SubscribeRecap IdeaLab 2007 at the WHU Vallendar
Published by cornelius on Tuesday, November 20th, 2007 in Entrepreneurship.Tags: german startups, idealab, idealab2007, vc, venture capital, whu vallendar
The last weekend I attended the IdeaLab 2007, which is organized by students of the WHU Vallendar, one of the leading German private business schools. They invited young entrepreneurs and those interested in startups and entrepreneurship. The agenda was filled with several presentations of well-known speakers, from the venture capitalist to the successful serial entrepreneur. There were also many interesting startup presentations. I will add some links at the end of this post for those interested.
The headline of the event was “Founders wave?!” (German: Gründerwelle?!) and thus there has been a panel discussion if we have a new bubble in the Internet sector in Germany. The answer was mainly that there is no bubble but in some sectors there are too many startups jumping on exactly the same business ideas, e.g. social networks for athletes or any other niche community. The consensus was, as long as not all of these companies get high fundings there won’t be serious economical problems. Inspired by the success and the successful exits of companies like StudiVZ (the German Facebook), or Xing (a LinkedIn competitor) the Internet is still in the interest of many young tech savvy people and thus the growth in the number of startups in this sector was naturally but is nothing concerning in comparison to New Economy times. The number of newly founded companies (relative to last year) is only growing in the Internet sector in Germany, unfortunately.
Some of the speakers:
Lukasz Gadowski Stefan Rizor Mountain Partners Michael Schwetje Oliver Jung (Adinvest) Oliver Samwer Holtzbrinck High Tech Gründerfonds Wellington PayPal Christian Vollmann (Magic Internet) Ehssan Dariani Founderslink Partech
Presented Startups:
- Rudi Rockt! The best way to socialize while cooking and eating.
- Amiando Event invitations, management and ticketing.
- NetMoms Mother community
- TripMonkey Service to share private accommodations
- Brainsparent A platform for socially and environmentally friendly clothing companies.
- Doktus Online document management
- Jobleads Employee search through personal recommendations.
- Smava Private credits between users.
- Esanum Closed doctor community
- Weblin 3D community avatars
- netzathleten Community for athletes
Thanks to the students of the WHU Vallendar for this great event and the perfect organization and the tasty food. Some advice for the next time, maybe reduce the number of presentations and leave more space for questions and open discussions after each talk.
In the next days or better weeks I will write some more posts about this event and with a focus on more specific presentations and topics. For example, impressions about the venture capital market and the background story of StudiVZ. The founder of StudiVZ, Ehssan Dariani, gave an enjoyable presentation that is worth writing about.
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