Talks

Diversity is high on everybody’s agenda. If it is not on yours, you’ve really missed something ;). But becoming a diverse organization is more complex than it seems at first sight. There are plenty of aspects to diversity, and due to time and money constraints, you cannot focus on them all. You need to choose your battles. Where do I invest time and resources? How do I make it happen as a startup with little employer reputation, budget constraints and time pressure? How do I decide what aspect of diversity to focus on? Let’s discuss!

Katy Campbell →

APX

Lead Brand & Communications

Rainer Berak →

Project A

Managing Director & COO

Uwe Horstmann →

Project A

General Partner

Meera Innes →

-

Startup Culture & Communications Consultant

Product development moves at lightning speed today. Our analytics cannot be a blocker. But – spoiler alert – when we don't have the right processes and infrastructure around it, our analytics will be a blocker.

Stefania Olafsdóttir →

Avo

Co-Founder & CEO

Klara is a digital product, which means that it needs a lot of iterations of testing and improving before it can go to production. Even though we have a place in our stack for unit tests, our functional / integration test suite is growing much faster. During the development of our product, we found out that it’s more important to test our product via user flows. Cypress.io is a tool that allows us to do so.
Our first cypress related commit happened in September 2017. What we did since then will be one of the main topics I will talk about in my presentation.

Fatos Hoti →

Klara

Engineering Manager

The technological basis of IT systems has many implications for day to day business (e.g. performance limitations or development-processes). Together with kfzteile24 we recently had the opportunity of re-thinking the frontend tech stack of their e-commerce platform to tackle such issues. This talk will cover the process from analysis, solution- and migration-strategy to key-learnings and -results.

Juan Pablo Dénis Otarola →

Project A

Frontend Engineer

Christian Höpfner →

Project A

Teamlead Frontend Engineering

Hannes Schwager →

kfzteile24

Lead Product Manager

It pays off to know your target group, their needs, how they perceive your brand and your product and service offers. It’s not rocket science either. It’s just work – but its worth it. Discussed are the most relevant approaches needed to steer your marketing based on real insights.

Mirko Caspar →

Mister Spex

Managing Director

How can you optimize an import process in a way that it only takes a few hours instead of several days?

A common issue for microservice platforms is to sync huge amounts of data between services. This talk covers the hopes, results and challenges encountered during the migration of the Kfzteile24 eCommerce dataflows from stateful cron jobs to an event-driven pipeline based on Amazon SQS and SNS.

Nick Personn →

kfzteile24

Lead PHP Engineer

Jacopo Melloni →

Project A

Web Developer

Two trends have been emerging recently that use mechanics well-known from the world of celebrity marketing: embodying brands through human beings via personal branding and personified marketing.

On the one hand positioning a person, mostly founders, as a renowned expert in their field. On the other hand, investing marketing dollars to boost the popularity of lesser-known individuals to associate their attributes with the company featuring them. Julia Bösch, Pia Frey and Ronnie Vuine all have become the public faces of their respective companies and will discuss their personal learnings.

Pia Frey  →

Opinary

Co-Founder & Head of Publishers

Ronnie Vuine →

micropsi industries

Founder & Managing Director

Julia Bösch  →

OUTFITTERY

CEO & Co-Founder

Dr. Florian Heinemann →

Project A

Founding Partner

This talk covers the operational support that Project A provided in the context of our Trendtours Private Equity investment.

We will speak about how we kept systems alive after the leaving of a key person, how we participated in a migration to the SAP CommerceCloud and how and why we implemented a slack like DataLayer for data.

Stephan Schulze →

Project A

Chief Technology Officer

Stefanie Jahnke →

Project A

Teamlead Software Engineering

Five hard truths every entrepreneur has to learn about communication.

Your business idea is spot-on, your product brilliant, your team inspiring, - and yet nobody takes notice. You wonder why? We will share 5 hard truths of communication that you have to know to get the attention you and your startup deserve. The first hard truth is: Nobody cares about you and your startup. But the good thing is: You can change that.

