HHL is organizing the 3. HHL Startup Career Fair. 4 startup companies are invited on campus to present students from the M.Sc. and MBA programs with their offerings and career opportunities.
In recent years, doing internships or starting a career with a startup company has become a popular option among HHL students. Furthermore, the direct interaction with the entrepreneurs at the career fair provides them with the opportunity to discuss with role models and to build important professional networks.
Participating companies this time are:
- Venture Capitalist and Business Builder Team Europe Ventures from Lukasz Gadowski and Pawel Chudzinski (with their Startup headhunter i-potentials and Constanze Bucheim)
- Online Gaming portal Playnik from Malte Paul
- E-Learning platform Lecturio from Martin Schlichte and Tim Koschella
- Kaeuferportal with Robert Heesen
The Career fair is going to be held in the first on-campus week of the new students on September 22.
A new HHL startup on the list comes from HHL alumnus Martin Elwert. With his social entrepreneurship offering Coffecircle he is providing premium coffee from ethiopia. Follow his blog to see how they are developing or check their press coverage.
HHL students Sarah Jentzsch, Christian Hetke and Dennis Grosche won the Professional cup East of the yearly EXIST-priME-Cup competition, organized with support from the Federal Ministry for Economy and Technology. With this award, they won over all the other particpating schools from East Germany and are now invited to the finals in Berlin. Congratulations! More info here.
HHL graduates have started their own businesses already in the first graduating class (known as the “K1″), and since then the number of HHL startups has grown to over 100. As a recent poll shows, these startups – and we are only talking the ones where an HHL graduate actually was a founder and co-founder, not the many that have been supported as business angels or coaches – created over 2.500 jobs. I think an impressive track record for a school of our size. Congratulations to all entrepreneurs out there!!!
For those of you interested in the investment decision process of startups: a short introductory article on the major decision points a startup has to pass with an investment proposal.
Financial Times Germany hosts a yearly entrepreneurship competition called enable2start. Finalists and winners receive big media attention plus financial as well as non-financial awards. The event, organized together with HHL partner UnternehmerTUM and with HHL honorary Professor Dr. Burkhard Schwenker in the jury, is a must for every serious entrepreneur. Last year, a startup resulting from the HHL-UnternehmerTUM Executive MBA was the winner and you can follow Jan Philipp Hinrichs and his startup CaptchaAd in an online blog on FTD’s website. Applications for enable2start can be submitted now – check here for the procedure.
Think E-Commerce and Fashion. Now, think again. And now read this great article about some very interesting start-ups in the online fashion industry.
The team around Prof. Faltin arranges the Entrepreneurship Summit 2010 on Nov 6. Last year over 900 entrepreneurship-interesteed students and academics, founders and investors joined up in Berlin for this event.
Concurrently, the summit runs a competition for the most creative business model – if you are interested to apply even with just a business plan, check out the procedure here.
www.ab-in-den-urlaub.de, one of the travel portals of Leipzig based Internet conglomerate unister (where HHL alumnus Daniel Kirchhof is Head of Finance) is now the biggest travel website in Germany. According to a recent analysis, they reached 1.9 mio unique visitors in July compared to expedias 1.6 mio.
Who is going to buy your product? This question is at the core of srutiny for any new business idea. Most entrepreneurs fail to actually come up with one, two or even more pilot customers, but keep on optimizing their product before they dare to launch it.
of couese you need to have a decent product quality, but customers will expect your first versions to be somewhat shaky anyway. Venturebeat.com is making a wonderful case why focussing on customers early on is so important, not at last for an early reality check.
