Categories
Entrepreneurship Principles Tree.ly

#recalibrate – a new work schedule

Luckily Tree.ly is humming, buzzing, taking off. That feels really good. The entire team and me are putting in a lot of love, passion and effort. After two years we closed the first loop of projects certified, sold first credits, but also brought new investors on board and also just moved to a new office.

Tree.ly at Rossstall (we have space for co-workers)

Humming, buzzing and taking off also means a lot operational tasks and often being driven by urgent things. As we speak I’m using my Saturday morning to work on 185 E-Mails that require my attention, as I took a day off yesterday I have unread notifications and overdue reminders in Slack, a flow of notifications in Trello and more open tasks in Hubspot.

Still I have the feeling for the need to spend more time on important longer term items (pointer to the Eisenhower matrix in case you haven’t heard about it).

So three weeks ago I decided to work from Lisbon for ~5-6 weeks to work more on strategy, but also #recalibrate myself (and not to forget improve my kitesurf skills)

This boi is setting a new habit and promising to keep his schedule

Starting monday I’m setting a new habit and time schedule. Will stick exactly to it for at least for 1 month and then do a retrospective and potentially adapt.

These are the buckets and allocations I came up with initially:

  • Day-to-day operations: 30%
    jumping in where needed and directly supporting the team, e.g. product development, customer service, marketing
  • Sales: 25%
    Directly sell to customers, marketing, PR, networking
  • Strategy: 20%
    Market research, competitive analysis, setting goals, planning
  • Investors: 15%
    work on pitch deck, meetings with impact investors, strengthen relationships with existing investors and angels.
  • Partners & Network: 10%
    Identifying, winning and enable strategic partners, networking, working with influencers, advisors

I’m running a Trello board for each of these categories, where I prioritize and organize them within their own “timebox”.

As for many of us, freedom to work when, where and how I work is important to me. Still I’m a teamplayer. So how do I allocate timeslots that allow focus time, collaboration with others, but also freedom to work out (skitour, hike) if weather is good?

Here’s my first shot! Would love to hear your feedback and experience.

My new work week

Monday

9:00-9:25, #day2day, #meeting: team weekly
we’re a remote-first, distributed team and start into the week with a all-hands team meeting. good mood to start the week with. or a coffee together. We do a team-checkin, Christian, my co-founder and COO and me update on recent developments, set priorities and answer questions the team might have. We close with an checkout.

I highly recommend the checkin generator.

9:30-10:20, #strategy, #meeting: founders weekly
We discuss strategic priorities, important decision-making, and aligning on the most critical tasks to focus on for the upcoming week. Even though these tasks are often operational, the process of deciding what is most important typically requires a strategic perspective.

10:30-11:30, #strategy, #meeting, #monthly: finance
This meeting only happens monthly after the previous month is fully processed by our accountant. This involves reviewing our sales numbers, runway, burn rate and other finance-related topics.

11:30-13:30, #team: cooking/lunch
I’m joining the kitchen team on Monday (except once a month when we do the finance monthly). Cooking and having lunch together is an important part of our company culture. Guests are welcome anytime!

The new Rossstall Co-working kitchen in action

13:30-14:20, #sales, #meeting: sales weekly
The meeting is driven by my co-founder Christian. We scrub our sales pipeline(s) – forest owners, forest project development partners, carbon buyers, carbon resellers. We set priorities for the upcoming week and I identify where my help is needed.

14:30-14:55, #sales, #nomeeting
Most of the times in the sales meeting things that need to be done come up. I like to get them done straight after the meeting.

15:00-15:55, #day2day, #nomeeting
After quite some meetings time to get the most important day2day stuff done. No meetings, as morning was full of them. I’ll work on my own stuff.

16:00-16:50, #partners
Identify and enable partners, both in the forest and carbon buyer space. But also build and strengthen industry relationships in our space. I try to keep a balance between meetings and working on my own on this topic.

Monday tends to be an exhausting day, I try to leave the office not too late.

Tuesday

9:00-9:25, #day2day, #meeting: Team coordinators
CxOs and Team coordinators meet twice a week. We hand over new story proposals, solve impediments and discuss team or other issues.

9:30-12:20, #investors
In the early stage, a significant amount of time may be spent on fundraising. This includes preparing for pitches, meeting with potential investors, and maintaining relationships with current investors.

12:30-13:30, #team: Lunch

13:30-17:00, #sales: ongoing sales & marketing activities
This is the slot where I’m doing active sales as founder, working with parties on both sides: forest owners and carbon buyers. I’m also active in marketing activities such as webinars or writing content.

17:00-19:30, #day2day: scrubbing e-mail inbox and such
Tuesday evenings I usually work longer on mails, errands,… as my wife Manuela also has activities that evening #zumba 🕺.

Wednesday

I keep every Wednesday mornings free of meetings and plan that time flexibly. Most of the time I will start the day working from Kaffewerk Handle. But sometimes I also might do a workout, go for ski/bike or take care of my bees. It’s also the day I meet with other friends/family for lunch.

Wednesday afternoon is for Scrum – review/planning/grooming. It alternates every week.

13:30-15:00, #day2day, #meeting: scrum review and planning 1
15:00-16:00, #strategy
Every second week we run our scrum review meeting, where all team members present what has been achieved over the past two weeks. The meeting is followed by the scrum planning 1 meeting, where the teams commit their stories for the upcoming 2 weeks.
Afterwards I use the time to recalibrate priorities and also (re)set my goals for the upcoming 2 weeks.
In the alternative weeks this time is used for grooming meetings – discussing stories, estimate complexity and business value,…
But this is also one of the slots i wanted to create with the new schedule. I’ll work on longer term, important (not necessarly urgent) stuff. I might initiate calls/meetings, but don’t accept inbound ones.

16:00-18:00, #investors
Same as Monday.

