Currently thinking about what the company of the future looks like, I loved reading Dave Gray’s book The Connected Company. It is an amazing read and I would like to give you a little bit of a summary and show you a few of the nuggets of information in the book. Here is the blog that is kind of part of the book.

Long gone are the days of a predictable world in which you could take your time to make decisions, manage an organization from the top, or get away with mediocre products and services. [... ]Eventually, every customer will be a connected customer. And if you want to win over connected customers, you will need to become a connected company. [...] The producer-driven economy is giving way to a new, customer-centered world in which companies will prosper by developing relationships with customers — by listening to them, adapting, and responding to their wants and needs. [...] The problem is that the organizations that generated all this wealth were not designed to listen, adapt, and respond. They were designed to create a ceaseless, one-way flow of material goods and information. Everything about them has been optimized for this one-directional arrow, and product-oriented habits are so deeply embedded in our organizational systems that it will be difficult to root them out.

This is the most important shift that is going on. Previously we could push a product into market with a good marketing strategy but with the rise of social media, we have a regained a real marketplace around products that is open to anyone, and people talk about their experiences. Faking it with a bad product does not work anymore.

The entire world moves in the direction of services and even products really become a service. The iPhone is a service for me to enjoy interacting with it to reach a goal of talking to people.

Services cannot be designed and manufactured in isolation, like products. They are co-created with customers and are interdependent with wider service networks and clusters. [...] Sure, many services require some level of efficiency, but services are not production processes. They are experiences. [...] The value of a service lies in the interactions: it’s not the end product that matters, so much as the experience. [...] To this end, a company with a service orientation cannot be designed and organized around efficiency processes. It must be designed and organized around customers and experiences. [...] Products aren’t just things. They are servants. [...] A service is different. While processes are designed to be consistent and uniform, services are co-created with customers each and every time a service is rendered. This difference is not superficial but fundamental. [...] customers introduce a massive amount of complexity into the Company Formerly Known as The Well-Oiled Machine. [...] We need to optimize not for the line of production but for the line of interaction, the front line — the edge of the organization — where our people and systems come into direct contact with customers. It’s a whole different thing.

He cites a great idea from Vanguard, who have a different methodology for customer care in the sense that you have one person responsible for solving your problem. It is based on measuring Net Promoter Score (NPS) which is being adopted by a lot of companies. What they are doing right is that if you call their support line, and the first line worker cannot fix the problem, he will not hand over to the second line support but get some expert in on the call but stay on the call. It first of all feels great for the customer and the support person learns something. Great move and oh so simple.

You need to give the people that are talking to your customers real power, and then he adds a saying: “When in doubt, go towards the fear.”

Complexity is a function of three things: the number of unique nodes (in this case, companies); the number of connections and potential connections (not just competitors but partners and other allies); and the rate of change in the system. Taken together, these three change forces create a highly volatile, uncertain environment, where advantages are short-lived and the competitive landscape is constantly shifting.

And we are in a time of increasing rate of change, of increasing creation of niches and specialisation. This again fits with looking for T-Shaped people as employees, not an old idea, but an increasingly important one. You need to open up to that complexity and reach out to your increasingly complex environment to solve real problems. And then you have the innovators dilemma and a changing environment.

If you are at the top of a fitness peak and the landscape starts changing, it can really throw you off. Companies doing the right thing at the time — making the right moves for their situation, trying to optimize their production lines to squeeze out all the costs and inefficiencies so they can run lean and mean operations — may later find that they have optimized for a business environment that no longer exists.

Two great quotes here: Jack Welch once said, “I’ve always believed that when the rate of change inside an institution becomes slower than the rate of change outside, the end is in sight. The only question is when.” Darwin said, “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.”

So you need to optimise for adaptability. Things change faster than ever, you need to integrate that into your processes.

