On Wednesday, March 28, we officially launched our program in Berlin, Germany. As in Silicon Valley we were very happy to welcome more than 200 guests who followed the invitations we distributed through our extensive network in Germany.
Sebastian Hamann, head of Q 110 of Deutsche Bank welcomed our guests before Oliver Hanisch, Vice-President of German Silicon Valley Accelerator (GSVA) led us through the program and thanked all our partners and supporters.
He invited Prof. Dietmar Harhoff, Chairman of GSVA and Dirk Kanngiesser, CEO of GSVA on stage to introduce the program and share the vision of the GSVA with the German audience.
Keynote-Speaker Christian Mangstl, founder of the Scout24 Group then guided the audience through his way that made him start the scout group. He very much stressed the importance of his experiences in Silicon Valley which contributed a lot to his success in building up the Scout Group.
After the keynote speech, Andy Goldstein, Executive Director at LMU Entrepreneurship Center underlined the need for a more entrepreneurial mindset in a “Land of Ideas” and reminded the audience of the “Deutsche Gründerzeit” in which great companies such as Bosch or Daimler were founded.
Dr. Johannes Velling section chief of the BMWi gave the guests reasons why he pushed forward the GSVA initiative inside the BMWi as well as his belief in the concept which allowed the private initiative to start its operations.
Of course following the speeches it was time for some pitches. Two of the already four selected companies kicked off their company pitches.
Dr. Christian Becker, Co-founder of FairObserver one of the first two companies in the program presented the vision of their company–to “make sense of the world” by providing a 360 degrees view consisting of context, a global perspective and quality control on matters of international significance.
Dr. Gero Decker pitched his company Signavio which helps to make business process management easier und simpler for small and large organizations through technical innovation and business process management. Signavio will be one of the next two companies that will participate in the program in the second quarter.
After all these presentations the selected 12 companies for that day’s pitches prior to the event were waiting for the announcements of which company will be selected in the third and fourth quarter of 2013. Ram Srinivasan, entrepreneur and manager finally revealed the winners.
And the selected companies participating in the program in the third and fourth quarter 2012 are:
- 6 Wunderkinder
- Customer Alliance
- Ondango
- Parstream
- Products-up
- Upcload
The GSVA team would like to thank everyone who contributed, attended and helped us to promote and make our launch event the big success it has been.
Let’s keep the momentum going, join our journey and engage off- and online:
For more pictures of the launch event please visit our facebook album.