Wednesday evening 19:00 is also the day and time of the week I go for a hike with my friends:

Every Wednesday: The “legendary” hiking group with my friends Stefan, Alexander, Manfred, Christoph, Wolfgang, Jump, Jörg and others.

Thursday

9:00-9:50, #day2day, #meeting: Team coordinators and Team
Like Tuesday morning I start with the Team coordinators sync. Afterwards I’m available for short follow-up day2day meetings with team members.

10:00-11:30 #strategy: Coaching, personal development
This is the slot where I work with my coaches (or on my own).

11:30-14:00, #team: Cooking and Lunch
With our new office and kitchen I want to be part of the cooking team a second time per week. Thursday I’m also going to stay longer in the office (with an afterwork beer afterwards), so an extended break over lunch is definitely beneficial for productivity.

13:30-13:55, #sales, #nomeeting: prepare meeting
14:00-14:50, #sales, #meeting: pipeline scrubbing
15:00-15:25, #sales, #meeting: weekly sales/marketing alignment
15:30-16:50, #sales, #nomeeting
Thursday afternoon is sales focus.

17:00-18:30, #day2day
This is the time where I hopefully reach Inbox Zero the second time in the week.

I like Thursdays – because most of the time I go straight from the office to an after work drink with friends.

Friday

9:00-10:00, #strategy: OKR review/preparation
I want to review where we stand with our strategic initiatives and also identify upcoming priorities

10:00-11:00, #day2day, #meeting: Retrospective
This slot will alternate with the 2-week scrum cycle. The one week we’ll hold a company-retrospective (each team is sending one representative), the other week I’ll work on partners stuff.

11:00(10:00)-12:30, #partners

12:30-13:30, #team: Lunch

13:30-15:00, #day2day
Hopefully Inbox Zero by 15:00, otherwise I might stay a bit longer 🙂

Saturday

I generally don’t work weekends. However it became a habit that – while Manuela is at the stable with the horse – I hang out at Kaffeewerk Handle with my computer. I do stuff I like. Playing with ChatGPT and hacking stuff, reading articles I saved during the week, writing Blogposts.

Thomas from Kaffeewerk Handle

The current stats of this schedule:

Right now 66% of the block – day2day/parts of sales/strategy are scheduled meetings. This might be a problem. But first I’m excited to see how this turns out in the first iteration.

Of course, emergencies, offsites, quarterly OKR blocks, customer visits,… might overturn this schedule now and then. But I’ll try to minimize this. At least until I learnt the new habit.

Also how it plays for the team. Apart from the meeting time allocation I also need to dig deeper into how I work/prioritize within the different categories. ChatGPT has proved helpful to put this together and will also help me getting that done.

I’ll keep you posted and would love to hear feedback! I will edit and document changes as we go.

Updates:

August, 7th: Isa (finance) is picking up kids monday 12, so moved finance slot forward and pushed sales to afternoon. That also lead to slight reshuffling of the day2day meeting.

August, 7th: swapped sales meeting from a.m. to p.m. on Thursdays, so one less context switch.

Categories
Culture Food for Thought Principles

CV des Scheiterns

Die “Scheitern” Ausgabe des Neue Narrative Magazin startet mit den “CVs des Scheiterns” der Autor:innen. Dabei berichten Sebastian Klein, Laura Erler, Paul Fenski, Emma Marx, Taraneh Taheri und Dominik Wagner steckbriefartig über “Erfolglose Bewerbungen”, “Abbrüche & Kündigungen”, “Lücken”, “Fähigkeiten, die ich nicht habe” sowie “Sonstige Niederlagen”.

Ich hatte nach den ersten 7 Seiten Tränen der “Berührung” in den Augen. #connectedness sozusagen. Warum?

Als Unternehmer führe ich seit vielen Jahren (immer schon?) selbstorganisierten Teams. (Manche mögen “Führung” und “Selbstorganisation” als Widerspruch sehen – NEIN! – Aber das ist ein anderes Thema). Dabei habe ich Lauf der Zeit zum Einen tiefe Einblicke in das Leben vieler Menschen bekommen – und zum Anderen viel Kritik und Gegendruck von Investor:innen, Aufsichtsräten und Kollegen für meine Einstellung bekommen.

Beim Lesen dieser Scheitern-CVs wird das Bild der Menschen kompletter und die Trust vs. Performance Betrachtung wird kompletter. Was hat das mit Trust vs. Performance auf sich?

Simon Sinek hat da meine Philosophie auf den Punkt gebracht:

Simon Sinek über “Vertrauen” im Gegensatz zu “Fachlichem Können”

Ich fühle mich durch die Offenheit der CVs of Failure total in diesem Ansatz bestätigt. Und Failure – und Erfolg – das ist für viele nicht vereinbar bzw. ein Widerspruch. Aber darüber zu sprechen und das passieren zu lassen – Das ist für mich ein wesentlicher Anteil für das System “New Work”. Und es braucht noch viel mehr Unternehmer:innen die dafür einstehen und das auch offen sagen.

Failure – vor ca. 2,5 Jahren habe ich “mein” über 7 Jahre aufgebautes System – die Firma Crate.io verlassen und habe seither von aussen mitangesehen, wie es top-down in die komplett andere Richtung umgebaut wurde. Ich sage bewusst anders und nicht falsch. Unterschiedliche (Werte)-Vorstellungen mit dem Vorsitzenden des Aufsichtsrats waren damals der wesentliche Punkt für meinen Ausstieg. Denn ich sah mich nicht mehr in der Lage, mit dem neuen Leadership die Organisation weiterzuentwickeln und dahinterzustehen.

Ich wollte beweisen, dass ein fast-growth Deep-Tech Startup mit einem “Trust” Wertesystem und “New Work” Fehlerkultur kombinierbar ist.

2,5 Jahre später sind in der Organisation noch 3 von 65 Mitarbeiter:innen meines “Trusts” verblieben, davon niemand in einer Führungsposition. Der “Werte-Exorzismus” hat viele Menschen vertrieben und neue Werte haben andere Menschen angezogen. Das hat sehr viel Leid beschert und sehr viel Geld gekostet. Der Erfolgsbeweis ist bisher ausgeblieben.

