What is Stephan up to? Mentoring startups through Creative Destruction Lab Product strategy and organizational structure for larger startups. Researching sustainable aviation. Spending more time in Europe these days, my Q1 2020 was dedicated to help Gunnar Froh, the founder of Wunder Mobility to refine the organizational structure of his startup. Wunder has recently closed…
(I am writing this from a cottage in Quebec with 5% battery left, so no perfect formatting…) FLIO is in process to be sold to SOS Travel SPA in Italy. If you are a user of FLIO, this means that you get to continue to use FLIO, the most used airport app in the world….
As Warren Buffett has become mainstream, it is now easy to confuse the forest and the trees of the headlines. I made my first trip to the annual meeting of Berkshire Hathaway in 2008 and have been to the event seven times in total. Going back to Omaha is not so much about learning something…
One of my favorite bits of experience sharing with entrepreneurs is: “It’s a marathon, not a sprint”.And when I coach other founders, I keep telling them that it takes a long time to build a great business. Gareth Williams, the CEO of Skyscanner just reminded me of this in his interview, when he said that…
Should you take advice from a guy who draws cartoons for a living? Generally not. Scott Adams, who does the Dilbert comics, is the exception to this rule. His book ‘How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big’ is one of the best books about life and happiness that I’ve read recently. It…
I recently did a couple of speeches for founders. One was in front of 1400 people at the Bits and Pretzels event in Munich. I’ve found that one of the keynotes that gets the most attention is my take on the entrepreneurial roller coaster. With the massive startup advice that is dished out to founders…
I love growing companies. I love this so much, that I have done nothing else for the past 15 years, with companies like TravelChannel, DocMorris, Qype, 9flats, avocadostore. Sustainable growth requires a very basic art: Every business must figure out how to Acquire customers profitably and How to sell to them. People who know how…
A couple of days ago I was keynote speaker at an EO Accelerator meeting. I was sharing my experience as an entrepreneur in building fast growing companies. While preparing my talk I realized how the basic principles for building an organization are very similar to those helping a six year old child cleaning up her…
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…
This is a very short post but it contains an essential guiding principle for investors in dealing with CEOs. At this years Annual Meeting at Berkshire Hathaway, someone asked Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger how they intend to keep their managers of Berkshire‘s subsidiaries. This and another question triggered Warren to explain that he does…
