🚀 Success with the right team - day 3 of the high-flyer journey

In Sunnyvale today, we met with Fred Kim, who has worked for Meta, YouTube, Volkswagen, Lucid and Samsung. With him, we delved deeper into the topic of "Hire the gap" with a view to the different personality types:

• The right mix makes the difference: Visionaries, builders, scalers and optimizers, each specific role contributes to success.
• Balance in the team: Especially in small teams, one person takes on several roles and must be able to switch flexibly - but not everyone succeeds in doing this.
• It is striking that companies in America work much more with frameworks than in Germany, such as here for the composition of teams.

During a guided tour through the various areas of Plug and Play Tech Center explained Elina Gorji us the opportunities that the world's largest accelerator offers young companies.

Jesús Deusa Alonsohimself the founder of an Agritech startup, spoke about the advantages and disadvantages of VC investments and confirmed: "The chemistry between startup and VC has to be right! Ben Schwedhelm from MySpirulina GmbH took the opportunity for a spontaneous pitch and an exchange with Jesus about Food & Beverages.

Then we went to Standford. Tim Joehnkwho organizes contacts in the USA for Schleswig-Holstein companies with the Northern Germany Innovation Office and also accompanies the high-flyers, gave us an individual tour of the campus.

There we also met Tim Martensen. Tim told us about his journey and the challenges of establishing the European start-up Soulbuddy in the USA. His key learning: more contact points are necessary in sales in the USA than in Germany.

What else we can take away from Silicon Valley: Implement quickly, but also let go quickly if something doesn't work and move straight on to the next idea - a culture that we in Germany should embrace even more.