What I learned at the EU-XCEL Scrum
Last week, I participated at the EU-XCEL Scrum in Poznan, Poland, with around 50 other participants of the program. EU-XCEL is the first European Virtual Accelerator funded by the European Commission and Startup Europe. Their goal is, to gather 250 of the most talented, aspiring and young Tech Entrepreneurs throughout Europe to work together and create a european wide network. They want to enable us to make our dreams and goals come true.
Now I want to share with you what happened during the week and what I learned from it.
The first day was all about to get to know each other, we did some fun games to get in contact. We also did some exercises like brainstorming on 5 of the most important trends within the next 10 years like AI, IoT, Healthcare and so on. That was a really great way to get to know all the participants and to see how we connect.
One the second day, we pitched ourselves and our ideas we want to work on. It took about 3 hours until everyone had pitched his idea, which was pretty exhausting.
My Pitch was about politics. I think politics are old, not transparent and not accountable for what they do. For example, they are sitting in their parliament for hours talking, whithout showing not even one single Powerpoint slide. That’s sounds like an awkward thing to do in the year 2015.
For me it was a market research to see if young people are even interested in politics. The feedback I got was really impressive. It turns out, that a lot of young people are interested in politics. But there is no right channel for us to join those discussions and make an impact. Therefore we have to disrupt politics!
If you want to learn more about the idea behind this pitched problem, you can check out our application for Peter Diamandis’ Singularity University
You’ll find our project here: https://angel.co/disrupt-politics . We need feedback on this idea to make it come true, so please comment in this section.
After the pitching was over, we had to form teams. This was really exciting, because we had no idea how to do that. So we ran around like headless chickens for 3 hours and talk to everyone on how he feels about the ideas and what he want to work on. But at the end, we turned out with a lot of great teams which are surprisingly well-balanced.
On the third day, we started working on our projects. We didn’t really know where to start, but fortunately we have Alex on our team. He is a serial entrepreneur with a lot of experience in building successful startups. I learned more from him in those three days, than I learned in one semester at university.
Instead of starting to work on our idea immediately, we started with team building, clearing responsibilities and all of that paperwork. That helped us a lot during the next days. Afterwards we started to work on our initial idea to do something in politics. After not even one hour of talking, we decided that the topic is too broad and wouldn’t work well for us within this program. So we pivoted, brainstormed and started to work on meter measurements.
On Thursday, we continued to work, iterated on some assumptions and started writing our basic concept. During that day, there was a lot of excitement too, when a Polish TV channel came to cover the event.
We were working like crazy, because we also had to create a pitch presentation for the next day. So after that already exhausting long week, many teams were working through the night to get the job done.
On the last day, we pitched our ideas. Even though we had almost no time to prepare our pitches and were very exhausted because of the work we accomplished through the week.
And of course all that socializing during nights didn’t really help us to refresh, still we came out with many good pitches.
If you are interested, you can watch our pitch on meter measurement here:
I really had an amazing time during the whole week. There were a lot of interesting and great participants on the Scrum, as well as the Coaches, Mentors & Guest Speakers. It was very well organized and the Poznan Science and Technology Park (PPNT) provided us with everything we needed. I really enjoyed working hard on our projects during the days, but the nights with all that socializing is what made this week special. Poznan is really great place to be and they have a great silent disco I highly recommend!
So here are my lessons learned:
Team wins championships!
Gary Vaynerchuk , one of my favorite marketing rock stars, has this famous quote:
Ideas are shit. Execution is the name of the game.
He is very inspiring and knows how to do marketing & sales in the year 2015. I love to watch his show, the #AskGaryVee Show. You should definitely check that out.
And I think he is right with his quote about execution. Of course you need a good execution in order to make an idea come true. But for me, the team is the core value to execute well.
So if Execution wins games, Team wins championships!
Shared Values
After you created your team and feel some sort of connection to the people, you should be working on the shared values of the team. They are very important, because they are the biggest influencers of your team vision. You have to know what is important for the others, where they want to live and how they want live in the future. So basically, you have to provide your team with all the information you can’t find on Linkedin.
