On a regular basis the ETH Entrepreneur Club provides us exciting blogs about the Startup Essentials. The first of this semester’s workshops by venturelab started with a lesson about how to pitch: the participants had 30 seconds to present their startup idea. 

20160308_172514_s

Stefan Steiner (venturelab) said: „You have to learn to talk about your project but taking care of your IP.“

It was important to focus on one thing during the pitch: “Who buys what and why?”. If you can explain this in less than 30 seconds, the first step is accomplished. After the pitches, feedback was given to the audience. We heard ideas about methods for accurate diagnosis of brain injuries, ultra low power chips, renewable energies, multi-purpose support buttons, smart homes and many more.
Stefan Steiner from venturelab, who led the evening’s event, said that it’s important to go out of your lab/office and talk to people. You have to learn to talk about your project, but taking care of your IP. Feedback is important!

Going out and talking to people also helps you build up a network which will give you credibility when looking for investors. This point takes us directly to another topic of the workshop: how to approach people when looking for investors. Here also Steiner had many tips to share with the audience: Keep your intro mail short! You don’t want to annoy people, get straight to the point. And find someone to introduce you personally, don’t just write emails to info@… email addresses since most probably they will not be read. Keep it simple and clear: as Einstein said, “If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” 20160308_172204_s Claudio Marforio and Nikolaos Karapanos from SoundProof, winners of the last edition of the EC Award, are developing a two-factor authentication mechanism that does not require interaction between the user and his phone. “We want to learn about how to bring our product to the markets”, Claudio said. As many other tech startups, they need help for the business part. And that’s exactly what the Startup Essential Workshops are for!

The Startup Essentials are a great format for young and ambitious entrepreneurs. Loads of success have already participants from the last semester course like Clara Beck from TapTools, Tauras Sinkevicius from WedMap or Raphael Gindrat from BestMile. Register here for the next free workshops with Staff Finder CEO Viktor Calabro – with whom we talked a last year about his company and who closed a huge financing round last week. You want to jump into the next workshop session? Register at http://www.venturelab.ch/se A report by ETH Entrepreneur Club (written by Marco Hoseneder).