Week 9 Farmers Market, MittelStart, Book writing, and life goals

Another remote week with lots of meetings and virtual interactions.

I had an intense and good week—a lot of work and many meetings. I am doing the final overhaul of this text while being dialed into a video meeting—obviously something you should not do. But like too many other times: I want to do both and am more a fan of “as well as” than “either/or.” Here is what I want to share with you this week:

Farmers Market

Every Saturday at 7:00 or 7:30, I go grocery shopping at the farmers market. It’s a 20-minute walk from where we live in Berlin to get to it, and I usually walk there with two friends. We meet around the corner from here and then walk together. Sometimes these were my only “real-life” contacts with people I know per week over the past lock-down weeks and months. In my life, that luckily is so dynamic and full of change, it is super relaxing for me to have this one thing I always do no matter how the weather is. So far, I only skipped the Saturdays when I was traveling with my family (which did not happen too much over 2020 and during lockdowns).

Usually, I like to be connected and recognized by the people whom I meet during the week or who work at the restaurants or shops I go to and with the farmers market, I really love the anonymity that you have when you walk around with a face mask. Sometimes I deliberately wear different jackets and backpacks. It is finally a great application for my jacket and bag collection for those of you who know me better.

I tend to wear the same clothes during the week because I don’t want to think about what to wear in the morning. So I grab a black merino T-Shirt and a pair of jeans or pants and am done.

At the farmers market, one of my friends buys all the groceries they need for the coming week, the other one buys large quantities of salmon and some random vegetables, and I buy parts of our weekend food, some freshly smoked salmon for breakfast, and vegetable and cheese supplies plus some extras. Once we are done, we walk back home. On my way, I grab some bread rolls from our local Lueske supermarket (best supermarket ever) and am back home around 9:00. The rest of us usually is still sleeping. Then our weekend together starts. I am looking forward to Saturday!

Mittelstart

We started Mittelstart, a new initiative with Deutschland Land der Ideen, and the company I work for, APX. This week on Thursday, we had our first event, where we invited mostly family-owned companies and venture-backed startups and created an opportunity for them to connect.

I gave a keynote about building bridges between smaller and larger companies and working together. A keynote in this context can be challenging because I did not know about the company owners' experience levels who were present. If I am “too meta” in my keynote, it might be boring, and when I am too specific, I might lose quite a few listeners because they cannot relate to what I am talking about. So I decided to talk about some patterns and best practices how startups and corporates can do something together:

• The first question was: why should startups and corporates work together? Reflecting on business, growth, and learning opportunities for both stakeholders.

• Then I talked about the venture path: building a high-growth company with investors who want to exit. This is usually a topic especially the owners of family-owned companies have issues with.

• What does success look like? How do we get there? Are the two questions where alignment is crucial to get onto the success path

• Then I talked about failing granularly on the path to epic success. This might be worth a longer piece in the future.

• The truth and reality distortion and their powers and dangers got 2 minutes of talking time.

• And then I reflected on knowing, not knowing when to know something and how startups, in the beginning, have no data about their business at all. Just assumptions and ideas that are more or less qualified and quantified. In contrast, a lot of corporates have extremely rich data pools they can use to make decisions. In my experience, it can be helpful to feel comfortable and know what to do in both situations. And it can be very inspiring for both to talk to each other.

• Then I talked about the forms of cooperation: becoming a paying customer (easy) and/ or an investor or the owner. It is always important to think about this long-term as too early, a too big investment might have a severely negative impact on the startup's fundraising abilities. This might mean that the corporate has bought the startup without the intention to do it so early. And with the “purchase,” they also have the duty to finance the startup. It actually is not a contractual duty; it’s just that no other investor will be willing to give any capital to the startup when it is strategically burned with a too big strategic shareholder on their cap table. The new “owner” will then have to choose between investing or letting the company run out of money. Becoming the startup's actual owner usually does not make too much sense in the early days of a startup as the risk and valuation relation is not favorable to either the purchaser or the selling founders and their shareholders. This might be a future post as well.

• One of the best working best practices in my experience is the “Why our cooperation will definitely fail” exercise. We did it several times in various contexts where the corporates and startups first developed ideas of cooperating. They did a 45-minute long session where they explained why their partnership would definitely fail. Interestingly enough, the meeting participants like this develop quite some destructive momentum and figure out valid reasons why it will not work. It is important to have some time after the meeting to brainstorm solutions to the identified issues. Otherwise, it will be a sad day for everyone.