Ist das mein Failure? Einen Elefanten geholt zu haben, diesen durch “meinen” Porzellanladen ziehen gelassen zu haben?

NEIN. Es ist lediglich eine Niederlage.

Mein CV of failures

Erfolglose Bewerbungen

Ich habe mich als CTO beim Digital-Spinoff (“new mobility”) eines führenden Automobilherstellers beworben. Ich habe mir das lange überlegt und dachte, dass ich da echten Impact haben kann und geile Software auf einem breiten Scale mit viel Umweltimpact bauen kann. Und Deutschland Tesla die Stirn bieten kann. Aber ich wurde nichtmal für ein Interview eingeladen. Das hat mich in meiner Selbstsicherheit etwas geknickt 🙂

Von den 2-3 Situationen in meinem Leben wo ich mich für eine Stelle beworben habe (ehrlich gesagt waren das nur Ferialjobs) war das die einzige Bewerbung in meinem Leben die nicht geklappt hat. Ansonsten war ich immer selbständig.

Abbrüche und Kündigungen

Siehe Text oben. Das war definitiv bitter, 7 Jahre Herzblut zu investieren, also quasi ein Viertel meines Arbeitslebens. Und dann die Kontrolle zu verlieren und gegenseitig zu kündigen.

Ein weiterer Abbruch – weiter zurückliegend – war meine Promotion. Ich hätte noch ca. 6 Monate durchhalten müssen und die finale Defensio vorbereiten und halten müssen, aber habs hingeschmissen. Das bereue ich manchmal ein bisschen. Aber eigentlich nur in Momenten wo ich etwas prahlen möchte :).

Lücken

Während dem Studium bin ichs verhältnismässig locker angegangen. Meine Frau war um 8:00 im Büro und hat das Geld verdient, ich habe ausgiebig geschlafen und auch zwischendurch mal nach der Prüfung Faxe-Dosen am Vormittag im Park gezischt.

Auch im Jahr nach meinem Crate-Ausstieg hab ich Zeit zur Verarbeitung gebraucht, mir Zeit zur Vorbereitung der Zukunft genommen, und von Ersparnissen und Arbeitslosengeld gelebt.

Fähigkeiten die ich nicht habe

Geduld: Ich glaube, dass ich recht geduldig bin. Bin ich aber nicht. Sagt mir auch mein Umfeld. Klassischer Fail von Selbstwahrnehmung und Fremdwahrnehmung. Häng aber auch davon ab, wie ausgeglichen ich bin. #sport #meditation

Anpassungsfähigkeit: Würde an der einen oder anderen Stelle für weniger Reibung sorgen. Ich bin aber auch (noch) nicht bereit, das loszulassen. Weil ich glaube, das brauchts auch manchmal als Unternehmer. Wobei ich “eigentlich” selber weiss, dass das Geheimnis die richtige Balance wäre. #zen

Strukturiertheit: Ich brauche wenig Struktur und kann gut komplexe Dinge in meinem Kopf zusammenhalten. Im zusammenleben/arbeiten mit Anderen, wäre das jedoch manchmal für meine Mitmenschen angenehmer, wenn sie mehr Struktur an der Schnittstelle hätten.

Sonstige Niederlagen

Eine erwähnenswerte sonstige Niederlage ist vor ca. 15 Jahren passiert. Ich habe – u.A. durch nicht-funktionaler Verhaltensweise, Ego, Sturheit meinerseits – große Zukunftspotentiale meiner damaligen Firma nicht genutzt, bzw. diese weggeschmissen. Da muss ich immer wieder aufpassen, dass ich nicht “aus Prinzip” handle und die richtige Balance zwischen “Business machen” und “Recht haben” wähle.

Was meint ihr dazu? Ich freue mich über eine Diskussion auf dem Linkedin-Post!

Categories
Culture Entrepreneurship

Meine neue Welt

Ich war das letzte Jahr viel beschäftigt. In positiver Hinsicht. Die Entscheidung – mich ausschließlich um Zukunftsthemen zu widmen fühlt sich immer noch richtig an.

Ich lerne jeden Tag und beschäftige mich mit super spannenden Dilemmas, nicht entscheidbaren Fragen – und das gemeinsam mit einer wachsenden Community von Menschen, welche die Welt von Morgen gestalten.

Technologie war und ist mein Steckenpferd. Und auch die Verbindung zum Digital Campus Vorarlberg – insbesondere zum Coding Campus und Green Campus geht recht weit zurück.

Nachdem es in meinem Blog etwas ruhiger war die letzte Zeit – an der Stelle ein ausführliches Interview, das ich sehr gerne mag – und mich auch so zeigt, wie ich mich gerne sehe. Danke an Daniela, Berloff, Marco Esposito und Mika Halbeisen.

Ich freu mich über Feedback.

00:00 Intro und Vorstellung von Jodok
02:39 Was versteht man unter den Begriffen Klima Tech oder Green Tech?
05:12 Erklärung von Credits, Zertifikaten und warum man tree.ly hier vertrauen kann.
08:06 Wie funktioniert der CO² Speicher Wald?
11:25 Wie kann die Technik in Sachen Nachhaltigkeit am Beispiel der Waldwirtschaft helfen?
13:48 Digitalisierung benötigt Energie. Wie ist das Aufwand/Nutzenverhältnis hier?
15:10 Beispiele für energieeffiziente Technik
16:20 Welche Technologien und Berufsfelder erwarten uns hier in Zukunft?
19:03 Was können kleine Unternehmer in Vorarlberg tun um nachhaltiger zu handeln?
22:25 Gibt es spannende Start-ups im Bereich Nachhaltigkeit in Vorarlberg?
24:46 Was muss passierten um das ganze Potenzial zu nutzen?
26:01 Welche Berufsfelder gibt es im Bereich Programmieren?
30:15 Wo fange ich an? Welche Skills benötige ich?
35:28 Eine Frage die sich jede:r stellen sollte: Wie schaut eine Welt aus, die für jede:n funktioniert aus?

