Category: 1.6 Software Startups
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Wed Nov 19: At Offener IT Gipfel and Hochsprung Award
Today, I was in two places at once. I participated in the Offener IT Gipfel of Germany’s green party where I had been invited to give a talk on open source and to participate in a panel moderated by a member of the German national parliament. (Local copy.) I was also present at the Hochsprung…
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Student Startup Passion vs. Market Potential
As part of being a professor, I’m trying to motivate student startups. Here, I want to talk about student startups coming out of a Master’s program. These are different from startups coming out of my research lab, which are based on work with my Ph.D. students. Master student startups are typically smaller, not based on…
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Founders vs. Success vs. Home-runs
A student of mine pointed me to this article about who founds companies. It is a well-known fact (or at least lore as I have no reference at hand) that the highest success rate as a founder is with those around age 40 (38 according to the article). At that age, a founder has worked…
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Favorite Story of Student Entrepreneur Ageism
I teach a course on software product management where I sometimes cross over into startup-land. During a recent class, I showed students a rara-talk by a VC, who was trying to convince them to become entrepreneurs. So I asked the class: Statistically speaking, a 40-year old entrepreneur is much more likely to succeed than a…
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Where to Focus a University Incubator
Fueled by the success of Silicon Valley startups and other success stories, there probably isn’t a single university today which would not like to foster startups from their student ranks. There is a lot to be said about how to do that, but before all operational decisions, a university incubator needs to know where to…
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The Wall Street Journal and Berlin Reporting
The Wall Street Journal provides a nice infographic on the “billion dollar club“, that is, startups of valuation $1B or above. In Europe, the WSJ counts six >$1B startups, of which one is in Amsterdam (Adyen), one is in Stockholm (Spotify) and two are in London (Powa, Shazam) and Berlin (Delivery Hero, Home24). In addition,…