Category: Entrepreneurship

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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 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 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
Entrepreneurship VC

Pitching und Raising Capital

Über die letzten 7 Jahre – während ich Crate gegründet und mit aufgebaut habe – hatte ich über zahlreiche Finanzierungsrunden Gelegenheit Pitches zu üben und zu “delivern”. Ich habe mich sehr gefreut, darüber mit Boris Gloger darüber eine Podcastfolge aufzunehmen.

Mit Leidenschaft zum Venture Capital – mit Jodok Batlogg
Podcast Folge bei Boris

PS.: Boris ist mit QLAB gerade selbst gerade dabei, wieder ein Start-up zu gründen. Dazu gibts auch eine Folge auf Boris’ Blog.

Categories
Entrepreneurship

Servus and Thank You!

This has originally been posted on the Crate.io blog end of September 2020.

Today I’m announcing my departure from Crate.io, the company I cofounded 7+ years ago and have been building together with a great team.

I’ve had many roles at Crate.io over the years, and today I have a new, final one – a still convinced user and ambassador of CrateDB. But I will no longer be part of day-to-day operations. Instead, after obsessing for so many years over distributed databases and building a strong engineering culture built on trust, it’s time to move on and focus on solving other problems on this planet. Going forward I’ll use my experience and endurance to tackle them in any way I can.

Seven years ago, Bernd Dorn, Manfred Schwendinger and me built the first version of CrateDB and then we configured our startup: Manfred had to take care of our pre-existing business, I took the CEO role, Bernd, the best coder and architect was the natural choice as CTO and Christian Lutz, with his experience and success in funding, building and selling tech companies initially as our COO. Our goal was to make scaling super simple. CrateDB and “Big Data SQL in Real-Time” did a picture-perfect launch: HackerNews, trending Github repository, TechCrunch, Gigaom, TheNextWeb, Pioneers,…

It was crystal clear that building an open source database is a long-term, difficult undertaking requiring lots of VC funding, which would allow us to build together a successful business and raise capital in multiple rounds.

Crate: simple – horizontal – scaling 

Machine generated data – including Time Series Data – is the fastest growing database segment and the fully distributed SQL query engine of CrateDB is the perfect foundation for the enterprise IOT market.

End of 2015 it was again a natural move that I took the CTO seat and Christian took over the CEO seat to build out with the team the commercial part of the company and execute professional VC fundraises in UK and Silicon Valley.

End of 2016 we tipped the cow, released CrateDB 1.0 and also started monetizing our product. This led to a global, strong growth of users and we transitioned from an engineering-only r&d company to a financially successful B2B enterprise business and also raise our Series A.

Today, 7 years and 360 CrateDB releases later, Crate.io is grown-up and is a revenue driven enterprise business with large customers and partners, and even more ambitious growth targets than ever. That’s why the board of directors brought in Eva Schönleitner as CEO, Christian got appointed as President to the board and I am happy to see Bernd coming back and taking again the engineering lead as CTO. To be able to pursue that huge opportunity that lies ahead of Crate the leadership team needs to evolve and guide the company to further growth. As a leaving executive I couldn’t be happier to see that the company is set up for success and find a new role.

As a founder, of course, I have mixed emotions. When you create a company, your job is to make sure it can one day succeed without you. Then eventually that one day comes and the celebration can be bittersweet.

It’s never easy for a founder to part ways with their work. I know that most ideas never materialize. Most software goes unused. Most businesses fail in their first years but we didn’t and here we are. Now, with Petabytes of data being processed by CrateDB, some of the largest and most successful businesses using CrateDB in their core processes, being recognized by Forbes Magazine and named a Cool Vendor by Gartner you know that your work was meaningful, and that a vibrant group of customers and partner will continue building upon it…. can any founder ask for anything more?

Photo: Ian Ehm/friendship.is 

I want to thank from the bottom of my heart every Cratie – our team members, past and present, for making Crate.io what it is today. Thanks to you, this founder’s bittersweet moment is mostly sweet. I look forward to seeing where you will take it next.

Thank you

Jodok

What started with an Cathode powered screencast ends with the same:

DELETE FROM
Categories
Culture Entrepreneurship Motivation

Podcast: Von der Idee zum Unternehmen

Mein Freund Boris Gloger ist ein besonderer Mensch. Mich verbinden viele Sachen mit ihm. Wir wollten und wollen immer noch mehr gemeinsam unternehmen. Ein erster kleiner Schritt ist, dass wir es endlich geschafft haben, einen ersten Podcast aufzunehmen.