Categories
Entrepreneurship Technology VC

The power of datascience

TLDR;: I’m member of the board of directors of Alphacruncher, the EdTech startup building nuvolos.cloud. We’ve just raised CHF 1.5M to rock the EdTech space.

I’m a natural scientist by education. I do my best to operate on objective reasoning, rely on data, trust the interpretation of experts. A lot of that thinking goes back to my time at University/studying (NTB Buchs in Switzerland, University of Karlruhe in Germany, but also studies abroad, e.g. Harvard Business School).

When founding Tree.ly, it was clear to us that datascience is going to play an important role. We started with some local Jupyter Notebooks in Visual Studio Code (works actually pretty well), but quickly realized we need something where we can collaborate within the team and with others.

Analyzing Forests
Image Credits: Tree.ly, Ocell.io, illwerkevkw, TU Vienna

We continued with tools like Amazon SageMaker, Microsoft Notebooks, but also Google Colaboratory. Not to forget to run JupyterHub within our Kubernetes infrastructure. It’s amazing to see how easy everybody can do Data Science nowadays! I strongly encourage to check out these tools.

Only until my friend Oliver from Zeughaus connected me with Alexandru Popescu from Alphacruncher and I learnt about Nuvolos Cloud.

It’s primarly targeted to educational customers (that’s also where it is coming from), but I also see a great potential for “commercial” datascience. What do I find especially cool?

Snapshot and shared workspaces.

Inside the platform one can easily snapshot and share datasets with others. E.g. a teacher can create an environment for an exercise and share that very environment with the entire class – and each student can continue in her/his personal environment. Only to hand in the solved problem to the teacher afterwards.

Or assume that you wrote a scientific paper, who’s findings are based on a larger dataset and a couple of computations. You cannot only share the PDF, but also provide the possibility to access the full environment and validate the findings – or even build upon them. Magic!

In our case we’re using larger datasets (e.g. a few TB of airborne laserscanning pixel clouds, parcel data and all kind of other readings) that we collaboratively work on. We can use a shared Kernel image with all dependencies installed and work on the same shared data folders – while still preserving our personal preferences and spaces.

Resource efficiency / Shared resources

Data science has the characteristic that you need quite some resources for a rather short amount of time – and then for a larger amount of time you don’t need the instances running. Nuvolos and it’s billing/usage model makes that cloud-elasticity super simple for the user. One can book a base level of resources (that are only spun up when needed, and automatically terminated afterwards), but also book spike resources.

That’s not only convenient for companies, but even more for universities or school classes that need these resources for every student.

Everything in the Cloud

We spoke mainly about Jupyter Notebooks, but the Nuvolos environment also provides access to Snowflake (One of the coolest databases on earth) and many other Tools. In the Cloud. In the browser. In a shared space. The team is working on expanding that toolsuite permanently. Right now it’s RStudio, VS Code, Spyder, JupyterLab, Julia, Stata, Matlab, GNU Octave, SAS, IBM SPSS, REDCap, Airflow and others.

A winning team

During due diligence I took a look at the tech stack and got personally known to some of the core team members. They are not only using state-of-the-art technology and methodology, but also managed to attract top talent to build and operate the product.

I couldn’t be more excited to play a small road on Alexandru’s and his team journey. Thanks for letting me ride with you.

Categories
Climate Change Entrepreneurship Food for Thought Sustainability Tree.ly

Saving the Climate with Entrepreneurship

I had the opportunity to speak at TEDxDornbirn about my journey as (serial) entrepreneur and my latest venture Tree.ly, ensuring optimal carbon storage in our forests.

I’m also giving more intimate insights why I’m doing what I’m doing and how I put my values into action. I would love your feedback via Twitter, LinkedIn or E-Mail!

TEDx talk “Saving the Climate with Entrepreneurship”

For the more text-oriented visitors, I’ve paraphrased (and detailed) my talk. Note the different intro 🙂

TEDxDornbirn, Eva Sutter | Matthias Rhomberg. fotograf

2 years ago, to be exact on February 27th, 2o20, 20:45 Toronto time, I boarded Air Canada’s flight to Munich. I was exhausted, sleep deprived, as this marked the end of a crazy 4-day trip to the San Francisco Bay Area, including 2 red-eye flights east-coast/west-coast because of heavy snow and weather.

Flying twice SFO-YYZ, red-eye.

Little did I know about the changes the next two years would bring.

But it was a super successful trip and marked the end of a month-long marathon to raise capital for my deep-tech startup baby. The final boardmeetings with our future investors were positive, and we were about to secure a termsheet in the range of ~$20M. Holy! That was an incredible feeling! I’ve worked so hard for that. I’ve travelled >60x to San Francisco over the past 15 years, and yet this was one of the few business class flights. In the light of the exhaustion and great success we decided we deserved to spend the extra 1.066 CAD.

This is one of the many high peaks an entrepreneur, running to build a unicorn company, has to climb. The feeling reaching new heights is overwhelming!

How little did I know in this moment about what the future would bring.

/me dreaming at this time

I’ve built several successful companies and was running some of the largest web properties on this planet.
I’ve built a 65 people database company from scratch. Out of the small town of Dornbirn, Austria – with hubs in Munich, Berlin, Vienna, Zurich and ultimately headquartered in San Francisco. We’ve made it to Techcrunch Disrupt, been part of the Gartner reports, named by Forbes as one of the most promising companies and won lots of happy customers.

I had all of this.

/me, sitting on top of that hill, crying.

Yet i found myself sitting there, crying on the top of that hill. Asking myself: “What am i doing here?“. Something is missing. Perhaps some of you have experience with the same feeling. Live is too short.