Dr. Laura Sophie Dornheim →

eyeo

Head of Communications

Danijel Višević →

Project A

Director of Communications

Data Science is transforming businesses: proptech, insurtech, fintech. None of these industries is going to stay as we all know them. How has data science transformed Real Estate business (e.g., Zillow, Homeday, Compass, OpenDoor)? And what is next? Some questions will be answered in the presentation, some will stay open...

Dr. Artiom Kovnatsky →

Homeday

Lead Data Scientist Entrepreneur

To build a successful company, you need the right timing, a great idea, and the relevant market size. Most importantly, you need a team that delivers great performance! You have to define the right structure and implement it at the right pace, motivate your people, and get the right skills on board - operational expertise but also soft skills. You need to give people guidance without micromanaging, allow for creativity while keeping the focus on delivery, be there for them while fostering independence. Here are 6 rules for building a company in a way that makes success possible.

Rainer Berak →

Project A

Managing Director & COO

Simon Dotzer →

Spryker

Director People, Operations & Data

As software advances in the world, all business transactions become digital. Even the most analogue businesses need to rethink their approach from a purely digital perspective. In this presentation, Michael and Dennis will give you a framework for analyzing any business from the point of view of digital commerce and its standard components to better understand what you need to serve your customers. Regardless of its specific characteristics, viewing your business through the lenses of digital commerce will help you navigate this landscape more effectively.

Michael Vax →

Spryker

VP Product

Dennis Krüger →

Project A

Product Manager

After more than twelve years in the venture capital industry, Project A founder and general partner Uwe Horstmann will share his view on the venture capital business model — and specifically what's wrong with it. Ugly truths will be revealed, as well as strategies on how to make them work for you when you are trying to raise capital from VCs.

Uwe Horstmann →

Project A

General Partner

Exiting a company is a once in a lifetime experience for almost any founder. At the same time, preparing for and executing an M&A process for a VC-backed company is a tremendous challenge. These and other key drivers for a successful M&A process will be discussed and practical insights shared in SMP’s “The Exit” talk.

Dr. Martin Schaper →

SMP

Associated Partner

Dr. Peter Möllmann →

SMP

Partner

Marketing automation is a powerful tool for scaling businesses, but these systems are often over-engineered in ways that make them ineffective or counterproductive. This talk highlights the key steps in ensuring simplicity in these systems to boost the marketing output of companies of all sizes.

Ellis Crosby →

Blinkist

Senior Marketing Intelligence Analyst

To build a successful marketing plan you need to define your short- and long-term strategy. Resource allocation into the short or long-term poses a dilemma: You need to plan long-term success of your business, but without short-term success, your business may not survive for long-term strategies to pay off. However, focusing on short-term success will put your business in a bad position for future growth and ROI efficiency. A competitor that’s in it for the long haul might eventually surpass you. I will share 4 learnings from personal experience to help you deliver on your marketing strategy.

Dirk Brauner →

FRIDAY

Chief Marketing Officer

Iskender is the founder of the COUP Movement - Commandments of Outstanding Presentations.
In this session, Iskender will provide a short version of his COUP Framework that empowers everyone to be more successful through outstanding presentations and speeches. You'll get Iskender's top advice for all of the four modules of his COUP Framework:
1. Script: The perfect storyline for your presentation/speech
2. Actor: Using your voice and body language
3. Slide-Design: Designing impactful slides for verbal presentations
4. Audience: Engaging with your audience and maximizing the learning effect

Iskender Dirik →

COUP Movement

Founder

Hiring salespeople is cited among the biggest challenges in organization-building within our portfolio. There simply don't exist enough experienced salespeople out there with the right fit for your company and even if you find them, you likely spent a staggering amount of time and money to get there. Knowing this, you either become damn good in building up talent yourself and/or you train and retain the rare talent you did find. Corinne and Raul created the Sales Development Graduate Program at Project A and would like to share their insights on how to hire, train and retain sales talent.

Corinne Herberg →

Project A

Sales & Customer Success Analyst

Raul Porojan →

Project A

Sales & Customer Success Specialist

Scaleups have been increasing their strategic M&A activities. As traditional commercial loans are often unavailable, questions regarding the means of financing arise. Due to the lack of stable cash flow, the focus is now often placed on share for share deals and financing rounds. These topics and various questions concerning buy-side M&A deals involving growth companies will be touched upon in SMP’s “Strategic M&A” talk.