Im Frühling hat mich Boris “auf dem Fahrrad” besucht – und wir habeen beschlossen: Jawohl! Eine Podcast Episode zum Start.

Hört euch an, was wir zum Thema “unternehmen” plaudern:

“Die Ideen gehen mir nicht aus”, Jodok Batlogg ist Gründer und Geschäftsführer von Crate.io in Dornbirn. Außerdem ist er Informatiker und mehrfacher Entrepreneur, der bereits sieben Unternehmen aufgebaut hat und nun das achte Jahr im aktuellen Unternehmen Crate.io angeht. Ausgehend von einer – für ihn – glasklaren Idee einer hochskalierbaren Datenbank für maschinengenerierte Daten (z.B. Sensordaten, Daten in der industriellen Produktion) gründete er das Start-up Crate.io und fing dafür wieder einmal bei Null an.

Ich unterhalte mich mit Jodok darüber, wieso er es nicht lassen kann, was ihn antreibt und welche Hürden er überwinden musste. Er erzählt uns ein wenig über seine Produktidee, was seinen Lebensstil als Unternehmer ausmacht und wie er das gesamte Unternehmen denkt. Silicon Valley spielt natürlich auch ein Rolle.

Ich wünsche euch viel Spaß beim Zuhören!

Boris Gloger

Categories
Crate Entrepreneurship

Podcast: Distributed databases and product-market fit

I had the opportunity to record an episode of the “Digitale Leute Podcast” with my friend Oliver Thielmann from Giant Swarm and would like to reshare it here as well:

featuring electric skateboards and bitcoins

Why industrial IoT startup Crate.io can easily do distributed databases but still had trouble finding product-market fit

Being at number one at Hacker News or winning the TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Battle might help create a hype around your startup. But it doesn’t help finding the product-market fit. Jodok Batlogg, CTO at industrial IoT startup Crate.io explains in this episode why they needed six years to finally hit product-market fit.

Digitale Leute Insights is the podcast for passionate product people. We interview product developers from around the world and take a closer look at their tools and tactics.

Subscribe via: Soundcloud, Spotify, Deezer, Google Podcasts or Apple Podcasts.

When Jodok Batlogg was the CTO at StudiVZ, the largest social network in Germany before Facebook got traction in Europe, the biggest problem they had was data storage. The data of 60 million users were running on about a thousand servers and Docker had not been invented yet. It was clear to Jodok that the amount of data would be growing and the problems with it. 

Four years later, he founded Crate.io with a prototype of CrateDB. The open-source distributed SQL database management system used Elastic Search when that was still “a crazy guy sitting in Israel coding at a new kind of approach on how to deal with distributed computing,” as Jodok puts it in this episode. 

His startup enjoyed two hypes early. The first one was a Hacker News article that resulted in the company going into the “Big Data SQL in real-time” direction. The second boost came after winning the TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Battle, which Jodok completed with a broken fibula. Although it helped to keep the company alive with bringing in investors, they were still to find product-market fit, Jodok admits. “On the product side, it was fine, but from the going-to-market side and on the monetization side, it was totally wrong.” 

How to gain product-market fit

The turnaround came as late as five years after the foundation when the company did a customer survey. The result was a transformation to a more enterprise-focused company concentrating on industrial IoT. They switched the open-source model, which allowed the customers to perceive Crate.io as a product worth buying. It also helped the sales department actually to sell the product.  Before that, even hiring extra sales employees had resulted in zero sales. 

Today Crate.io is a remote-first company, led by Jodok Batlogg as CTO from Dornbirn, a small town in Vorarlberg, Austria. The mountainous country and Jodoks attempt to not use his Audi anymore leads him to try out all the new electric boards, bikes, and gadgets on the market. He shares this passion with our host Oliver Thylmann. This is why they close this episode by discussing electromobility and paying it with bitcoin.

About the Host
Oliver Thylmann is a serial entrepreneur based in Cologne, Germany. He is the co-founder of Giant Swarm, a 35-person SaaS company providing managed microservice infrastructure to big enterprises.