Don’t me wrong. It was not completely off – but something was missing. That was my life – and that’s fine. If that was you this would also be fine to continue! But not for me.

I decided to move on to something new after 7+ years. I’ve read so much about that purpose sh.., and heard people saying it, over and over. E.g. from team members, 20y younger than me. But yes – it’s really true!

It was a hard step, as giving up something is always difficult. Over that time I’ve spent many, many hours in nature. Skitouring, hiking, biking, a total of whopping 135.000 vertical meters in that year.

Well deserved coffee break after a hard day working as forester

During that time I’ve also spent a lot of time with my friends dad in their forests and became a semi-professional forester. This helped me a lot to also pause, and to reflect. It might be clear for you. For me it took a lot of time. It took a year, with unknown results beforehand. And i also worked with my coaches and friends Dieter and Matthias like i’m doing since many years, did peer-interviews with friends and thanks COVID-19 some excellent online-exercises.

I’d like to share how I’m doing what I’m doing. Or to put it into Simon Sinek’s terminology. My values in action:

Lead the way
Sense the unseeable and pick up initiatives, fuel excitement and make them lively; nudge people and ideas, even if outside of comfort zone. All while remaining transparent and clear. No hierarchy for the sake of hierarchy.

Engender trust
Assume everyone is the best at their jobs, even when they fail; Without basic trust, without fundamental respect, an organization cannot thrive.

Live our authentic self
and develop it in an agile manner, all while staying grounded. Diversity and tolerance attract creativity and yield in innovation.

Be smart
Look at things in new ways, from new angles, questioning assumptions. See the inconceivable big picture, but also take care of the small details.

Strive for genuine success
It’s not about making others lose; it’s about genuine improvement, crafting better solutions, making a dent in the universe. 

Live basic, unruly optimism and unconditional love
Impossible is a good word to start; assume we can figure it out and solve what needs solving full of joy and with a good portion of humor; laughing about ourselves. It’s good to be nuts now and again.

Trampolines are great fun

What can i pass on to my kids? How am i leaving this planet?

I’m going to fight climate change!

I started to eat less meat and switch to a mainly plant-based diet. I do my best to fly less and we got rid of one car and switched to an EV. We’re using only green energy at home (and to charge the car). We reduce consumption and I preferably only buy used things. According to the Klima App this reduces my personal yearly footprint from ~11kg to 7kg.

This are great thing to start! And it’s great if you do that too.

But i’m an entrepreneur and i see a lot of opportunity in that change ahead of us. And i want to have impact and build something scalable. I want to move capital and help large businesses to change. Using entrepreneurship/capitalism to save our climate.

At some point climate change is irreversible

We only have around 10 years left. The main tipping points (irreversible damage) are:

  • The melting ice sheets in Greenland (G), Arctic (B), Antarctic (I and J)
  • The slowdown (since the 1950s) of the atlantic circulation (C)
  • permafrost thawing (H)
  • large-scale die-offs in the coral reefs (F)
  • the shrinking amazon rainforests (A)

but also

  •   Fires and pests changing the boreal forests (D)
Treeloss in Germany: 5% over the past 3years.
Source: Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt e. V. (DLR)

If you look into science, europe’s forest have a great potential to help reaching the climate targets as they account for 7% of emissions in europe. This could grow by additional 5%. Partially through improved forest management, through additional forests, but also by substituting fossil fuels or CO2 intensive building elements. However the forest are endangered by climate change and potentially even could emit CO2.

Europe has around 16M forest owners. This means 16M opinions. Many don’t mind der footprint, many don’t even know where their forest is and they never visited it. They just inherited it. The forester is an unsung hero and he’s fighting a hard game where timber prices are still not matching the risen costs of labor.

However there’s a light at the end of the tunnel: The mechanism of trading carbon credits. To put it simple – companies (and individuals) emitting more than their budgeted carbon have the possibility (or duty) to offset hard-to-avoid emissions. Of course they have to 1) avoid emissions 2) reduce emissions and as last resort 3) offset them. This approach is called “Science Based Targets“.

Right now about 10.000 companies in Europe are part of the non-voluntary ETS (EU Emissions Trading System). They account for ~40% of Europe’s emissions. While this is a big and growing market, I find the voluntary carbon market way more interesting. Companies decide – e.g. because of their CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) to offset their hard-to-avoid emissions, but often also contribute to secondary ESG (Environment, Social, Governance) goals.

This is what-for i founded Tree.ly.

I had a dream that these 16m forest owners could be united, and pull in one direction; step by step, not just in one year. The forest has a lot of functions (protection, commercial use, recreation, wellfare) and we need a healthy mix of various forest types (jungles, primeval forests, biodiversity, commercial forests,…). In the first step Tree.ly is focussing on the forests with the largest share – managed forests.

Measuring forests
Image credits: Tree.ly, illwerkevkw, ocell.io, Land Vorarlberg

We’re developing state of the art software that calculates the amount of carbon stored on parcel level, using terrestrial forest inventory and airborne laser scanning to train machine learning models that run on multispectral and multitemporal satellite images.

Ideal stockstand
Image credits: ETH Zurich, Silvaconsult, Tree.ly

For each parcel the optimum stockstand (the amount of timber per hectare), based on scientific methods, e.g. studies from ETH Zurich, is being calculated. This depends on a series of factors, e.g. the altitude of the different areas of the forest. Within that calculated boundary, the annual growth of timber is optimized. If a forest is operated in this area, the largest amount of CO2 is being sequestered every year.

An important side-note (and already mentioned earlier): For other reasons, e.g. biodiversity we also need native ecosystems and forests with more natural conditions. E.g. the FSC (Forest stewardship council) recommends 10% of the area to be optimised for biodiversity.

Image credit: Unsplash

The forest owner makes a commitment for 30 years, based on his/her future plans and the previously calculated data. It might be necessary to build up biomass, or simply to preserve it. As seen above, if we do nothing, our forests won’t exist the way they do now in the coming years. Adapting our slow moving forests to the challenges of climate change requires a great amount of resources and time.

