A Perspective on Location Services, Mobile Entrepreneurship & Startup Life

From the Centralway website, an investment company focusing on Internet businesses.

Centralway participates in companies based on the following investment criteria:

• … companies in the Internet sector
• … with clear, short, simple business models
• … which already have a management team
• … which already hold a top position (1st or 2nd place)
• … with a positive cash flow
• … with clearly recognizable growth and profit potentials
• … which already have a “proof of concept”
• … which are not in a “turn-around” situation
• … in which no other strategic investors or financial institutions hold shares

5 contradicts 7 in my opinion, having a positive cash flow with a proof of concept? Early stage investment or not? It goes along the lines of venture capital companies becoming more conservative and move away from the inital idea of taking more risk to support innovations. Business angels are much more interesting for internet startups these days.

Centralway recently set up a 10 million iPhone fund, worth reading about.

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.