JanBeckers.com

Klaus-Martin Meyer has interviewed me about Absolventa.de and Entrepreneurship:

Interview-Blog

After I left San Francisco last week I stay for a short while in New York, before I move back to Germany next week. The city is beautyful and it`s great fun living here. I spend my days mostly watching the typical tourist attractions, celebrating the clubs, meeting locals and inhaling the city spirit by meeting some locals. I also met some nice entrepreneurs with roots in Austria and Singapur…

The picture was taken at the Top of Rockefeller Tower with the Central Park in the background.

I just posted an interview with Loic Le Meur on Gruenderszene.de.

Loics friendly greeting to European entrepreneurs: “Don`t do Copycats. That`s no good advertising for Europe.”

Some weeks ago Felix Haas, CEO of Amiando.com visited me for some days while he joined a conference in the valley. Some years ago he made his pilot license here in the valley while he studied at Stanford. So we went to the Palo Alto Flight Base and rent a nice small Cessna to fly over the bay area. We flew over the headquarters of Google and Co. and had a lot of fun especially when I took over the control of the machine…

The whole Area is pretty nice but for me San Francisco is definitely the best place around…

Tuesday night I spend with Manuel and Philipp, founders of Spickmich.de, at some web2.0-expo after parties. We started our tour at the office-party of six apart where hey had arranged a beautiful mini golf course - built mainly from macbooks and thinkpads…

Maybe that`s the reason why the vc-rounds tend to be a little bit larger in the valley

Anyway we had a lot of fun at the parties of Six Apart, Yahoo and Mashable…

Today our team in Berlin announced that Absolventa.de reached more than 17.000 Registrations within 18 days of closed-beta. As the whole amount of graduates per year is only 200.000 we could never have expected to grow that fast. The number of employers is now 155 and includes 29 of the 50 largest hiring companies in Germany. That are about 50 more within the last 3 weeks and means our sales force akquires about 4-5 new companies each work day. Next task to complete our launch is to finish the matching functions and start the official search in the next days or weeks. Our engineers are already working day and night on it. When looking at my Skype contacts online status it seems that our office in Berlin is open 24h… Anyway I`m very happy to be (non-executive) member of this great team!

On Gruenderszene.de, which is Lukasz Gadowskisgerman blog about entrepreneurship, I wrote a longer analysis on the probability of start-up success and on the different factors of risk which can lead to start-up failure. Most important risk factors are in my eyes:

1. Risk of market entry barriers

2. Risk of (lack in ) resources

3. Risk of the idea (including technology and market risc)

4. Competition risk

5. Team risk

Depending on the business idea, risks in law and economics could also play an important role.

Anyway  it is incredibly important to screen the risks of potential business ideas very thoughtful.  All different kinds of risk should be evaluated separately. A failure of unsuccessful web2.0 start-ups is often that they underestimate the amount of entry barriers (especially network effects). If your (potential) business includes network effects you should estimate the necessary critical mass and calculate if your resources are enough to jump over this barrier. 1 day of detailed risk analysis could save you a lot of struggle later with adapting the business or even prevent you from spending some years of your life on the wrong idea…

Certainly there is not the one “right” formula that will guarantee success as entrepreneur. But there are some important factors which will define a large part of the long term outcome as entrepreneur. For sure every entrepreneur has already his implicit understanding of these factors. But sometimes this intuitive feeling will be to unclear to help to make the right decisions. So I believe it is useful to have a simple, explicit model of the key drivers that will effect the outcome as entrepreneur.

First I`m going to describe the key drivers to give you a better understanding which aspects this factors include in my model. After that I give examples how all this drivers are connected among each other. Last I will put them into a little formula.

- Knowledge:

Entrepreneurial knowledge includes all kinds of information about technologies, markets, economies, leadership and everything else that is needed to found successful Start-ups. Depending on your role in a venture, the targeted market, etc. your knowledge will develop in different directions. To make the right decisions for your entrepreneurial career it is important to differentiate between specific knowledge and general knowledge. The worth of specific knowledge will decrease much in worth after starting a new venture in a different market. The worth of general knowledge (How to start a company…, How to negotiate…) will not decrease that much. One the other side general knowledge is less scarce and will therefore not be able to differentiate you.

