It has been a whole year since I’ve moved to Munich, and the opportunities that the city offers still don’t stop surprising me. Indeed, the startup community here may not have the media hype and the vibe of its Berlin counterpart. Yet, it is growing steadily, building a strong ecosystem of new players, backed up by and learning from the success of larger enterprises. An ecosystem, where teams help, and not mindlessly copy each other. An ecosystem, where people with various backgrounds and experience meet up regularly, exchange ideas, and most of all, have lots of fun.
A couple of days ago, I took part in Ringside Talk #2 - a super-sped-up version of the Google Design Sprint (GDS), organised by the local chapter of Founders Fight Club and hosted by PayBack. The idea of the GDS is to cut short through the processes of building and launching a product. Instead, a product idea gets brainstormed, and continuously revised over a series of interviews with different groups of people. What normally is supposed to happen in 5 days, we had to do in one evening (i.e. a little more than a couple of hours), starting shortly after everyone finished work. A few hours later, we had already scoped the problem down to a concrete idea, had put it through a series of feedback interviews, and were ready to pitch it to investors and the jury.
Bringing an idea from nothing, to something ready for pitching in that little amount of time is not easy. More so, when you don’t know some of the other members of your team. You choose a topic, quickly get to know your teammates over some pizza and beer, and off to the job. All of this made it so much fun though! All one needs is relax and accept the challenge. When each of the team members is equally ready to participate, a team spirit forms within minutes. The rest is hard work and fast reactions.
Our team did not win the first place, but we won nonetheless. I met many new friends, with whom I’d gladly consider potential ideas for future work. I also refreshed my pitching skills, and my ability to generate ideas under pressure. The past year has been quite intensive for me, with lots of hard work on many projects, but primarily on the deep technical side of things. It felt great to envision future ideas from scratch again. It was some sort of a spiritual comeback for me. I hope that challenges like this one would help me finally put into motion some of the many projects, I have been working on in my spare time.
All in all the Ringside Talk challenge was lots of fun, and I am looking forward to taking part again!
Thanks, Jan and Patrick! Also, thanks to my teammates! We should grab a beer sometime soon again 😉
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