of dropbox, and in part evernote can be attributed to their ability to bridge offline times with great syncing. - Co-working.
As much as I like the idea of sharing (the relative success of 9flats is owed in part to the idea): Coworking does not work in my view. We tried with avocadostore. It was just plain stressful for people to be in a large and changing office environment. In my view, humans need consistency. They need their place, their space, their quiet zones. Coworking usually does not provide this. - Open floor plan.
Nearly every startup has it. The open floor plan office, with people not even in cubicles, but in rows of desks. Even the CEO – except: did you realise, the CEO never actually sits at his desk? He spends time in meeting rooms, where he can speak to people in private. I have worked in startups where the coffee shop nearby got rich by offering an anonymous setting for a private chat. - Always on.
Facebook, skype, twitter, whatsapp, email. We all know about the addiction this generates. We check every minute whether something important is being sent their way. Which seems to be an acknowledgement our their very existence. I have recently been partially successful in weaning myself off my mobile gadgets. The result? People start to wonder why I missed their emails for a private get together on a weekend. - Social where there is no social.
Some transactions benefit tremendously from social media. Others don‘t. I‘m not sure what why a detergent needs „likes“ in order to work.
All these things are great, and they work sometimes. But more often they do not.
Closed doors allow me to be more open with people. Sitting at my own desk makes me more comfortable. Sometimes social media is just a waste of money. Taking my work with me for and switch off my web connection often results in precious and productive solitude.
What are your favourite fads?