“The purpose of a company is to do something for customers while making a profit.” If you have increasing complexity you need to establish something called Command Intent. “Command intent is a style of management used by the US Military when a situation is too complex or uncertain to give detailed orders.” Always remember that:

Profits are not a cause of success, they are an effect. They are a result. And looking at a result tells us very little about the causes that led to that result. [...] Of course, profits are important. And measurement is important. What gets measured gets done. If you only measure profits, then that’s what you’ll get. But the wrong kind of profits will kill your company. Traditional accounting tells you nothing about the quality of your relationships with customers. And happy, loyal customers are the only driver that will yield success in the long term.

Another great quote: No plan survives contact with the enemy. – Helmuth von Moltke

Law of Requisite Variety, also known as Ashby’s Law, states that any control system must be capable of variety that’s greater than or equal to the variety in the system to be controlled. [...] Taken together, agile teams, service contracts, composability, and loose coupling allow the creation of complex service clusters and networks that operate in a peer-to-peer, city-like way. In fact, these kinds of “service cities” can sometimes be so complex that the only way to manage them is to not manage them. Instead, the company focuses on creating an environment within which they can thrive.

He goes on to show what Netflix does with their Chaos Monkey and it is a truly great system.

Netflix has a kind of digital “building inspector” they call the chaos monkey. Says Cockcroft: The chaos monkey…goes around killing things, killing services. The chaos monkey is the building inspector that makes sure that you followed the planning department’s advice and you built a safe building that won’t burn down. If you build something that’s fireproof, it doesn’t matter how much fire there is. It’s fireproof. The chaos monkey is our pet arsonist.

You need to make teams small, and let them run on their own on their own vision that is part of a shared vision and roadmap, but they will need to be independent. They also need to know how other teams are doing and what is going on in the company and how their performance compares. Whole Foods does that for example.

Teams also have access to detailed financial data, like product costs, profits per store, and even one another’s compensation and bonus information. They can look up the best-selling items at other stores and compare them to their own. Employees at Whole Foods are so well informed that the SEC has designated all employees “insiders” for stock trading purposes.

WordPress also has small teams and Amazon is known to work like that, also making everyone interact with customers every two years for a few days.

Teams are limited in size to about 8–10 people. At Amazon, they call them two-pizza teams: if you can’t feed a team with two pizzas, it’s too large. What keeps the teams close to customers? Three things: Each team has a fitness function — a number they are focusing on — and organizes its work in any way it pleases to improve that number. Such data is critical for organizing autonomous pods. “Fact-based decisions overrule the hierarchy,” says Bezos. Since each team focuses on a small part of the ecosystem, the company gets closer and closer to the data, tightening up feedback loops and helping the whole system evolve faster. Teams work backwards from customer value to service or product. They start with a press release describing their intended features, and start collecting feedback before they have built a thing.

But Dave also emphasises values in this case:

When it comes to language, protocols, culture, and values, you don’t want variability, you want consistency. Having shared values is one of the best ways to ensure consistent behavior when you lack a formal hierarchy. Consistency in standards is an absolute requirement if you want to enable autonomous units.

He also talks about a trait that has recently been found with entpreneurs.

Instead, entrepreneurs focus on the capabilities they have and ask the question: “Given what is currently under my control, what kinds of things could I do in the world?” Instead of looking for money, they focus on the means they have at hand and what they can afford to lose.

I know that at a previous company this was for example the internationalization strategy. We had contacts in a certain market and the risk was smaller, … go.

The bottom line is that entrepreneurs focus on things that are within their direct control and try to make things happen. If life gives you lemons, you make lemonade. [... ]It doesn’t take a genius. What it takes is a bias for action, a willingness to work with what you’ve got, to experiment, and to engage people in collective action.

But you need the right people for this and this is especially important at the beginning, actually explained by something called preferential attachment.