Carbon Credits and secondary benefits
Image credit: myclimate

Based on the forest owners commitment and management of the forest Tree.ly takes care of the cumbersome job of auditing it with a third party and also does the annual reports/monitoring. We manage the issued VERs (verified emission reductions), often called carbon credits or CO2 certificates and sell them on behalf of the forest owners on the voluntary carbon market.

There’s much to talk/write about the things that need to happen behind the scenes. Tree.ly takes care of certification standards (especially the aspects around additionality, permanence, leakage), creates a risk pools for calamities, works with public bodies in the areas of double counting, encourages companies to work along science based targets – just to name a few.

Lush mountain meadow in front of my parents house
Image credit: Andreas Schlachter Photography

It’s still a long way to go, but that’s where i’m coming from. A boy from the beautiful Bregenzerwald mountains. I could have known that this is part of my journey. I found my purpose right now, fulfilment and I’m certain success will continue.

I have to practice what i preach, and therefor I have shouted into the forest. I hope I come back in 10y and show that Tree.ly and my other activities made a dent in the universe.

Categories
Culture Entrepreneurship Food for Thought

Just do it.

Wir leben an einem der privilegiertesten Orte dieser Welt. Wir haben eine große Verantwortung für zukünftige Generationen. Deshalb nimm‘s in die Hand: Trau dich! Es wird niemand anderer für dich machen.

Some of my current Thoughts

Kürzlich haben die wunderbare Pia Pia Pia (mit Team), sowie Andrea von Krautblog mit mir eine Story für die Smartcity Dornbirn gemacht.

Dabei durfte ich Statements zu #selbstorganisation #leadership #comfortzone #stadtderzukunft #green #climate #smart und vielen weiteren wichtigen Themen geben.

Ach ja, ein Spoiler auf ein neues Unternehmen ist auch dabei. Dazu in einem der nächsten Posts mehr.

Youtube Video: Selbstorganisierte Systeme sind resilienter.

Die Textversion des Interview “Trau dich: Selbstorganisation mit Führung funktioniert! ist auch in gedruckter Version auf vol.at zu lesen.

Weiterführende Literatur zum Thema Selbstorganisation & Leadership gerne von meinen Freunden Boris und Dieter.

Categories
Culture Learning Motivation Principles

Fuck the Bread. The bread is over.

HÄNSEL AND GRETEL, BY ALEXANDER ZICK

Please take a couple of minutes and read the fabulous essay Sabrina Orah Mark wrote in her Happily Column. Her Blog focuses on fairy tales and motherhood. Within the many things that resonate in her post, one thing struck me most:

It’s about learning. Why are fairytales so important for learning, and why you need to curse “fuck the bread” sooner or later!

Enter Japanese Martian Art – Aikido. Shu-Ha-Ri is a concept describing the steps to mastery. I came across it a couple of years ago, when Alistair Cockburn took away my Scrum blinders.

shu (守)

protect, obey

This is the very first stage of learning, you apply traditional wisdom, you learn fundamentals, techniques, heuristics, proverbs. Think of children baking their first simple cake. Mine was a marble cake (“Marmorkuchen”). You strictly follow the recipe (If you’re not into baking, watch Karate Kid):

  1. Mix 125g of butter until it is creamy.
  2. Add 3 eggs and 120g of sugar. Mix until creamy.
  3. Add 170ml of milk and half a pack of baking soda
  4. Split in two bowls and add cocoa powder into one half
  5. Fill in buttered cake tin and fill with alternating dough
  6. Bake 50mins at 180°C

It fits like a shu (“shoe”). You do exactly as said, you’ll get a consistent result. It’s like a fairy tale. You walk through a dangerous forest, you don’t leave the path, you are ok.

Scrum is another great example for a Shu recipe. You create a backlog, you estimate and prioritize stories, you do sprintplannings, daily standups, reviews, retros. Timeboxed, with the right roles present. If you follow exactly the rules it’s guaranteed that you’ll have a consistent result.

Ok, we’re done with learning! You’ve learnt a technique. Many people stop here. And like in a fairytale they live happy until the end. But, Oh wait!

ha (破) 

detach, digress

In fairy tales, form is your function and function is your form. If you don’t spin the straw into gold or inherit the kingdom or devour all the oxen or find the flour or get the professorship, you drop out of the fairy tale, and fall over its edge into an endless, blank forest where there is no other function for you, no alternative career.

from Sabrina Orah Mark’s Blog post

No worries. There is more! Sometimes it’s necessary to yell “Fuck the Bread“. And break with the habits. Maybe Hänsel and Gretel walked the forest 100 times. And at some point they dare to take a different path, and guess what – it’s safe as well and more beautiful, and even faster! In this stage, curiosity, or the limitations of the given technique (think of cooking) cause you to experiment. Break with the norms. You’re collecting techniques. It’s the learning stage.

Back to cooking: After dozens of marble cakes (ask my mom!) I gradually left common recipes and I consider myself being a chef at the ha level in most cases – I can comfortably leave the exact recipe, I’m experimenting (and failing) – and in some rare moments I’m creating exciting new things! For complex szechuan recipes or a Ottolenghi masterpiece with dozens of ingredients I might fall back to shu level.

Throughout this stage you gradually separate from the strict form of the shoe “Shu”. Make sure you work on your habits, because:

In the first 30 years, you make your habits. For the last 30 years of your live, the habits make you.

Steve Jobs

ri (離)

leave, separate

At some point you are able to fully detach from the form. You can’t say why you chose a specific technique. You just do it naturally, no recipe, no preparation needed. Martin Broadwell describes it as unconscious competence. The easier you can leave the form, the more often you detach from it, the closer you are to the ri level.

Translated to learning, you now invent and blend techniques. The magic happens at your very own “You at your best” moments, where there are in the flow and time and space disappear.
Earlier I spoke about “Fuck the bread”. You’re past the point where you care about that. But you’re anything else but careless and you’re neither ruthless as well.