Dr. Tim Schlösser →

SMP

Partner

Dr. Benjamin Ullrich →

SMP

Partner

In an era where we are collecting ever more data, translating that into actionable insights can determine the success or failure of a company. There is no one perfect way of addressing this - together with specialists in the field we will discuss different approaches and challenges of inspiring organisations to become data-driven.

Sara Cooper →

Opinary

Business Intelligence Analyst

Dr. Florian Hottner →

Scout24

Teamlead Insights & Analytics

Melisa Kleen →

Blinkist

Head of Business Intelligence

Simon Dotzer →

Spryker

Director People, Operations & Data

In today’s economy, first-order platforms are pocketing the largest share of customer access. To retain direct customer relationships and regain margins, modern-day brands need to utilize their CRM insights to their maximum potential. Join us for a session where we will share best practices and case studies and inspire you to create maximal effective campaigns.

Krzysztof Szymanski →

Project A

Head of Customer Engagement

Dr. Markus Wuebben →

CrossEngage

Co-Founder & Managing Director

Several engineers reach the problem of dealing with distributed systems in order to scale platforms. When this happens, sometimes a lack of understanding the overall system setup shows up, creating a sense of loosing control over the components communications patterns.

With the help of Domain Driven Design, and applying Automation and Decoupling principles, it's possible to architect software, not to remove the complexity, but to transfer some of it the network layer, organising the interaction of loosely coupled parts through more simple 'event based' streams of data.

Pablo del Vecchio →

Hosco

Chief Technology Officer

When going to the USA there are many things to think of. It’s about proper planning a setup in the US - what has to be urgently considered? Also, it’s about scaling in the US - who are the right advisors, who the best hires, what’s the ideal go-to-market strategy, which are the necessary partnerships to think of? Last but not least - it’s also about raising funding in the US from the right VCs.

Alex McCracken →

Silicon Valley Bank

Managing Director, Corporate Relationships

Few companies manage to leverage the full potential of marketing and sales by carefully orchestrating them along the conversion funnel. In fact, often times two separate teams successfully pursue their respective core fields of expertise but lack understanding of how they could service each other. Christoph and Philipp will talk about how to operationalize one joint strategy for marketing and sales, going from broad to detail and giving specific examples of how to sync your activities in a B2B context.

Philipp Werner →

Project A

Chief Marketing Officer

Christoph Rösler →

Project A

Director Venture Development & Sales

In a saturated market having a strong brand has become crucial to establish who you are and how your customers relate to you. In this talk we want to look into the design process and walk you through case studies of our best practices, going into great detail about how to develop usable, memorable and beautiful brands.

Natalia Bulashenko →

Project A

Visual Designer

Tamer El-Hawari →

Project A

CPO

Corporates and startups working together and collaborating: What are the opportunities for each party? Whether it is to stay on the pulse of innovation, test the product-market fit and conduct user tests, the participants of this panel can draw on years of experience in both sectors. They will discuss the advantages and best practices for both parties, as well as the watch-outs and their learning experiences.
This panel discussion will be led by Florian Heinemann with participants from Kollex, HenkelX (event partner) and VC/O.

Udo Kiesslich →

kollex

CEO

Dr. Florian Heinemann →

Project A

Founding Partner

Dr. Florian Resatsch →

VC/O

CEO

Marius Swart →

Henkel X

Digital Lead Operations and Strategy

Join this session to learn how Microsoft for Startups Program can help tech founders and startups achieve more. Learn about our offerings, technical enablement, business and sales acceleration.

James Duncan Davidson →

Microsoft

CTO in Residence Microsoft ScaleUp

As a step towards KRY's mission to fast forward the future of healthcare, we are launching in Germany this fall. In this process we are confronted with the challenge of adapting our service to a much less digital environment compared to Sweden. In this session you will learn how we used service design methods to approach the challenge of launching a digital product in Germany's paper and fax-heavy healthcare reality.