Network theorist Albert-László Barabás discovered the mechanism that governs the growth of scale-free networks, called preferential attachment. New nodes don’t enter a network and connect randomly to other nodes. When a new node enters a network, it will prefer to connect with nodes that are already well-connected. Over time, highly-connected nodes continue to acquire more links than those that are less connected. The result of this growth pattern is that nodes that are rich in links continually get richer relative to their peers. [...] Developers of malls and business parks use the law of preferential attachment to their advantage. Early in the development process, they secure long-term agreements with anchor tenants, who form the initial center of gravity for the network to grow around. Developers subsidize early “seed tenants,” often losing money on the first few tenants. As more firms move in and the cluster grows, they raise the rents.

Good quote for that: “The best executive is the one who has sense enough to pick good men to do what he wants done, and self-restraint to keep from meddling with them while they do it.” — Theodore Roosevelt

Overarching subject of the book is that what is important in the future is innovation, and the best summary for what you need then comes from Jeff Bezos: “You need to set up and organize so that you can do as many experiments per unit of time as possible.”

Leadership is different in a connected company though:

In a connected company, senior leaders should be the most connected people in the company. They should spend their time listening, connecting, and empathizing. [...] One way to help people make good decisions in uncertain environments is to have a strong, constant purpose so everyone understands the job to be done, and a few clear principles that they can use to guide their decisions about “how” to do that job. [...] The purpose of management is to design, operate, and improve the system by which work gets done.

And I love the quote from Rackspace CEO Lanham Napier: “It really comes down to core values, and we don’t train our employees in core values. Their parents did that a long time ago.”

With that, I will leave you thinking about how the company of the future looks. I know I have been for some time and we are getting closer.

There are some very big proponents of not having an office and one of those is actually Matt Mullenweg, who talked a bit about this in a Pando Monthly Interview. If you want the best people, they will not all be in one city. In this video he says that you have to be where you work, and if you work on the internet, then be on the internet. He does agree that changing a company is hard, but when you start you can do it right. Only 20 of it’s 150 people actually come to the office in san francisco. He does admit or clear up though that what they save on office space, they blow on travel. If you want to know more about the history of WordPress, I suggest this article on Forbes.

Another big supporter of distributed teams is of course 37signals and David Heinemeier Hansson, as visible in this article, and more or less 50% of his tweets . They also get all the team together 3 times a year somewhere in the world to get the important face to face time. Here is a good post by an employee about how it is to work there. Github is actually also distributed. Github actually has no work hours, no managers, no deadlines and no meetings… or so they say. People probably gravitate to meet somehow, but still, the point is what the goal is. The important thing is that if you decide you do not to have office hours you need to think about how do build your company with that idea. The founders of Github have my vote solely on the point that allnighters are a bad idea. Happy people are more productive, get more good people in and are just happier. So the goal is to get the best work out of your employees. The have hack houses, where they get teams together for a month. And one important item is that their employees have kids and you need to support that. Family friendly I can also agree with. They also have something very important if you are distributed, a central dashboard showing you where people are.

They do everything over chat… even if they are in the same room. Fun Here is a good article by an employee from his view. They are actually working similar to Valve (See the Valve Handbook), because everyone decides themselves what they want to do. You need a clear vision for that of course. But don’t you need that anyway? And you need people to convince other people about projects. But, it only works in a product company he believes as you have that focus on something and can focus on long term. Being profitable from the start helps of course.

As another side of the coin I do agree with Johanna Rothman though in that you will need an office at home if you work from home. Then again, a coworking space close by has the same effect if you are just not 10km bit 200km from the head office. And this is not only for developers, why aren’t your sales people where their customers are instead of where the office is. Her idea of an office from that article really fits with my general ideas at the moment of using things like Startplatz as an office. They are now expanding and adding a lot more meeting rooms and a lot more small office spaces. The place is inspiring and I have a beautiful space, reception, coffee, meeting rooms, team rooms, phone rooms, parking, great location and much more. And then I want that in different places possible. In the new part I will actually have a small 3 people office that can be locked and we will just distribute outward into the open spaces available.

