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Interview

Ulrich Dietz: “An entrepreneur needs a feeling for the right decision – sometimes it’s a spontaneous gut feeling.”

Andrea Wlcek_November 30, 2011_1:43 PM_No Comment

Ulrich Dietz (Photo: Günther Bayerl for brand eins)

Andrea Wlcek: You were recently voted one of Germany’s best entrepreneurs. What makes a successful entrepreneur, Mr. Dietz?

Ulrich Dietz: Passion, perseverance, a certain willingness to take risks. But in the long run of course, growth. If you want to be successful, you need to have faith in your own ideas.

AW: Do these principles apply in the same way today as they did when you founded your IT company 25 years ago?

UD: More than ever before, good ideas also need friends and a critical exchange of views. Factors such as internationality, networking skills and flexibility also play an increasingly important role. Compared to the old days, decisions have to be taken more quickly in these fast-moving times. An entrepreneur needs a feeling for the right decision – sometimes it’s a spontaneous gut feeling.

AW: You yourself recently initiated the innovation contest CODE_n. What do you expect from the competition?

UD: Many young people around the world are thinking about our current and future mobile society. CODE_n aims to bring together these fresh new ideas, present them to an international audience and thus give them a chance to achieve global success. But CODE_n is also the start of a wide-reaching community, a global innovation network based on sustainable support and mutual exchange.

AW: What will participants receive if they win?

UD: The participants will receive an exceptional platform to showcase their concepts, products and apps. The presentation at the CeBIT fair will feature a unique backdrop – a highlight certain to attract considerable media interest.

AW: Prestigious awards certainly raise a company’s profile. But it’s still a long way from actually implementing the idea.

UD: Gaining attention is only the first step. What then follows is ongoing business support. The aim is to help young companies take the next growth steps and launch their ideas on an international market.

AW: What kind of support can the CODE_n partners offer the winner?

UD: IT start-ups have plenty of creativity, but often don’t have the necessary business and technological know-how or experience. For this reason, experienced managers of our strategic partners will be offering personal coaching. Over a period of two years, a network of managers will provide the winner with advice and help, for example discussing growth strategies or important company decisions.

AW: The topic of the contest is “Mobility”. How relevant do you think this topic will be in future?

UD: These days, every child knows how to use a smartphone; such mobile devices will also be used increasingly by companies in future. Each employee will have access to the Internet. This combination of growing private and business use will lead to a myriad of new application opportunities.

Every IT company is currently working on new developments – whether security solutions, new database applications, operating systems or new devices and apps. It’s the right time to initiate a start-up movement.

AW: Do you expect many applications from abroad?

UD: We’ve already received over 200 applications from more than 30 countries. They include some fantastic business concepts which really whet the appetite. The CODE_n hall at the CeBIT will not only be showcasing a wide variety of mobile business concepts but also a cultural variety of young companies from around the world. I’m already looking forward to meeting them and exchanging views.

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JENS-UWE SAUER: “I recommend that all startups take part in pitches or contests.”

Oliver Gassner_November 11, 2011_2:45 PM_Comment (1)

Jens-Uwe Sauer in a digital interview with Oliver Gassner about crowdfunding for startups, Seedmatch and what startups need to do to increase their reach.

Oliver Gassner: Hello Jens-Uwe, would you please introduce yourself to our readers?

Jens-Uwe Sauer: I’m Jens-Uwe Sauer, founder and CEO of Seedmatch.

OG: And what does Seedmatch do?

JUS: Seedmatch is an online platform that provides crowdfunding, giving people the opportunity to invest small amounts in startups. If many do so, a significant amount comes together and the startup can implement its concept.

OG: I noticed that Seedmatch recently funded its first startup. What was it, and what is the financing structure like? A couple of large investors or many small ones?

