The benefits of attending startup events for founders and their growing teams are countless: from meeting investors, leaders in your industry, listening to inspiring talks and of course connecting and learning from other motivated entrepreneurs. However, it is no secret that attending events takes a lot of time and energy, so making sure that the events you attend are worth your time is essential. To help you to navigate the vast amount of startup events, we have compiled the top 5 hottest startup events in the first half of 2023 that you don’t want to miss!

Does this situation seem familiar to you? The days are over, where fruit baskets are a good enough to attract and keep employees. They want their company to care for their needs and also want to see the benefits of working at their job in their personal life. Having a mental health webinar, for example, as presented in this TikTok by Ali Woods video, might look good to others on LinkedIn. But does it actually contribute to your employee's wellbeing if they are already overwhelmed with work? Not really. 

Do you want getting inspired by other founders, learn new skills, and meet potential new partners or investors? Startup events are a very important venue for entrepreneurs to meet new people and boost their own business. We put together the perfect list for you, presenting the top events of 2022 you shouldn't miss!

You have come across our Accelerator program, but you are not quite sure if it is suitable for your startup? We often receive questions from established startups asking whether they still fit into the program and what added value the participation has. In this article, we will show you 10 strong arguments why established startups should definitely apply for our free program. Let's go!

Going in to the new year, we have the time to reflect on the way that remote work is currently organized in our team. Do you have long-term solutions to common challenges in remote work? In this article, I will highlight five challenges of remote work and tips on overcoming them.

​​Dear reader please note this is NOT a regular product market fit blog article. Here we neither explain you what Product Market Fit is (we already did in our Product Marktet fit and your startup: 7 things you need to know blog nor will we repeat you that a bad product market fit is the reason #1 why startups fail. With this article we want to introduce you to a methodology to quantify your product market fit.

Not really unexpectedly, the startup environment is not very diverse but rather homogeneous. Let the numbers speak: Let the numbers speak: 16 % of founders in Germany are women and roughly 75 % of VC money goes to male-only startup teams. Many companies, advisory boards, political parties have picked up these facts and want to contribute to change, for example by offering startup accelerator programs for (gender) diverse startup teams (Grow F, SpinLab Summer School), VCs that especially support female or mixed teams, quotas or scholarships. It has even become a trend in many industries.

A cap table- short name for “capitalization table”- is a spreadsheet with an overview of who owns a portion of equity of a company and how this equity is distributed among shareholders. When entrepreneurs are looking for financing rounds, the cap table is one of the main files that investors will check to assess whether the venture has a healthy distribution of equity or not. Generally, investors prefer cap tables where all or at least the vast majority of shareholders will contribute to value creation in the future. In some cases, entrepreneurs with appealing and promising business ideas miss funding opportunities due to the so-called broken cap tables. This refers to an inadequate distribution of equity among shareholders or inacceptable terms and conditions, which generates misalignment of interests or interferes with an efficient business management. As a result, the startup losses the ability to raise funds or requires going through a painful restructuring process.

When preparing financial rounds, investors usually ask for cap tables (short version for “capitalization table”). Basically, this is a list or spreadsheet with an overview of all shareholders who have a participation on your company. Sounds easy? But in fact it isn’t, especially in later financing rounds. Why? Well, in the easiest case is the simple share distribution to founders and investors round by round, but in practice the deal structures are more complex. Typically, due to special rights and agreements, the allocation of equity shares deviates from voting rights and from money proceeds distributed after a cash event like an exit (e.g. a trade sale or an IPO). Very often it is complex enough to hire (and pay) external consultants and lawyers to reproduce the contractually fixed distribution and it is a frequent discussion point in due diligence processes on that way. Thus, it is worth paying some attention right from the beginning.

"2021 will be the year of the unicorns," "German startups are raising more money than ever," "From a garage to the most valuable corporation" – there are great success stories of founders to read about in the news. However, barely anyone talks about the many failures in the startup world. And believe me, there are way more than you might think. While it seems deceptively easy to found a successful start-up, this is not really the case. Rarely is a start-up so well-tuned to its niche that it can be kept afloat with minimal effort. The momentum among founders is high, but in the long run only one in ten companies survives. In this article, we present the most common reasons why start-ups fail.