And as for the communication problem, I touched on it above, but Justin Carmony has a great post on it. In a nutshell, you need to change your entire company to be distributed. The communication channels need to be setup so that communication happens asynchronously and is logged somewhere. I am not fond of the idea of having to go all in, but it does have a point. That’s why Github chats over everything.

Some good tips for going distributed are here, and important to note is that people will need to report on what they are doing and did.

I am currently envisioning a system that facilitates distributed teams and am actually wondering if there is nothing out there already. I would like to have something where people show where they are, a chatroom where everybody hangs out, always available hangout for face to face chats, integrated task management with an automatic logs of things you have been doing visible to all, distributed but clear places to meet each other with an easy way to plan ahead (I’ll go to X tomorrow, who is joining?).

Oh, and one more thing. Are there virtual Nerf guns?

What do you think?

It is clear by now that with everyone who uses the internet, with every minute you use it more, Google wins, and they have the data to prove it. When a big telco asks if you want to have Gbit Internet for $2000 a month, most will say no, but for $50… sure. That is not something that the big telcos want though.

But let’s do a calculation. You are online 24 hours a week, 100 hours a month on average. 21% of that time is spent searching, of which most if not all is Google anyway. This means that you are searching for 20 hours a month. In 2011, Google had a billion unique users a month, so let’s presume they have 2 billion now. They also have 5.6 billion adimpressions per day on search, on average i’d guess 2 ad impressions per search, so 90 billion searches a month. Each user does 45 searches per month. On average 65% of the clicks are paid and I presume that there are three clicks per search on average. Means 135 clicks per month with 90 of those being paid, at $0.35 on average. That’s something around $30 per month. That’s actually close to the $43 per user cited on Motley Fool.

With Google Fiber they have people watch movies online, be faster, be able to do more in the same time, and so on. Can you get that time from an average of 100 hours per month, to 150 hours per month, which is just 5 hours and includes TV. That would mean an extra $20 that Google will make. Remember this is an average, you just get a lot of people from a few minutes a day. And it is a lot more complicated than that.

But, what becomes visible is that Google will possibly make something like $20 per user in Ads without getting anything for the pipe.

This makes it very very interesting for Google and is a revenue stream that the telcos cannot match. And it does not factor in the lockin value, and other things.

The telcos better beware.

(P.S.: and this is just a thought experiment and probably wrong in different points but also probably not too far off )

Here are a few items. Instawallet has folded after a hack at Bitcoin Central, who should themselves be back online in 48 hours, while Instawallet, a simple URL based wallet, might never come back. It will be interesting to see this unfold.

Mtgox is experiencing a major DDOS attack. They are fighting back and have a good post up.

There is a great post on Medium by Felix Salmon that you should read.

See this part:

On a good day, at the top of the bubble, the trading volume in bitcoins can be more than $20 million. But by the standards of global currency markets, those kind of figures aren’t even a rounding error. The foreign exchange markets see volume of $4 trillion per day. That’s 200,000 times greater than what we’re seeing in the bitcoin market, and it happens on a regular, day-in and day-out basis.

It really says what I said but in better words, unless bitcoins go up A LOT it won’t allow for speculation, hence no liquidity, hence no stability. It needs to grow a lot to really become a currency because otherwise there is too much fluctuation or rather a deflation. Of course he is saying that it will never work as a deflation means that you will not spend your money as it will be worth more tomorrow. He thinks it can’t work, I am still not sure but I agree here:

But whatever it looks like, in the end, we can be sure of one thing: it will owe a very large debt to Satoshi Nakamoto and his audacious attempt to invent a whole new currency. Bitcoin isn’t the future. But it has helped to light the way ahead.

Then there is a great post on Forbes to read that goes on the general discussion on what a currency has to be, which is an answer to this one by Denninger. Great reads.

