2018 is gone – what to expect for 2019? Letter from CEO Nicolai Schaettgen

News 1. January 2019.

2018 is gone – what to expect for 2019?

We are in our 4th year, are present in >20 countries and achieved what most initially called “stupid”: to live off our business model. We are proud and thus allow ourselves to join in the sheer unlimited number of outlooks 2019. Here comes our very personal one.

2019 is dedicated to “Less is more” – Why that? 

We are doing too much… Opportunities are turning up and each one is eating up a few of our resources leading to a mismatch between needed and actual attention. Thereby our vision is simple: “Make startup-corporate collaboration simple and successful” – as such, we will much more diligently focus on activities leading us to that vision and – more importantly – stop activities (very painful…).

Where will our bets be placed?

1. Make our existing core more efficient

In 2018 we managed to significantly strengthen our team and welcome many senior resources (Attila Keszeg, Amine Tazi, Allison Amber, Daniel Heller, Alireza Abdolali, Arkadiusz Andrzejewski, Chris Morgan, Claudio Staub, Karl Peter Nöstler, Niko Schweitzer, Pascal Hohman, Stefanos Anastasiou, Liza Semenova, Anastasia Rastorgina, Munaa AlTamini, Francesca Montanar, Björn Schättgen). In 2019 we will focus on bringing this potential to the market: we know what needs to be done, now we need to get better at it.

2. Be more creative in the collaboration models with our startup partners

All our startup partners (currently we are working with nine portfolio companies) are confirming the value which we are creating directly and indirectly. Still, we feel we can do more and bring more value to the startup world to help to navigate through the corporate jungle. We are already working on new engagement models to enable the impact of our work to spread.

3. Strengthen and reinvent the way we work with our corporate partners

We have had interactions with >300 corporations in 2018 (!!!) – in reality we have done business with only a fraction of those, which means that we need to qualify better the business potential.

Given where we are and where we are heading, we are looking positively into 2019. Thank you all for joining us.

 

Sincerely grateful,

Nicolai Schaettgen

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