APuschilov

The issue with pitch decks is that they represent only the legible part of the fundraising process. The promise of a good pitch deck is that it gets you funded. However, this is far from the truth.

The truth is that the biggest early-ish rounds (pre Series B) were not closed because of the pitch deck, but despite of it.

Actually, the earlier the round the less important does the pitch deck become.

It's the illegible part, that so few talk about and that can't be shared that is the main driver. It's the social reality surrounding the founders and the round. It's the whisper and rumors inside the investor community, who makes the intro, the medium of the intro (phone or email) and many other small things.

A fantastic description of how the process of how founders should run their companies. Being a CEO myself, I wish I'd run into this article earlier, as I strongly believe in instilling autonomy and responsibility in my team as well as that best decisions evolve when I involve the whole team.

very good points! i'm moving back into this field again. would you be available for a thought exchange?

Up up and beyond.

Hi Tim, I'd love to meet for a chat tomorrow. Drop me a line, to alex-at-limitedcraft.com. During the day I'm with Rocket in Mitte (Friedrichstraße).

if that's where we're going here, i might as well post this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDScp1JCFHM

I couldn't agree more: It's either no clear way to monetize or very hard to no access, such as the healthcare market. In healthcare everybody agrees that it is "ripe" for disruption and that to do well you need to do good. But there's just no access to it, with all the bureaucracy. This implies that investment need is high and iteration periods are long. (Note: I'm from Germany. But while the US system is much more open than over here, it also super tough in the US to launch a "meaningful" (read: not a fitness/recreational) healthcare business.)

I totally agree. Writing stuff down is good, but coming up with a solution to a problem in bed or actually while you're asleep is even better.

At least in my personal case, I've solved the hardest problems while being asleep.

Best of luck! Maybe you should post into the Berlin Startups group on Facebook, too (https://www.facebook.com/groups/159595270791268/). It's pretty active.

Puh...I'm not sure if I like that. Yes for skimming a text it might be useful, but then why not just write a very good description/summary at the top or bullet-point conclusion at the bottom.

Also the first sentence of a paragraph should provide a summary of the following paragraph if following good writing guidelines (kinda http://www.une.edu.au/tlc/aso/students/factsheets/paragraph....)

On the other hand, collapsible blog posts could help the writer. For instance after writing a blog post I would love if in iAWriter or WriteMonkey I could collapse all the paragraphs to just their respective first sentence. If the collapsed text would still bring my argument across I did a good job, if not I'd have to rework it.

I've just discovered this, what the Economist calls, "videographic". As expected it's been produced quite well and communicates its topic, the presidential race, quite clearly while backing it up with data. Usually, I would expect this to be published in the form of an infographic. However, after watching it I am convinced that the video format is even more accessible. Therefore, my question to the community: Do you guys think we will see more videographics and less infographics in the future?

Certainly videographics now are much smaller than infographics (as judged by Google search results 280k vs 30m)

that's a great solution. it would be also quite great if you would tell us what these (to us) unknown parameters mean :)

thanks for this :(

Yes, you can find a bunch of Greasemonkey scripts for Google and Youtube doing exactly this. An alternative might be NoCrap, which sounds like a useful thing (I have to admit that I haven't used it though) http://www.ghacks.net/2012/01/17/nocrap-removes-annoyances-f...

What i found helpful when thinking about some types of ideas (e-commerce) is looking at reviews of existing businesses to discover all sorts of things. I've also written it down: http://ifigure.de/quick-idea-validation-using-reviews-59.htm...

Given that Google is not about search anymore but about Google all those acquisitions make sense. Now Google totally controls the biggest assets online (not counting facebook). They could also know as much now as they would like to know about you to give them, data-wise, more than just a controlling position online. So the seperate entities don't even have to be profitable if they generate enough data exhaust for the mothership (what they clearly do).

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The biggest and best deed of the Samwer brothers was to make Internet entrepreneurship big in Germany. Before they sold Alando back in the day to ebay and later exited Yamba only few people regarded entrepreneurship as a viable career path. It was mostly due to their success that people started following their example. Nowadays, whenever you read about a startup being funded in Berlin chances are that both the CEO and her company's seed investors were at one point working for Rocket Internet, e.g. Wooga.