Dalai Lama state? Can anything come after? The Shu-Ha-Ri ends here,

but Alistair Cockburn (mentioned earlier) is on the journey to dive deeper and find out what could come after:

Kokoro ( 心)

essence, heart

Kokoro is used in the writings of the 17th century samurai master Miyamoto Musashi to refer to the essence or heart of the samurai. It’s the radically simplified essence of a skill area. The figure below shows how practice starts off simple (Shu, learn one technique), grows more complicated as one learns more techniques (Ha, collect), becomes indescribably complicated at the Ri level (invent and blend), and finally takes on a simple form (Kokoro) when given by the advanced teacher.

Alistair Cockburn “Heart of Agile“

By teaching others you improve your mastery. Kokoro represents the teaching stage of the advanced practitioner. It is characterized by the advice “Just master the basics.”

  • The marble cake.
  • Hänsel and Gretel following the path
  • Following the essential rules of Scrum

“You know what, Mama?” he says. “You’d make a really good teacher.” “Thank you,” I say. And then I show him how to draw a bet.

Closing words of Sabrina Orah Mark in her column

Right now my learning journey is getting better in coaching, active listening, … and I’m glad to learn the basics from masters like Matthias Ehrhardt or Dieter Rösner.

Categories
Culture Entrepreneurship Principles

Why people quit

I received some feedback and questions about my post on leadership decisions at a workplace, and why I believe that many societal and political topics don’t belong to my workplace. (A clarifying side note: I wasn’t saying Basecamp is right or wrong. And banning and forbidding speech is a bad idea in general).

I’ve been chewing parts of this post for a while. But as about one third of the Basecamp workforce left after their leaders Jason/David announced some cultural changes and today Melinda and Bill Gates announced their separation, it was time to push it out.

All of these separations really moved me and over the weekend I spent several hours in reading and researching. It moved me because I can personally relate to that very well. In November I left my previous company (~60 employees like Basecamp) and over the last few month ~25 people – of which most of them I hired personally – left the company too.

(Just to be clear and explicit: I’m not making hints, propose conclusions or draw any parallels to my former company or people involved there. This is rather based being a curious, learning entrepreneur for 30years).

It was the right decision

Companies and their leaders have the right and duty to make decisions. To set their leadership style and their culture. To change it gradually, radically or not at all. And to take the consequences. This isn’t good or bad per se. This is just how it is and how it has to be.

At the point a decision is taken (“Culture Changes”/”Quitting the Job”) – it was the right decision for the corresponding party. At the very moment to decide, everybody will take the best decision this person can take, based on the (limited) facts available.

Software engineers in the tech space are well paid (in Basecamp’s case ~220k/year, paying at the top 10% of San Francisco market rate and will receive up to 6 month of salary if they decide to leave). So they can also decide freely if they want to stay and adopt to the new situation/culture or if they want to move on. It’s also very unlikely they have to pee in bottles while driving delivery trucks or being in physical danger. So it’s pretty safe to assume:

People don’t quit a job, they quit a boss.

It’s a common saying, but i don’t fully agree.

(Among the many articles I read, this HBR article reflected my view best, I’m partially paraphrasing it. Also “What you do is who you are (Summary)” by Ben Horowitz inspired me a lot).

Strong companies are built around strong cultures. And they will be highly individual, but they will share a couple of patterns. Often they are built around the leaders that craft them. I bet you’ve seen this comic:

This comic has been floating around the internet for a couple of years

Organisations need structure and leadership. This is a good thing and isn’t contradictory to self-organisation, empowerment of the individuals,… Modern leadership styles/principles fully embrace that. I’m stressing that because I strongly believe that so much of a happy/fulfilled workplace is dependent on that connection.

Changing culture

It’s as simple as that. Different cultures attract different people. Sometimes leadership changes, and therefore a change of talent follows. Or culture starts drifting away and gets recalibrated, which results in churn.

Nothing to worry about. just to be aware of.

Missing Joy

As leader you need to know what employees enjoy. Where a person can work at their best. People aren’t resources that are slotted into a position. Remember, we spend a good portion of our time awake at work. We need to support everybody to craft their optimal experience at work.

You need to design around them. If people are engaged and come to that energized state that is named flow, magic happens. And magic results are just magic! This is only possible if people are in a safe space, where they don’t have to worry about many things. Without trust a safe space can’t exist. But how to create trust (Yes, mistrust leads to people quitting their jobs)?

Shrinking Trust

Strong cultures are memorable and based on a set of rules. The simpler and more explicit they are, the better. Because if you’re operating on these set of principles reliably it creates trust. An additional benefit of trust is that it makes communication way more effective. Because, if you don’t trust me, all my talking would be useless.

A few of my personal rules that randomly come to my mind: “I do what I say, I say what I do”, “I communicate decisions, as soon as they are taken and don’t hide them.”, “In case of mistakes I’m focussing on avoiding it in future, not on finding who’s guilt it was.”, or to close that heading “Assume every decision is right, as you assume best intentions.”…

Never forget: It’s hard to earn trust and takes time. It’s easy to destroy trust and takes no time.

Lack of Appreciation

A healthy company has a good, diverse mix of individuals. The doers, introverts, fighters, dreamers, caretakers, listeners, thinkers, tinkerers, silent ones, critics,… As leader I often felt like a Zoo director.

The animals in the forest (from MyToys Puzzle)

Assume everybody is doing her/his best. All the time. Therefore everybody deserves their share of appreciation and attention. A “small beaver” can be equally important to a “big roaring tiger” but will leave if he’s not seen and appreciated. No matter how long an employee is with the company, or how important their role is.

Lack of growth perspective

Bill and Melinda Gates separated after 27 years of marriage because they “no longer believe they can grow together as a couple”.
So, if an employee is asking: “What is my perspective at the company?”, you already missed the point of proactively managing that. If these answers are missing, one will sooner or later quit. On the other hand – providing a clear growth path can do wonders!