JUS: Cosmopol was the first startup to be financed by crowdfunding through Seedmatch. Cosmopol is an online shop for special lifestyle products from around the world. We have since then also financed our second startup: Neuronation , a platform that lets you train your memory with entertaining exercises. And now our current startup has also reached the funding threshold and has thus been financed successfully. It’s BluePatent, a patent search platform that taps the expertise of the crowd. Very future-oriented. It’s still possible to invest in BluePatent.
About the financing structure: With Seedmatch, we consciously opened ourselves to a group that has not yet had the opportunity to take part in targeted investment in startups. You either needed the deep pockets of a business angel, or you could invest in a venture capital fund – a black box, as some call it. Seedmatch lets you invest a minimum of 250 euros in a startup. BluePatent currently has 122 investors and has collected 76,000 euros. So that amounts to an average investment share of 620 euros.

OG: Yesterday at the Convention Camp, I heard that “SoLoMo” (Social, Local, Mobile), the Cloud and video are the trends of the future. It sounds as though your startups are currently less of a good fit.

JUS: It’s up to individual investors to choose whether they back such future trends, put their faith in less-hyped topics, or invest in solid business models. Seedmatch lets investors put their own portfolios together. The three startups are a first step. But as I have already said/written, I personally see crowdsourcing as a field with great potential.

OG: In our CODE_n competition, we are looking for innovative ideas for the mobile web and mobile lifestyle. What would you, in the role of judge, look for in a (mobile or web) startup to put on your shortlist? Or to be accepted by Seedmatch, of course.

JUS: At Seedmatch, we are always looking for an investment story. Our aim is to inspire and convince investors of an idea with our online pitch. That encompasses innovations and unique features, as well as a comprehensible and scalable business model. But in the end, a convincing team that can implement the idea quickly and effectively needs to stand behind it.

OG: Are there specific startups that you think have good prospects, where you would recommend they apply to CODE_n?

JUS: Basically, I recommend that all startups – provided they fit the focus of the topic – take part in pitches or contests and present their business plans, and above all discuss them.

OG: What do users want, anyway? What do I need to attract them, in order to increase the reach of my mobile startup?

JUS: You can attract customers with a clear and easily communicated customer benefit. The application either needs to make the users’ lives more pleasant, or it has to help them save money.

OG: Startups can win a presence at CeBIT in a special CODE_n area. What can that mean for the startup? What would you offer as a prize?

JUS: Extensive coverage in partner media or other major media outlets is very important for any startup. Ongoing reporting covering the development of the startup, in which readers can follow its growth, is ideal. Or the startups could win a Twitter campaign that focuses attention on them…

OG: What do CODE_n startups need to ensure long-term success?

JUS: Lasting success calls for an excellent founder team, top developers, people who understand marketing, ideally a media partner that provides coverage, a business angel to act as a sparring partner for the founder team, and Seedmatch to ensure adequate capitalization and to involve the crowd as a disseminator.

OG: What would you advise CODE_n startups: a two-year sprint and selling to a major player as soon as possible, or sticking with it and building long-term business?

JUS: A quick exit is always a nice reward for building a company. But as a founder, you should not have an exit fixation, because only a profitable business is a good business. Still, keeping an eye out for interested buyers early on and presenting yourself as an acquisition candidate with above-average growth can’t hurt, of course.

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Interview

BILL LIAO: “In Europe it’s not OK to fail so people end up not taking enough chances to explore new territory.”

Oliver Gassner_October 21, 2011_8:18 AM_No Comment

XING Co-Founder Bill Liao chatted with us about Steve Jobs, Coder Dojo, and why he sticks to his waterproof Samsung mobile phone.

OG: Hi Bill, would you please introduce yourself to our readers?

Bill Liao: Hi Oliver and Hello dear readers :) Bill Liao is my name and among several things I am variously known as an entrepreneur, diplomat and author.

OG: Can you detail the entrepreneur part a little for us?

BL: Well I first became an entrepreneur at the age of 27 when I quit my day job and founded my own company teaching engineers how to sell. I then went on to become part of the team that took Davenet Limited public in Australia and have been part of 7 IPO’s total. The most recent was XING AG where I was Co-Founder alongside the Founder Lars Hinrichs in Hamburg. I am also a great believer in lean startups and have written a book on the subject called “Stone Soup – the secret recipe for making something from nothing”.