Hedda Selder →

Kry

Service Designer

The biggest part of the data that organisations collect remain under the radar. This data is stored but not being used for any current purpose. To answer if this so-called "dark data" matters we need to assess its value. I will share some learnings in the context of location data.

Alex Schäfer →

HERE Technologies

Lead Data Scientist

LILLYDOO stands for modern premium baby products that satisfy both the functional and emotional needs of parents. 3.5 years after the launch in Germany, LILLYDOO is known by 3 out of 4 mothers with babies and has grown to a 40m Euro revenue business. This growth was supported by an ever-present synergy of Performance marketing and branding, on the one hand uniquely positioning the brand and on the other hand not losing sight of conversion goals. This talk elaborates the strategy behind the marketing of LILLYDOO and how to bring together Brand and Performance Marketing.

Johanna Wielens →

LILLYDOO

Vice President Marketing

We started using GraphQL in the sennder engineering team in late 2016. Three years later, we decided to stop using it. This talk explores the benefits and the trade-offs that come with using GraphQL. And why we deprecated it at sennder.

Konstantin Schubert →

sennder

Head of Engineering

To drive company success, startups with a global future need to consider building teams in various locations and offering employees the opportunity to work remotely. These measures are crucial in times of talent scarcity. Distributed teams and remote work – buzzwords or the key to success? How do these organizational setups work in practice? What are the dos and don’ts? What are the prerequisites for a company to thrive with such a setup? In a panel discussion, Charlotte will pick the brains of Cornelia, Mads and Iwo about how to manage distributed teams in a high-performance global company.

Cornelia Moller-Atam →

eyeo

Head of People Operations

Charlotte Niklahs →

Project A

Venture Development Manager

Iwo Szapar →

Remote-how

Remote Work Advocate & CEO

Mads Fosselius →

Dixa

CEO & Co-founder

Originally designed to add bits of interactivity to web pages, JavaScript has developed into a versatile programming language within the last decade. With its widespread usage in client and server applications, a new set of challenges has emerged to JavaScript developers – first and foremost building scalable software. This talk will introduce a well-established engineering practice that strongly supports this goal and gradually finds its way to the JavaScript community: Dependency Injection.

Tobias Rosenstock →

Project A

Teamlead Software Engineering

Christian Höpfner →

Project A

Teamlead Frontend Engineering

As a former professional showjumper on Denmark’s national riding team, I learned the importance of focusing on one jump at a time. Since joining Pleo's journey, I have realised just how relevant this can be in the startup world. I'll share our key learnings and best practices when it comes to growing loyal customers and daring to go above and beyond for them - even in scale-up times.

The purpose of my talk is to be boldly honest and generously share our mistakes and epiphanies in scaling Pleo while still growing our customer satisfaction to new heights.

Marie Moesgaard →

Pleo

Director of Customer Success

How does Venture Debt as a way of financing work? When to consider it for your startup and when to avoid it? In a fireside chat with Florian Heinemann, Oscar Jazdowski will share his insights into the topic based on his experience in technology financing for over 30 years.

Oscar Jazdowski →

Silicon Valley Bank

Co-General Manager

Dr. Florian Heinemann →

Project A

Founding Partner

How do you scale and organize your marketing department in times of growth? Which functions do you centralize, which roles do you need locally when internationalizing? Is there a playbook you learn once and can apply to new markets? Whom to better ask these questions than Max who is responsible for marketing at Hellofresh that scaled the company from roughly 14 million euros in revenue to over a billion in just five years. In a fireside chat with Philipp, he will share his most important learnings when it comes to building and managing an international marketing team.

Maximilian Backhaus →

HelloFresh

Global CMO

Philipp Werner →

Project A

Chief Marketing Officer

SunshineSmile has complex and long build to order processes: Every medical aligner is designed and produced for the specific needs of a customer. In this session, we will show how consequent Business Process Management with support of technology has led to a process and data-driven company.

Peter Baumgart →

SunshineSmile

Co-Founder

Gregor Müller →

synatos

Process Digitalization Consultant