Clear Responsibilities
To work well together, especially in a virtual program like the EU-XCEL, it is very important to clear out the responsibilities. You have to name a leader who can make final decisions, if the team doesn’t have the same opinion on some topics. You also have to name a referee, a person within your Team who mediates when members of your team are getting in an argument. The referee is also the person to decide, whoever is right or not from the team point of view. You also have to decide who is in charge about design, coding, engineering and business development. That doesn’t mean that this person has to do the work all by himself, it just means that this person is responsible to get the job done.
Clear Communications & Working expectations
You have decide on which channels and platforms you want to communicate and store your data. We decided to go with Skype, Wunderlist and Google Drive. On other projects we also use slack for instance.
But you also have to determine when you will be communicating, how everybody wants to work, what to expect from each other, how to meet deadlines and what to do if we don’t meet deadlines.
Be honest to yourself and to your team
You have to be honest to yourself and to your team members. If you feel like something is wrong about the idea or about the way the team works, you have to tell your team as fast as possible! If you don’t tell, your team will realize that something is wrong but can only guess what the reason might be. So that will lead to more conflicts. It also saves you a lot of time and argumentation.
For me, that doesn’t just count for startups, but in general for everything I do in live.
Don’t hold on your ideas for too long and don’t be too emotional about it
As I said before, ideas are shit and you will iterate on your way anyways. So don’t hold to tight on your idea. I know this is hard, especially when you came up with the Idea and already put a lot of thoughts and work into it. But you will never get your initial idea into reality, it will always look different at the end.
At the Scrum, every single team changed their initial idea within couple hours after forming the teams. You have to be flexible enough to adapt quickly.
So that is what I learned from this awesome week. I want to thank everybody who is involved in this program and wish you all the best.
I especially want to name those people and institutions:
Philipp Paul Köhler. He is my co-founder at pyxl and for my early stage startup on 3D Printing. He is our Digital Human Officer.
@phlppk
Nico Bentenrieder. He is also co-founder on our 3D printing startups and an outstanding engineer.
@itnebn
Alberto Hernández Cerezo. He is a great software engineer and coder. He is working on Artificial Intelligence and can explain complex structures in a simple way to understand. We are working together on disrupt politics!
My team at the EU-XCEL program:
Alex Zelinsky. Our Leader and a very experienced serial entrepreneur.
@alekszelin
Kamil Grycz. Our Coder, right now he is doing his master in robotics.
Ramon Linke. Our Engineer, he is doing his master in engineering and is also involved at the SCE incubator APE
Sandra González. Our Designer and referee, she is doing her Bachelor in economics and is working on designing and managing digital marketing campaigns
Dominik Tryba. For his effort in making great pictures of the Scrum as you can see.
I also want to give credits to all of the great and talented participants of the Scrum:
Mikkel Amstrup
George Angelopoulos
Jared Balavender
Aaron Barker
Mairead Blake
Pooya Charmarai Tohidi
Aaron Cogolludo
Sebastian Cygert
Ismael Dols Manrique
Nicolas Economides
Marina Ejlertsen
Dimitris Fronimos
Mateusz Fuczyło
Maciej Gabrysz
Luz Frine Gadea Perez
Marina Garrido Sanchez
Konstantina Georgiou
Martins Grants
Jakub Grzyb
Jose Luis Jurado Gimeno
Alexander Kiltz
Thijs Klinkhamer
Anna Lisicka
Wojciech Lubarski
Kristian Lundager
Seamus Mac Grianna
Lorraine Ellen Mulcahy
Goran Ninkovic
Julie O’Connor
Alexia Politaki
Petra Ras
Danielle Neves Rasmussen
Konstantina Maria Stavrakouli
Paweł Styperek
Robert Suhada
I want to thank our Coaches, Mentors and Organizers:
Joe Bogue
Siobhan Bradley
Maciej Nowak
Brian O’Flaherty
Damien Organ
Anna Padewska
Audrey Stolze
Anna Tórz
Theodora Trachana
Igor Tasic
I especially want to thank Igor. He held a great talk on the core values for startups and also helped me on some of my 3D Printing projects.
Last but not least, I want to thank different institutions for making this possible:
EU-XCEL, European Virtual Accelerator
InQbator Poznan Science and Technology Park PPNT
Academic Program for Entrepreneurship APE at the Strascheg Center in Munich. Thanks for your support and providing us the right tools to survive in the startup world.