OG: What is the web or mobile innovation of the past year? What changed your personal life most?

BL: I think that the most striking innovation is a recent one where Apple has chosen to integrate Twitter into iOS5. This is the first time a social network has been integrated into an operating system. Knowing that this was coming I redoubled my Twitter efforts. At SOSventures we also invested in Storyful.com. I also created a conduit for my Google Plus content to be rebroadcast on Twitter. Storyful is an interesting innovation because it finds stories on Twitter then helps human journalists to curate and verify those stories.

OG: Is Twitter here to stay or will it eventually go the way of Altavista andMyspace?

BL: I really like Twitter and so I hope that it stays and I use it every day. I no longer use facebook every day nor Linked in nor even XING but I use gmail, g+and Twitter every day. Twitter is much faster than all the other news streams because the messages are so short. I just hope they start to deal with all the spam.

OG: Why did XING fail to make the jump to a global scale? Was it good to concentrate on DACH at some point?

BL: XING always needed to serve its core users best and the core is Germany. The problem with the early days of XING was that it was very hard to get the balance between serving members and also existing in an eco system where many corporate partners wanted to have a white label copy of XING. We were distracted by that and that meant we did not internationalize fast enough although we did do well in some other countries than DACH.

OG: Was Steve Jobs an innovator, a genius or just posessed?

BL: On the couple of occasions I met Steve he occured as pretty brusque and he had a posse of very smart people with him. I think Steve inspired devotion amongst those he worked most closely with, especially talented people like Andrew Ives and he kept these people close him, it seems. He was very good at spotting a technology somewhere and applying it to an existing problem he was trying to solve. Also he had very high standards yet a resolute eye on keeping costs down I think from Apple’s first near death experience. So very smart but not posessed.

OG: So Jobs is no role model for managers? He made his money on the back of very talented people? Or is it possible to be human and have high standards at the same time?

BL: Hey that’s a bit unfair. A great manager gains the greatest potential from the team he works with, and I am sure Steve did exactly that. Also he made far less money than the aggregate Apple shareholders most of whom are pension funds the beneficiaries of which are very happy to any return these days. I think to have high standards is a great expression of human integrity.

OG: What is the difference between a good idea and an innovation? And how do you make money from an innovation?

BL: Ideas are worthless good or otherwise invention, creativity and innovation are only worthless ideas to begin with. They need a story and they need execution to become valuable. Most of the time this involves a lot of trial and error. You make more money therefore by iteration than innovation. Just as lone heroes only win in the movies lone ideas only win in fiction as well. Innovation and inspiration someone told me are also inversely proportional to formality. I do wish Steve had iterated the ipad keyboard more though :)

OG: I understand “execution” (and I think: “iteration”, too) – can you put a little detail in the “story” part? Maybe using XING, the iPhone or Facebook as an example?

BL: A story has three parts – Crisis, Struggle, Resolution. And the best stories have a counter intuitive component. Some surprise. The pain that Steve saw was that mobile devices were fiddly to use and he knew that he could make a device that was cleaner and friendlier. The struggle was in back rooms at Apple for years to come up with the right combination for a minimum viable product to test on the market for real in a very crowded industry. The resolution was the sheer surprise and delight of using the iPhone for the first time. It was breathtaking how different and yet how intuitive it was. The iPhone brand still carries all of the story in its DNA and the surprise that a computer company could make a great mobile device still has not been beaten. The iPad is also a similar story which most people do get. The iPad’s most valuable feature is its day long battery life and yet the competitors do not see that because they focus on the wrong parts of the story.

OG: How come most online and mobile innovation seems to come from the US? Is Europe just a (talented?) copycat?

BL: I am convinced that it is because failure is far more celebrated in the US. In Europe it’s just not OK to fail so people end up not taking enough chances to explore new territory. Steve had some notable failures that would have gotten him fired many times in Europe. So Europe tends to try to refine what someone else creates. The problem is that it’s much much harder to copy something that someone else has spent a decade innovating behind closed doors because you don’t have the deep understanding of the complexity that underpins the simplicity.

