Month: December 2015

comdirect Start-up Garage – Rethinking Banking. Together

comdirect Start-up Garage is my newest baby.  Setting up a brand new FinTech accelerator program in stellar speed together with Mariusz Bodek was a great fun.  With lots of encouragement from the board, Mariusz’s endless energy and commitment and a positive response from the FinTech community, we have created a collaborative platform supporting smart and ambitious founders on their way towards the first million and a hockey stick experience.

startup garage

I am very happy about the amount of attention our initiative has raised in the press and the FinTech community and positively surprised by the number and the quality of submitted applications.

We have already invited the first teams, who will join us at the beginning of 2016 in the comdirect Start-up Garage and look forward to welcoming them soon.  We keep our fingers crossed, hoping that some of them will walk in the footsteps of the famous garage entrepreneurs.

In parallel, we have described our inspiration and the entire thought process leading to founding the Start-up Garage in a book chapter, which is coming out in the first quarter of 2016.

Source: comdirect Start-up Garage – Rethinking Banking together

Art of Negotiation – On Negotiation Teaching in Germany

I am very happy that my work in the area of negotiation has recently been noticed by Süddeutsche Zeitung – one of the main German newspapers.  We need lots more of those to help negotiation reach the status it deserves in academia.  It might be hard to believe but negotiation is still not taught at the most German universities and there are only a few colleagues, who focus on it in their research.  Read more…

Source: Verhandlungskunst – Mit Strategie zum Ziel – Karriere – Süddeutsche.de

Bankathon: 30 Hours for the Future of Banking

Here are some of my impressions from Bankathon 2015.  It was a great event and we are very happy, we could be a part of it.  Congratulations to the organizers!  We look forward to welcoming the winners in comdirect startup garage soon!

Der Bankathon ist ein schönes Beispiel dafür, wie fruchtbar die enge Kooperation von Entwicklern/Fintechs und Banken sein kann. Wir glauben fest daran, dass dies der richtige Weg ist und werden auch künftig innovative Projekte und Ideen fördern.

Bankathon is a great example of how fruitful a close cooperation between developers / Fintechs and banks can be. We strongly believe that this is the right way and will continue to promote innovative projects and ideas in the future.

Source: Bankathon: 30 Stunden für die Zukunft des Banking

Let’s get it started!

Finally, I got my act together, transferred my domain, bought by the way at least a half a decade ago, setup and configured a hosting service and now I’m writing my this:  my first post.  It’s been a rather bumpy ride so far and there is sooo much more to do to make things look right but as Confucius said:  “a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step”.  Stay tuned!