Especially during the current pandemic it would be very hard to live without some of our favourite products/services, that mostly appeared since the beginning of the millenium: Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Spotify, HelloFresh - just to name a few.

Although these and other favourite products of generations x, y & z are very different in nature, they often have 1 thing in common: venture capital. Some would even argue that without venture capital financing some of these products wouldn’t even exist today. Nevertheless it is almost guaranteed that those products would be different or their wider adoption level would be less without venture capital.

But what exactly is venture capital?

While Venture Capital (VC) is among the most preferred and frequently used financing options for startups, many founders are not very familiar with the definitions of various venture capital contractual terms – sometimes even after an investment has already taken place. For the sake of fairness, these contractual terms are quite complex and thus contracts are quite long.

Since VC contracts are private agreements, individual arrangements and wordings are up on negotiation. However, there is a basic set of frequently used mechanisms that can be considered somewhat “standard terms.” Still, in contracts – as well as in the dozens of books, presentations and many blogs and comments on those – the language used is formal and based on legal standards.

Therefore, they are close to what founders will officially sign, but are still difficult to understand for beginners.

About 200 venture capitalists, family offices and business angels mingled with our corporate partners and startups during the fourth HHL SpinLab Investors Day.

With networking sessions, inspiring speeches and panels accompanied by top-notch startup pitches, the likeminded community enjoyed the event. Focusing on the topics “Investing with international venture capitals” and “How to force exits?” both investors and founders were able to discuss important aspects of the same topics from their perspectives.

In the last years we saw many speeches by top German politicians of different parties who agreed that Germany performs badly compared to the United States, Israel or China when it comes to Venture Capital, due to the identified lack of Later Stage investments.

The HHL SpinLab Investors Day in June 2019 took place at the location with the best view over Leipzig! At the Felix - just across Augustusplatz – 170 investors, partners and startups met and engaged in several activities like keynotes and panels on special venture capital (VC) know-how as well as startup pitches and speed dating. Central topics of this year’s Investor Day were Team Due Diligence and Brand Management as VC.

Often, I get questions from journalists, scientists and people interested in startups from all over the world, “What is the most successful startup from Leipzig, or moreover, from all of Germany?” The answer to this question is difficult, not only because of the complexity to define or to measure what success really is, but also because the term “startup“ can be used and seen very differently.

Many startups all over the world have advisory boards for different reasons. However, research and practice-oriented studies on advisory boards can be rarely found. This fact motivated me to look closer at advisory boards in startups and to publish the following findings of my research.

Three and a half years ago we brought SpinLab to life, and just recently we were awarded as one of the top 3 German startup accelerators in an independent study conducted by the Cologne University of Applied Sciences (RFH).

Other studies mention us as lighthouse and also we have been selected as one of the top 10 German business supporters by the German Council of European Enterprise Awards committee.