OG: Well, Jobs was in fact once fired from Apple ;) – Would you dare to predict the next big thing on the web. Or easier: What should people invest in?

BL: Jobs was fired but by a CEO who came in late with big corporate ideas from a totally non innovative industry. In Europe Jobs would have been fired probably every month… Buy Apple stock it’s still cheap from any perspective. :)

Still looking to the future mobile, local, social, useful, fun are all the elements of inevitable things going forward. Investable stuff is that which an endure by the way as it’s even harder to predict what you might quickly make a buck on. So it’s best to hang in there because what the company is doing is going to be sustained.

OG: OK, let’s say: the next NEW big thing on the web or in mobile would be…? A social-local-mobile gamified something?

BL: What has mobile technology not yet solved for you? That’s the place to look. What little daily pain has not yet been catered for? I think the way we learn has huge potential. Look at www.coderdojo.com. It’s a new way to learn how to program computers and its free. No it’s not for investment of money and yet as a parent it may be a great way to invest time with your children if they are bright and inclined to learn logic.

OG: Thanks, I’ll check it out with my 11-year-old.Finally two questions about religion: iOS or Android (you partly answered this already as you seem to do this chat interview on an iPad) — Google+ or Facebook? And why?

BL: Android drives me nuts so I have an iPad but I do not have an iPhone. I have an old waterproof Samsung mobile phone because I like the long battery life.

I think Google+ is really well thought through and Facebook I find very tiring to use. So Google+ is my preference combined with Twitter.

OG: Thanks a lot and let’s hope Twitter survives in the Facebook-G+-Wars.

BL: Well, the wars are not between Facebook and g+ plus by the way. The war is being fought in the cloud. Amazon vs Apple vs Google vs Microsoft – they are the only players. Facebook is connected to Microsoft and Twitter to Apple. Will Twapple beat Amazon or Macebook who knows and its fun to watch. Amazon’s silk browser is the only real threat I see to the iPad. Stay tuned :)

OG: Actually silk made me think about getting some *pad, too. We will watch along with you. Thanks ;)

BL: Thanks :)

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Interview

GUNTER DUECK: “Steve Jobs had a kind of emotional intelligence – for machines”

Oliver Gassner_October 7, 2011_10:34 AM_Comments (4)

In his years at IBM, the thinker and author Gunter Dueck earned the nickname “Wild Duck”. We spoke to him about IBM’s innovative power, the sense and nonsense of business plans for start-ups – and about Steve Jobs, of course, who unfortunately left us far too soon.

Oliver Gassner: Hello, Mr. Dueck!

Gunter Dueck: Hello.

OG: What do you consider to be the biggest development on the web or in mobile world over the past twelve months?

GD: Well, the constantly increasing hype about the iPad, which has a lot to do with the now cheap flash storage; now all we need is LTE (Long Term Evolution) everywhere…

OG: Will LTE-enabled tablets save the publishing houses, or is that wishful thinking?

GD: I think that many people now read on-screen. As a writer, people ask me almost daily to urge publishers toward eBooks. On the other hand, people no longer read that many books; I feel that quite clearly. Digital natives prefer a snappy speech on YouTube – something new is on the rise!

OG: Was Steve Jobs innovative? Or driven? Or a “good” manager from the “Wild Duck” perspective?

GD: Jobs gave a lot of thought to what enthusiastic people would want from a computer. That they don’t crash, that they are easy to use – stuff like that. He was the only one who didn’t make any compromises in this area. He had a kind of “emotional intelligence” – but for machines! And he definitely had a talent for attraction. Most techies don’t have it. They don’t comprehend it, and regard it with suspicion (because techies are usually verrrry introverted and tend to be embarrassed in front of audiences, for example). And since they don’t consider it to be quite kosher, they can hardly copy Jobs’ success – even though they read about it every day in the paper, while shaking their heads over it.