As Leader, don’t delegate diversity and inclusion. It’s your job. As soon you reach a point, where DEI is done for it’s own purpose you lost the connection to the company culture and this leads to dissatisfaction.

There are assholes out there. They might be inside your company. Manage them well. Recognise that you won’t be able to change them. Make sure they do as little damage as possible. As long you have the power. Don’t look away, act.

People don’t leave companies, they leave people.

Paraphrased from Ben Horowitz’ Book

Oh, btw. I’m about to put together a new team as we speak.

People don’t join companies, they choose the people to work with.

Mail me or call me if you’re ready to make a choice.

Categories
Coding

Removing Animations in PowerPoint

Something totally different, but hopefully this will save another Entrepreneur using some PowerPoint Templates (I’m using the Voodoo Presentation from TemplateZuu right now) some precious hours.

Good old Visual Basic

While it’s handy to have a lot of templates done, I found the animations pretty annoying. But as lazy I am I didn’t want to click all 100+ Master Slides to get the animations removed. So I just added this VBA Code (Visual Basic for Applications) to one PPT and opened all other presentations – and executed the removeAnimationsFromOpenPresentations macro.

Sub removeAnimationsFromOpenPresentations()
    Dim myPpt As Presentation
    Debug.Print "Open ppt's : "; Application.Presentations.Count & vbCrLf
    For Each myPpt In Application.Presentations
        Debug.Print myPpt.Name
        Call removeAnimations(myPpt)
    Next myPpt
End Sub
Private Sub removeSequences(ByRef tl As TimeLine)
    For i = tl.MainSequence.Count To 1 Step -1
        tl.MainSequence(i).Delete
    Next i
End Sub
Private Sub removeAnimations(ppt As Presentation)
    Dim d As design
    Dim m As Master
    Dim cl As CustomLayout
    Dim s As Slide
    For Each d In ppt.Designs
        Set m = d.SlideMaster
        removeSequences m.TimeLine
        For Each cl In m.CustomLayouts
            removeSequences cl.TimeLine
        Next 'cl
    Next 'd
    For Each s In ppt.Slides
        removeSequences s.TimeLine
    Next 's
    ' Turn on animations again
    ppt.SlideShowSettings.ShowWithAnimation = msoTrue
End Sub
Categories
Books Culture Principles

The marks of a rational person

Over the past 6 months I’ve been in the luxury position to take time to further center myself and better live my equilibrium.

Among other things I’ve continued to dive into stoicism (a journey that will never end). Meanwhile the Daily Stoic iBooks meditation is the first and last thing I read in bed every night and morning.

Over the last few days I’ve been thinking a log about this meditation:

These are the characteristics of the rational soul: self-awareness, self-examination, and self-determination. It reaps its own harvest. … It succeeds in its own purpose …

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 11.1-2

As Ryan Singer in the book mentioned above put’s it:

“First, we must look inward.

Next we must examine ourselves critically.

Finally we must make our own decisions – uninhibited or by bias”

I had the opportunity to spend a lot of quality time with trusted people and collect precious feedback. That resulted in positive affirmation for some things I had a gut feeling about.

And that helped me to be clearer in my thoughts and trust my gut feeling even more. So today, when I read the changes at Basecamp David and Jason at Basecamp announced, my heart was jumping to see how they have the guts to make decisions!

And my inner self was smiling because I’m generally strong in making decisions and much of what they decided on resonated with me (and I already had decided on). Partially out of rationale, partly out of gut feeling:

1. No more societal and political discussions … 

The work place I’m responsible for is a work place. It’s no family, and it’s no club. It’s as open and welcoming as possible. Regardless of sex, gender identity, nationality, color, race, religion, ancestry, national origin, citizenship, sexual orientation, age, marital status or disability.

Societal and political discussions are essential! And we should have more of them. But outside and disconnected from the workplace. Still we are one holistic individual, we’re not schizophrenic and turn off one character when we enter the work world. We should be authentic, but be very aware in which context / role we are acting every moment.

2. No more paternalistic benefits. 

I’ve tried to motivate / incentive employees to e.g. do more sports by paying fitness benefits. This felt good and at the time I was proud about it. But these things are highly individual choices and it isn’t the responsibility of the company to influence them.

However, in my personal feedback talks with employees I often referred to the “Wheel of Life” or “Wheel of happiness”. And that I like that concept and encourage people to assess their happiness state. However I made very clear that me and my business can only help in the areas “Business/Career” and partially “Personal Growth” and to some extend in “Finances”. The rest is happening outside work.

(found via google image search and copied from The Start of Happiness)

3. No more committees. 

There is a german saying: “Wenn du nicht mehr weiter weisst, gründe einen Arbeitskreis.”

A lot of committees take speed out of an organisation and discourage decision making. Decision making is vital. It’s up to a leader to take decisions that can’t be taken by individuals or a team. No need for additional overhead, just take a decision (or escalate it).

This is also slightly related to the non-politics or societal discussions at work. Not at my business. Google seems to have a strong culture for that (but also reaches it limits if the wine lovers group starts fighting the breast-feeding-moms or they disagree with the group of people bringing their dogs to work and the pastafarians). I believe in a world where all of these discussions are welcome, but outside the workplace.

4. No more lingering or dwelling on past decisions. 

Let me just quote and repeat what Jason wrote: “It’s time to get back to making calls, explaining why once, and moving on.”.

5. No more 360 reviews.

Yay! Finally. I’m happy I resisted to that trend for so many years. Constant manager/employee feedback it is. I promise, for the near future I’ll continue to stay away from them.

6. No forgetting what we do here. 

I believe in a world where each individual can make it’s own choices (as long it is in accordance with the law and not discriminating/hurting others – also see above). And it’s also everybody’s personal decision which movements to join and where to spend energy. But at my workplace we’re making mostly software and that’s a big enough problem to solve.