Food for thought. All in all, Bitcoins need to appreciate in value and liquidity needs to rise for them to succeed. Will this happen?

A much more general use of the word currency is anything that is used in any circumstances, as a medium of exchange. In this use, “currency” is a synonym for the concept of money.

This comes from Wikipedia’s definition of a currency and it fits to Bitcoin, which is where this post could end. But that would be a boring post and not help you much, so lets go a bit deeper. For a history lesson search for Crypto-Currency – Bitcoin and its mysterious inventor, a great article.

When Nic Brisbourne wrote about it in March, the total circulation of Bitcoin was $400m and as I write this it is well over a billion USD! More and more people want in and understand the nature of the system or at least trust it more. They are trusting into a currency, a means to exchange value, that is not connected to any state, that nobody controls, that is based on cryptography and code alone.

But VCs are starting to notice as visible in investments in Coinbase, Adam Drapers Bitcoin focus, as well as his father Tim Draper talking about it in a recent appearance on Stanford’s Entrepreneurial Thoughtleader Series.

Some argue that the Cyprus problem builds distrust in state controlled currencies and that is one of the reasons the current interest in Bitcoin is so high. It is inherently uncontrollable unless it is forbidden but you can’t just forbid a billion USD. But if you look at the Coinbase security procedure, it is that they only have a small % of bitcoins on their servers. The rest is backed up on thumb drives. What? Backed up currency? Yep, same as real bills, Bitcoins can actually be printed out on a slip of paper and put in a ring binder. You can even look into other people’s wallets if you know their wallet id. Here is one of mine for example, actually currently hosted on one of the many Bitcoin sites out there. This again means that you will want to have several wallets to not tell everyone who you exchange bitcoins with how much money you have.

But it brings us to an interesting piece with bitcoins. It is both very anonymous in that you can create a wallet and put bitcoins in there. If they come from another anonymous source, e.g. Cash or another anonymous Bitcoin address, then nobody knows whom that money belongs to, but they do know how much money is in the wallet if they know the wallet id. The big exchanges require you to authenticate yourself if you really want to deal in more than a few USD and they need to do that to loose the image of facilitating money laundry. This will be needed to build serious trust and build a stable currency that the nation stations cannot move against.

But can the current run up in value continue? My last transaction from some 14 days ago has gone up in value almost 100%. But even the geek in me couldn’t yet trust serious money towards Bitcoin. On the other side, what good is a worldwide currency that only holds $1b in value? In 2010 there were over 800 billion EUR bills and coins in circulation. Based on this PDF by the ECB I presume 2015 we will hit 1 trillion EURs in circulation. Based on the Statistical Data Warehouse of the ECB, 2010 saw roughly 4.5 trillion EURs in salaries. And Bitcoin is global, making 1 billion USD not enough value for global transactions, actually approaching 2 billion as we speak.

This will seriously be something to watch. Looking forward to your thoughts.

I started the day with Marc Kley from the Cologne University, responsible for “Transfer” … making real startups out of ideas in the university. He is also handling the HGNC and for today explained to me a little bit the structure of the university and the startup ecosystem there. This 9:30 to 10:00 and from then until 12:30 Marc had scheduled 30 minute talks with 5 Startups from the University. I will take a bit more time to possibly go deeper into them but my expectations were exceeded. I learned about the food industry and innovations in data tagging, got to know more about forestry and drones, helped further develop an interesting recruiting idea, discussed risk related graphdb topics and brainstormed the connection of ecommerce and local stores. Extreme fun and I am looking forward to the next one.

Then I ran and got to my next meeting where I learned more than I expected about the energie and smarthome market. I will need to go through my long notes to get that one down to paper. And with that discussion still eating away in my head, I ended up talking about innovation with somebody with lots of experience in that space.

I think I now need a weekend to really reorder my braincells. At the moment I have high hopes that next week will be a bit more focussed on order instead of more chaos.