- Talent

The factor “talent” includes in my model all (given or acquired) abilities to deal with the entrepreneurial challenges. That could e.g. be skills in communicating, opportunity recognition, negotiation or just raw intelligence.
- Motivation

Motivation describes the level of effort that you are willing to invest to reach your entrepreneurial goals.

- Network

The entrepreneurs network consists of all (strong or weak) ties to potential partners.

- Reputation

Reputation is the amount of track record, talent, trustworthiness and reliability that other (especially potential partners) attribute to you. This reputation may be anchored in your network, but can also be accessed by screening you within the Internet (Google) or other sources.

- (other) Resources e.g. money

Beyond your talent, network and knowledge there are also other resources like money or (potential) media power which ownership (or access without ownership) will have influence on your entrepreneurial success.

Certainly, not a single of this drivers will appear ”new”. To be useful the relationship between the factors has to be analyzed. If you think about the connections between the factors it comes clear that all factors are related very strong among each others. I will point this out by giving you some examples:

- Talent influences the amount and depth of knowledge that you will be able to acquire.

- A good reputation as smart, trust- and helpful entrepreneur will help to build and maintain your personal network.

- Reputation relies on your past success and integer behaviour as well as your ability to communicate that. Therefore it is correlated with your general motivation and talent (through your past success) as well as your talent to communicate this success and integer behaviour.

- The amount of knowledge that you acquire grows with the worth of your network.

- The more resources you have, the better you can leverage the other factors. If you are CEO of a company with small resources, your work (and outcome) will have less influence than if you are CEO of a company with large resources.
- People will refuse to give you access to sensitive knowledge if you don`t have a good reputation as trustworthy person. So knowledge and reputation are also connected.

To be continued…

It is obvious that the input factors are strongly connected among each others. A model could reflect that by multiplying the factors. For sure not all factors will have an equal impact on the outcome. The importance of the factors could be modeled by giving them different exponents which raise or lower the factors influence on the final outcome. Depending on the role that you take as entrepreneur the exponents (and so the relative importance of the factors) will vary.

 After all a basic formula for personal entrepreneurial success could look like the following:

A = constant term

talent,knowledge, motivation, network, reputation, other resources = factors (key drivers of the outcome)

X1,…X6 = exponents of the factors

entrepreneurial outcome = A * talent^X1 * knowledge^X2 * motivation^X3 * network^X4 * reputation^X5 * other resources^X6

So for what insights could this very simplified and theoretical stuff could be useful? The most important thing you can draw from this model is that you have to increase your level of input factors simultaneously to get the best possible outcome as entrepreneur. Don`t focus only on a few factors to work on. For example the best knowledge about markets is not much worth if you don`t have the network to get access to this markets. To realize your full personal potential as entrepreneur in the long term you have to estimate which importance the single factors have within your role as entrepreneur. After that you can put the optimal amount of effort in improving every factor. As a consequence this means you are working with a personal long-term strategy as entrepreneur instead of working only on the daily routine of your current venture.

 At the moment this model is really very basic and a lot of aspects could be added. So share your minds and add your viewpoints!

After the launch of Absolventa.de hit the best expectations we are in urgent search for further Ruby-on-Rails-Rockstars as employees (or maybe also freelancer) to expand our service. Contact me if you like to join a great team in Berlin-Mitte!

Greetings from Mexico!

Today was a very exciting moment for our german E-Recruiting-Start-up Absolventa.de. After a long night of work we went live at 5 a.m. (german time). I´m very proud of the team in Berlin which did a great job the last months and acquired 100 companies such as BWM, Daimler, and Boston Consulting as early clients. At the moment we are still in closed-beta, but you may have a look inside if you enter the code “jan”. During the next weeks we will open the site for a larger audience and start our marketing campaign at StudiVZ.net.

I´ll let you know about the further progress of Absolventa.de and continue to list some blog-responses (in german) here:

Deutsche-Startups.de

Internetboom.de

NicoZorn.com

Gruenderszene.de
Thinkomat.de

Bloghure.de