We have collected 100 thoughts, resources and questions from CEOs, in four core fields of attention, for you. Reflect for yourself and see, if there is a better chance to adapt your business. Try to consider this crisis as a unique opportunity to revisit and redefine processes and ways of doing business. And, if there are synergies to leverage together we are eager to hear from you!
The recent Coronavirus crisis forced many of us into unexplored territory – everybody became a remote worker overnight. Considering our place of work is an essential part of our corporate DNA, the requirements of different generations, laws and regulations – mastering remote working is a challenge for entrepreneurs in any industry. It is a balancing act between legality, sanity, freedom, and efficiency in the new working conditions. Some of our clients adjust better, others move projects to Q3 2020 or cancel them completely. In our case that will not be necessary; we will offer the European Super Angels Club events, as well as Business Angel Institute trainings an option to be held online – we have all the necessary tools in place and have already done so in the past.
It looks highly likely that we will come out of this crisis with a new working culture. Sales estimates of video-calling and integrated communications solutions, like Grape and Phone-Automation systems, like Yodel.io, are going through the roof. Even Digital Team Österreich (an initiative from the Digital Ministry in Austria) is helping SME’s to find attractive solutions and special offers for any company in need of such services right now.
Not everyone can adapt to the new working environment equally. For most people, remote work is still a relative novelty. Even though laptops, cloud solutions and video calls are often supplementary to traditional office work, things become substantially more difficult once the entire team goes remote. It feels a little odd and you have to adapt and find ways to keep up your company culture – which can be tricky. There is certainly a lot we can learn from startups when it comes to remote work. Most millennials and startup founders practically grew up in remote teams at schools and universities. Global startups commonly have distributed teams, and some even work as digital nomads (while living on the beach or traveling the world). Some of our portfolio startups (in particular Grape, Butleroy and YodelTalk)have shared their learnings from previous years in blog articles (eg. Remote Work Checklist Guide, The World is Your Office), which we highly recommend reading).
We have summarized our personal experience, as well as learnings and insights of our startups for you in this article and hope sharing these tips for working remote from home will help you be more efficient in the coming weeks and maybe even beyond.
In order to be present and available for your team while working remotely, we recommend using a high-quality communication software. At Venionaire, we opened all our employees an account in an advanced unified communication platform named GRAPE.io. We also invite external project partners and clients to the same platform, albeit with restricted access.
We used to use WhatsApp groups for informal communication within our team; however, with everyone now working 100% remotely, we needed a much stronger solution, where we would not lose track of projects and developments. We needed to get a solution, which allows us to invite clients into private rooms and enables video chats, sharing of documents, and reduces the number of tabs open in our browsers. Switching between 5 to 10 solutions in parallel can drive you crazy really fast.
In our case, we have set very basic standards of communications – we say “hi” when we check in in the morning, we say our goodbyes before we go offline. Lunch and coffee breaks are still as important as before – therefore we encourage our team to chat during breaks and keep up social ties within the team. We use a separate chatroom for off-topic conversations and private video chats. We encourage our employees to use this for the sake of social relations and exchange while drinking a coffee.
Due to higher amounts of calls, email and chat-messaging through all kinds of channels, we encourage to plan in some “buffer-time” between meetings and in addition, introduced the concept of Timeboxing. We block times for internal meetings, for emails, for calls (internally and with clients) – this way our days and the workweek have a clear structure.This concept makes it easier for team-members and partners to engage with you, when you are ready for them.
As we cannot simply walk by our colleagues and get a sense for their current stress level and resource allocation, things need to be done differently. Every team member needs to be transparent about their work schedule, tasks and targets, and share it pro-actively amongst colleagues. For the sake of simplicity, we ask for 3 main priorities for the day to be shared. A personal checklist will naturally have more sub-tasks, however 3 topics of the day are enough to give an idea of the workload and rough schedule.
If a job or task is done – we pro-actively share it in our team chat and tag a manager to make sure this is noticed.
Unless you’re working on a deadline, limit your workday. Schedule breaks at least every two hours and save time for sports. On a normal workday you would sit in the car or public-transport for 30minutes or maybe even more – use this time for physical activity. You will be most productive, if you set yourself goals and a timeline to deliver them. Create a balance so that you can enjoy your surroundings, take time for yourself and your family, which requires your support in troubling times such as these.
Try to remember that nobody chose to be in the situation we find ourselves these days. Some adapt quicker, some slower – some struggle, some handle it more easily. This is a challenge, but at the same time an opportunity. It is important to share experiences and to listen to your colleagues when they share their personal situation and difficulties – we should all learn from each other and support each other every day. It’s up to you to ensure everyone else feels comfortable and welcome!
Praise yourself when you get something done. Working remotely is a challenge. It may look easy – looking at digital nomads and startups from the outside. Inquire deeper, however, and those who are honest will confess that they smile after every hurdle they jump over – keep on celebrating your wins and involve your team in it (even if it´s only on video) to really master remote working!
About the author: Berthold Baurek-Karlic is Founder and CEO of Venionaire Capital, with many years of experience as a serial entrepreneur, corporate finance expert and early stage investor. He supports the startup ecosystem in various roles such as President of the European Super Angels Club, Board of Austrian Private Equity and Venture Capital Association and General Secretary of Business Angel Institute.