But back to the subject at hand. The KOMED Hall was packed and after a Startplatz Intro by Matthias, Gunter Dueck came to the stage and started well. Lots of anecdotes, the stuff he is good at. I actually put a few things into tweets which I will list here.

First learning from @wilddueck – you always say 15% improvement as 10% is not enough and 20% sounds pretentious. Always 15. Always

— Oliver Thylmann (@othylmann) March 18, 2013

He really said that this was his greatest learning after 5 years.

Business plan = forced lie for the bank. #dueckcgn — Oliver Thylmann (@othylmann) March 18, 2013

Ok, that one is obvious and often said, but needs repeating. You still need to make a plan by the way as it helps you think, but then you can put it away.

First you think a bit, at the end you have meetings in the middle is all about shit, … shit and you need to want that. #dueckcgn — Oliver Thylmann (@othylmann) March 18, 2013

It’s really looking at Crossing the Chasm a little bit differently, but he emphasised that this middle part needs the entrepreneurs that will be willing to go through these hard times. He is not one of them by the way. He repeated that often.

As a startup think of all your costs as having an interest of 40%. Puts things in perspective. #dueckcgn

— Oliver Thylmann (@othylmann) March 18, 2013

This was actually very valuable as it is so simple. It was told to him by somebody that listed a lot of startups at the NASDAQ and others. It is just that a VC knows that 10% of his investments will have to pay for the entire portfolio more or less. So they need to big bets. Making 100 million EURs on a 10 million EUR investment just makes you break even. To understand this portion from the getgo and build the really big ones, always think that each cost has a 40% interest. It’s really scary, but a good frame of reference. Also Gunter Dueck said that there really only is a hockeystick. All other graphs for company growths are meaningless and not really existent in terms of breakthrough products, and that what innovation is about.

In a big comp you need a high sponsor to be able to fight against the inherent immune system of the company that WILL fight you. #dueckcgn

— Oliver Thylmann (@othylmann) March 18, 2013

This was agreed upon by many. We actually had an entire team doing those fights for us at Adcloud, and they did a great job. But in the end you need a sponsor at the top. And btw, this is not something that is bad or good or anything, it is just like this. There are budgets, and sales people, and stories, and whatnot inside a company that all naturally is against rocking the boat. This makes it really hard.

Der Berater hält die Hoffnung aufrecht so lange das Opfer zahlungsfähig ist. #dueckcgn — Oliver Thylmann (@othylmann) March 18, 2013

Well put.

Consultants are there to get you from a 5 to a 4- or 4+, not higher, as then you stop having a job. A startup needs a 1 or close. #dueckcgn — Oliver Thylmann (@othylmann) March 18, 2013

This again is really important and really true. Same as saying that you need to be orders of a magnitude better. I actually don’t even think consultants CAN get you to a 2+.

Then to end this one slide of what you really have to do for innovation.

What you really have to do for innovation. #dueckcgn @ KOMED instagr.am/p/XAlA7QMuMw/

— Oliver Thylmann (@othylmann) March 18, 2013

A few words on those. Agile is becoming a buzzword but really looking at the core values of agile, and lean for that matter, leads to a change in how you really work. This is especially hard for established players that have clear data on their old business on what to do next, that do not exist in the world we are in today, especially in younger companies. And you need an entrepreneurial spirit and you need risk taking. I wondered recently if a team inside a big company could say that they will forgo 6 months salary for a matching investment of e.g. 5 or 10 times the salary they give up and get a share in the business. This would be a lot more startup like. You have pain on the founder side then, but by making sure that they can have their job back after 6 months you allow them to take risks.

I will leave you at that and let you think for yourselves. It is a really tough subject I am thinking more and more about.