• Speaking the same language and understanding what is being said is also something that seems easy but is quite hard. My “favorite” example is a conversation one of our portfolio companies once had with a large corporate, and they agreed to get back to them “soon.” After a week, the founders were frustrated and asked me what might have gone wrong as they felt very positive about their cooperation. I recommended calling and asking what the status is and only after this ask about what might be wrong. It turned out that “soon” for their corporate contact meant: “This quarter,” and for the startup, it meant: “this week.” That’s why I think that clear, absolute, and precise communication is super helpful.

Writing a book in a group?

As some of you know, I am working on a book about success patterns when turning ideas into reality. The book is still in its early stages, and I have collected all the topics I might write about in my “external brain” roamresearch.com. Whenever I have time in the evenings and on weekends, I work on the book, and most likely, I will share some more details about its content here over the coming weeks.

Last Saturday I was invited to a “booksprint” by a friend. We were four people, writing 3 books, and are at various stages. We started with a speedy intro to each other as some of us had never met before and then started writing. We would keep a video conference running in the background, and after an hour of focussed writing, we met in the videocall and talked for 15 minutes. We started at 18:00 and ended at 22:45. I got a lot done over this time, and the 15 minute long interactions were extremely motivating; although we did not have the time to go too deep into the topics we are writing about, I got a lot of inspiration out of our exchange. I hope I will have the chance to do this again, and I think this can also be a good “tool” in our virtual work environments, where I want to try this with some of my colleagues. We worked on different topics like we did in our book sprint and working on the same topic in something like a “burst” mode.

Goals in Life

Boris and I had an email conversation about goals. Usually, I love to have these conversations over lunch or coffee. They are not really plannable and happen when they happen. These days, many things have to be planned, as you don’t really run into each other in the office or a restaurant/ coffee shop. So it started with an email from Boris after last week’s newsletter and the old slide from my lecture I shared about vision, mission, and how to operationalize turning a dream into reality. Boris shared that he had talked to several entrepreneurs about how to set goals and achieve them. The challenge always seems to be in the field of tension of the different dimensions of life and focussing your energy at the moment. Understanding the influence of time on this focussing is a key to getting it right, I think:

• Very long time: these are topics that are “longer” than you might be around. And can be the big topics of life, humanity, our planet, etc. What do you think about this? Do you have goals at this scale? I love long-term thinking, and I have been a member of the long now foundation for quite some time. Check it out.

• Long term, it is about identifying all relevant dimensions and developing more or less concrete goals. The long-term is multi-year or more than 10 years. Dimensions can be your full life, building a family, deciding on what you want to learn, or if you want to build a company or organization that shall exist for the long term. Do you spend time thinking about this actively? What is the right amount of time one should invest in these topics?

• Mid-term, it makes sense to choose focus areas and goals over a time span of fewer than 10 years. This can be your next job, your next venture-based startup (does anyone feel a need to discuss this?), or a phase in your life.

• Shorter-term is everything that spans shorter time frames. This can be 2 years, one year, a quarter, month, week, or day. There are tons of research, books, models, and best practices on prioritizing, getting things done. I will likely share some best practices on this over time, as this is one of my big topics.

Reading list:

Neuroprivacy as a Basic Human Right - NEO.LIFE: This might/ should be one of the next big policy debates. With humanity’s growing capability to measure brain activity and develop services around it, there will also be huge amounts of data to be managed. How can and should this be regulated? I think this is also a fascinating discussion in the context of DNA-related information. The discussion is also ongoing with behavioral patterns, and there are quite different approaches between countries and markets in our world.

Why did I leave Google or why did I stay so long?: a piece by Noam, founder of Waze, on their experience being acquired by Google and his takeaways. For the founders reading this: please note his comments about their shareholder structure and its influence on their decision to sell.

Markets at a Crossroads: Stocks Drop, and Bonds Surge: What is going on with the markets? An interesting quick view on macroeconomic scenarios in the US that might also be applicable in other markets.

I hope I will have the time to read some books next week.

Have a great weekend and then a great week, and thank you for reading! If you like this email, please share it with friends and consider subscribing.

Joerg