Week 12: Celebrations, asynchronous communication, spring, talking about it

An intense work week

I was back in the office after a few days off last week. And I worked with and on a lot of topics, I cannot talk about yet. This is not a cliffhanger; it is the reality that many things are just unshareable because of confidentiality. They need some time and abstraction until they become meaningful and shareable.

Celebrations and normality

Luckily the companies we invest in can raise financing rounds. This week, we had a video celebration with one of them. We usually are not too good at celebrating, but my colleagues and the team felt like having a video meeting to celebrate the financing round's closing. While being on the call with all, I remembered how we did these impromptu celebrations in earlier days when the startups and we were all together in our office. We have not had this normality for a year now. And we would have way more celebrations than before because we have made so many (so far so) good investments. But to be honest, the fact that we do not have our office led us to invest in companies who actually are not in Berlin, and I think the celebration we had would have been virtual anyway since the company is nearly 1,000km away from Berlin.

But I still cannot wait to celebrate in person again.

Asynchronous communication

One of the big challenges of life is how to organize your time. I personally am facing the challenge that there are luckily more things I could do than I will ever be able to do. So prioritization is something essential in my life. But it is not something that gives me too much energy. I like the prioritizing moments I have every day and multiple times per week, but this usually involves quite a lot of “no” saying.

Although I know that this has to happen and that a clear focus and not overstretching oneself helps create good results from what you do, I am continuously looking for ways to do the things I do better.

A few weeks ago, I started to invite people to be in an asynchronous communication mode. Quite many people immediately want to move communication to voice and real-time through meetings, phone calls, or video calls.

Sometimes, asynchronous communication helps to get more done and get into a productive dialogue without having to wait for an opportunity to speak in person. Also, I find it easier to organize sometimes to have a “good old” email conversation. Writing and reading make a lot of sense to me, and increasing my reading and writing speed I am continuously working on.

Spring and weather

I want spring. As I was hunting for the first greens last week when I was in the Brandenburg countryside, the last few cold days are like every year for me: I am looking forward to warmer spring weather. I hope spring will finally come over the next few weeks.

I cannot talk about it. And I miss my EO Forum.

I had a lot of topics and conversations this week I cannot talk about yet or ever. Financing rounds, board meetings, and also personal questions and decisions. This is obviously part of my job and also part of life. And it does not make writing a newsletter easier as >80% of the topics I was dealing with this week need a bit more time until I can share some learnings from them with all of you. It is also always a challenge for me that there are not too many people I can share these topics with. I can only discuss them in their specific context, and the only way they can be “cross-pollinated” is through my own ability to advance them based on what I can do and what I know.

In the past, I was a member of the Entrepreneurs Organisation (actually, when I joined, it was still the Young Entrepreneurs Organization but then we all became older). We had a forum of 10 people, and we would meet once per month. We were all entrepreneurs from different industries and backgrounds. We had super strict confidentiality rules, which we never breached over the course of the 10 years I was a member.

What I liked about EO a lot was that I had the opportunity at least once per month to discuss topics at eye level with people who understand what I am talking about, learn what they are dealing with (we are not alone), and share experiences with my fellow forum members. What made these meetings so valuable was that we had a trust level and a joint level of knowledge and experience and we would never give each other advice but rather share experiences.

This is usually hard to find in normal life as you either have one of the two: friends or family with full trust but not really an idea what you are talking about, and people who exactly know what you are dealing with but not a trust level that you want to share your topics.

I have not figured out what I want to do about this in the immediate future. Luckily I have some friends I trust and who are also entrepreneurs/ investors I can talk to. But they are friends, and I usually do not want to talk business with them.

Over the weekend and next week, I will hopefully read a lot more and find some things worth sharing with you. Here are three videos I watched while I wanted simple input:

• Finn Snow finding an octopus

• Camera Conspiracies reviewing a lens he does not have.

• And one of my all-time favorites: Matt’s Off-Road Recovery.

Have a great weekend!

Joerg