Finance Markets and Debt had among other Professor Dr. Bert Rürup and Professor Dr. Hörisch (I’ll listen to him any time!), which was again an amazing discussion moving along the line of whether money is not really a synonym of trust and what that entails. The day ended on the note of Moral in Business with Dr. Wagenknecht from Die Linke (left wing party) who held up very well with members from banking and stocks to say the least. I really have to give it to her, chapeau. While the idea of a 100% inheritance tax on anything above 1 million EURs was laughed at, the idea of giving anything above the value of 1 million of a company that is inherited to a foundation of all the workers, didn’t get a lot of replies because it is for harder to argue against. Then again, that the US as a whole can make better decisions on giving away Bill Gates money instead of the man himself is laughable, sorry.

Then we had a great discussion on startups in the evening and I finished up talking with Ulf S. Baecker and Bjoern Herrmann from Startup Genome, whom I met for the first time in person after having invested in 2012. I actually shared a room with both of them at the Mannheimer Jugendherberge, which was a blast. Amazing place directly at the water in a park, with very nice rooms. As a pointer, your key cards also work at the lockers … but only at one specific one and you need to rub it right of the little nob. Just sayin’

Next up on Saturday Morning was our Startup Panel on Resources moderated by Ulf and together with Bjoern, Dr. (yes ) Dominik Matyka from plista, and Robert Rudnik from Coffee Circle. We were then also joined by a Student that Ulf grabbed out of the audience, great move to be exact. We actually were a bit radical in our views but you are a startup founder for a reason. Stuff like not doing it for money, competing for time, calling it human assets instead of human resources (your employees are leveraged not used up) and the death of consulting and big companies were just some of the subjects we talked about. Judging by this comment on facebook, it seems to have worked well. I at least have to say that it was huge fun.

Mehr Impressionen vom Mannheim Forum gibt es auf Facebook (daher auch das Foto in diesem Post). Ich freue mich auf das nächste mal.

For example: Big companies were built to use efficiencies that belonged to big companies, but these efficiencies are no longer the most important thing out there. Smaller companies now have something that is really important: less need to sync with different people. The decision groups are smaller and this is something that is very hard for bigger companies to do. The thesis is actually supported by research into where the job creation is happening and it is more of the SMBs than the big ones. 

Let’s see how the day continues.

Today, which marks my first day no longer at Adcloud, I started off with being a mentor at Startupbootcamp Open Pitch Day Cologne. What a great way to start off and thank you Alex for having me.

Also good to see Christian from Venista Ventures again and meet to meet Norman, innovator at Vodafone, for the first time. Looking forward to some good chats in the future. Now I somehow need to find out how I can get the inside view on the future of mobility from Norman. I am all in for an Idea Generation Workshop like I did with Nokia several years ago.

But back to the important point, the Startups. Diverse crowd to say the least. We started off with Marijan from Fizeau Ads, actually pretty similar to The DECK, with the added benefit to a bit more tech. He came over from Macedonia by car because he does not like to fly. 16 hours.

Nothing that will become huge in my mind, but it can become a good business with dedicated customers and partners. And I have to give it to Marijan, he kept up well in light of my grilling. After a bit of back and forth, it seems that they also built different RTB modules. The team can probably be thrown into an accelerator like SBC without idea and end up with something great.

Up next was Jan Hase from Scanny, a backend platform about rewards and points (in the abstractest case) and a first app in Scanny that allows you to get points by scanning products in a supermarket. Actually a really nice idea as a Haribo can send you around to get point by scanning their new product. Once you hold the product in your hand, you are a lot more likely to also buy it.

Then we went on to football with Stefan Lochner presenting his new startup that is trying to bring better game mechanics to the online football games, other sports coming in the future. He has already made inroads with some players who want to support the platform, which is what makes this really interesting.

Last but by far not least was Labbler. Slava, one of the founders came over from Russia to present and with their small team they really built something impressive. Now the question becomes if they will get traction. I will leave it to The Next Web to explain it all. You can also sign up right now. I’d say, to be watched.

All in all a great event taking place at Osborne Clark, thank you for hosting us. I am looking forward to the next event.