As part of the Startup Europe Comes to Silicon Valley (SEC2SV) program, the Munich-based startup MeisterLabs was able to travel to San Francisco to showcase its presence among international startups and get a taste of the Valley's culture. Oliver Huebler shares his experiences across the pond.
The first few days in Silicon Valley always go by incredibly quickly. Dozens of appointments, many new impressions, hardly any sleep, and a feeling that everything here is moving along wonderfully, so much faster and more smoothly than in Germany or Austria. There's a solution for every problem, every task, usually two or three at once.
The question is whether we really need a solution for all of life's tasks and whether we need to automate everything. Because of high salaries, 10- to 12-hour workdays, and only two weeks of vacation per year, leisure time outside of work is completely optimized. Cooking your own meals is becoming a luxury, and as a result, five online services are springing up, selling pre-prepared ingredients with recipes as an "experience" and delivering them to your doorstep. Laundry isn't done in your own washing machine, but rather outsourced to online pickup services that compete for new customers with aggressive discounts and introductory offers – customers they absolutely need, since the $2 million investment has to be justified.
All of these services attract enormous investment sums, often achieve success very quickly, run expensive advertising on all channels, but usually make profits at the expense of many people. People who, for a low hourly wage, do most of the work that John from Superfortune 2000 is no longer interested in.
Silicon Valley's recipe for success
To avoid getting completely sucked into this world, I can always refer to good old common sense, coupled with a certain basic skepticism. Once you're aware of this, you can fully devote yourself to the success factors of Silicon Valley companies:
It all starts with the approach to projects. In Germany, we always try to fully develop products before launching them. However, the market is fast-moving, and it can happen that customers no longer want the product in that version, or that the trend has long since faded.
Silicon Valley seems to have found the golden solution to this problem with the so-called "pivoting." "Pivoting" refers to the frequent rejection of ideas after a brief test with potential customers. Often, there is no actual product yet, just an email waiting list for interested "customers." With this method, a few beautifully designed screenshots, a free newsletter service, and a few dollars invested in Facebook ads can be used very early on to determine whether there is any interest in the idea and its implementation, before investing thousands of euros or valuable personal time in developing an initial prototype. The concept of "pivoting" is not new, but it is too often underused in Europe. European startups would also do well to have their ideas tested by potential customers in the early stages and to carefully analyze the data obtained before investing further in them.
“Made in Germany” remains a seal of quality, but we must rethink
What is very positive is that the German approach continues to be a seal of quality for precision internationally, and we can play this card on a permanent basis.
What's often perceived negatively here is our tendency toward seriousness, tension, and shyness, which we've probably inherited from the older generation. If we want to compete with companies in Silicon Valley, we need to rethink our approach, especially in the startup sector. Information exchange among companies is essential, and the tunnel vision in partnerships must be urgently eliminated. In Silicon Valley, good ideas are encouraged and sometimes make it from the coffee shop queue to a management meeting within a week.
We can learn a lot from this straightforward, efficient approach. The trick is to take what we've learned and then implement it with the diligence and precision for which we're known. Those who manage to unite the diverse mindsets, maintain their own identity, and simultaneously present themselves openly to potential customers and partners are best placed to succeed internationally.
Oliver Huebler (@OliverHuebler) is the COO of MeisterLabs, the company behind the internationally known apps MindMeister & MasterTask, and has lived in San Francisco since March 2016.