OG: Guy Kawasaki recently said that Apple was planned as a kind of anti-IBM back in the mid-80s. They also had that Orwell commercial back then. Has IBM and the rest of the IT world learned anything since then?

GD: Tough question. People always accuse IBM of having missed out on the “consumer front”. But IBM caters to enterprise customers, and understands them very well – in that segment the company is uncompromising and even attractive! It’s very hard, if not impossible, to have several such corporate souls. The critics don’t understand that point – that it’s too hard to be everything to everyone. Our political parties in Germany are trying that right now – what can I say?

OG: In that case, it was of course appropriate for IBM to sell its consumer division to Lenovo. To come back to Steve Jobs: in his “stay hungry, stay foolish” speech, he put his success down to the fact that he failed more than once: as a college dropout, and the first time around as the CEO of Apple. Both experiences opened new perspectives for him: calligraphy, design, Pixar and Toy Story. Is it still OK these days – for managers and regular people – to explore interesting sidelines and learn from mistakes?

GD: Mistakes! Ugh, don’t use that word in my presence! You have to see innovation as an exploration of the unknown, not as something you can do correctly or incorrectly according to a timetable. Personally, I ONLY learn while exploring! Enterprises today don’t understand that, and neither do lenders who expect start-ups to submit a business plan. These days, it’s best if I stay in the basement until I’m done exploring. Not that that would work for the pharmaceutical sector and the like…

OG: I’m aware of who I put that question to, and I find it reassuring that the pharmaceutical industry doesn’t do its research in the wild. What distinguishes a good idea from true innovation?

GD: An invention is not an innovation. Leonardo already had the idea for a flying machine (albeit some time after Icarus). But so what? You not only have to perfect the technology – you also have to build airports, set up an air traffic control system, invent luggage carousels, and get the whole system to work at a ticket price of €49. Taking that initial idea and adapting it to reality is innovation, so we can define innovation as the remaining 99.9 percent of the work.

OG: What would you require from a startup instead of a business plan before you would be willing to give them 100,000 or a million euros?

GD: I would study the new entrepreneur as if it were a job interview, and I’d ask myself a hundred times whether I trust him to handle it, whether he knows what to expect, and whether he has a realistic perspective. I’d want to be sure he’s a good innovator.

OG: Your output in terms of books and lectures is impressive. And you even used to hold down a “normal” job while working on them. What do you personally need to be creative?

GD: In life, I’ve often seen things going fundamentally wrong. And that’s when I need to take a stand. I can write well, and so that’s what I do – to disseminate “my idea” or “the truth”. Now it would also be good (as an innovation) to sell those truths so that they change our lives. I’m still working on that.

OG: Would you be willing to predict what the web’s next big thing will be? In Abschied vom Homo oeconomicus, your predictions regarding mobility were spot on.

GD: And those about China, India, wage dumping, burnout and 2.0 weren’t bad either, right? And now? China’s economy will catch up with the U.S. around 2015, and that’s not very far in the future. But the exact timing doesn’t matter: China will continue to grow for a long time, and the world will experience a new phase of growth that will encourage innovation. The direction: the internet will become the world’s “operating system”, followed by growth in new and specialized fields such as medical, bio-, genetic, solar, nano-, and other technologies.

OG: And finally, two fundamental questions: iOS or Android (or Blackberry)? Facebook or Google+? And why?

GD: I have a Blackberry because it’s the only device that supports IBM mail. So I haven’t yet had a choice. My Blackberry is fairly new, and now that I’m no longer with IBM, I’ll wait until LTE devices are available and then get myself an iPhone 6 or whatever. Or an Android, we’ll see. I’m not dogmatic – I choose according to the features I need. And to answer your other question, I have the feeling that Facebook is more friendly and appreciative, while Google+ tends to be sober and critical. So the choice is a question of your personality. That’s why the front between the two is so fundamentalist. I personally feel more comfortable with Google+ because criticism and tough arguments (and rudeness, unfortunately) benefit me more than being “liked”, although that’s also nice. I’m on both platforms.

OG: Thank you for your time, Mr. Dueck.

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