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Fundraising is as much an art as it is hard work! We show you how it is done.
We will share 5 easy hacks to boost your fundraising efforts and recommend following them by heart! Life and death of a venture depends on liquidity and this usually implies multiple rounds of investments.
Theoretically, every Swiss invests USD 147.6 in startups, while every Brit invests USD 39,4 and every German only USD 27.7. It is quite impressive how big the small country is in business.
Why funding after an accelerator program tells us more than anything?
In order to the new high-tech European companies to develop and survive in an international context, they need smart investors who support young companies with knowledge, networks and of course capital. Hardware in particular is extremely difficult, but it is possible and there is a Hub for them: Dresden, Germany!
HIGHTECH VENTURE DAYS 2018 Europe’s leading investors’ conference in the high-tech sector, showcased some of the best hightech scale-ups we have seen in a long time. Berthold Baurek-Karlic, Founder and Managing Partner at Venionaire Capital enjoyed moderating the microtronics panel together with Dr. Ulrich Eisele, Osram Ventures.
The HIGHTECH VENTURE DAYS address the potential of European high-tech innovations and their capitalization as a two day match-making format for the decisive growth phase. Last 17th and 18th of October in Dresden, forty selected startups had the opportunity to present their projects to national and international investors, within the beautiful venue of Volkswagen Glaspalast.
The focus was on high-tech businesses from the areas of environmental & energy technology, ICT, micro- and nanotechnologies, life sciences, mechanical & plant engineering, materials science and transport & logisticst.
The exchange of different opinions and angles on the topic of innovation in various areas contributed to broadening perspectives of all those that took part. And that is exactly what a successful technology innovation event should be all about … we are looking forward to partner up with this great event again next year.
Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) is famous worldwide for its specialist banking services for the startup and venture industry. Having established a branch in London in 2012 which now employs 200 people, they have now opened a subsidiary in Frankfurt, Germany which will service the emerging European tech industry with venture debt services and products. Unfortunately, bank accounts for startups or VCs are still unavailable, as Frankfurt is a subsidiary office and does not yet have a full banking licence.
Munich played host to the opening party of SVB’s new branch in Frankfurt last week, its first on the continental mainland. It was a key investment meetup with private equity firms, partners of venture funds and family offices, as well as the European Super Angels Club.
Silicon Valley Bank offers a very unique set of debt products, which are very useful for funds, attractive to growth-stage startups and last but not least the bank has the world’s best network of investors. We are looking forward to working with SVB, explains Berthold Baurek-Karlic, President of European Super Angels Club after his return to Vienna.
Download the SVB presentation and find out what they can offer you!
It is a strategic decision of SVB to launch their first European mainland office in Germany. According to a recent report by London-based Frontline Ventures and Speedinvest, the German-speaking countries represents a very fertile breeding ground for tech ventures, with a reasonably homogenous market of 100m German speakers whose GDP/capita exceeds €48.000, a full 50% above the EU average and a smartphone penetration of 67%. If the region can fully leverage their position in the centre of Europe, use the (relative cheap and highly skilled) developer talent from Eastern Europe and match it with the increasing amounts of capital available (10 funds have launched over the past 18 months with a combined value in excess of €1bn), it could translate its historic high-tech goods manufacturing strength to IP-rich tech that is likely to dominate the next century.
As VC investment activity continues to grow across Europe, with €16.9bn being invested over 3,306 deals, also Switzerland, Germany, and Austria have followed the trend of fewer and larger sized deals. However, if the region fundraising game remains fragmented, it will always underperform its potential. That’s why our pan-European networks of angel investors, family offices, corporate venture capitalists exists: to help build this ecosystem and connect it to the rest of the world.
With ESAC, business angels no longer have to rely on the best startups magically popping up by coincidence and founders are no longer tied to a limited network in their surrounding area. For more information about the European Super Angels Club please visit www.superangels.club.
In the second part of the series, we take a closer look at the difference between Venture Debt and Venture Capital. Click here for the first part of the series about “What is Venture Debt?”
When comparing venture debt with venture capital, it is essential to bear in mind that venture debt is mostly a topic for mature (ventures) companies, which make a continual profit, whereas venture capital (equity) is for still early-stage companies. (Fuse3, 2017)
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Venture capitalists and entrepreneurs are intimately connected; meaning they succeed or fail together. The venture capitalists often take a seat on the company’s board of directors in order to make the potential return match the risk. On the other hand, a venture debt lender does not take on the same risks as the VC; they are hedged. A lender’s returns are linked to fees, interests and warrants (equity kicker). VCs provide a higher portion of the whole capital mix between equity and debt. VCs are an appropriate choice to attain a venture of the ground when a huge amount of capital is required. The most important drawback of the venture capital is that it can be dilutive leading to losing significantly of ownership of the founders. However, Venture debt has very limited dilution for the company’s founders, which is why owners choose venture debt after raising equity capital from VCs. (Edgington, 2017)
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Venionaire Capital exclusively invests through the European Super Angels Club, for more information and application please go to the website. We do not accept direct investment proposals via this website.
