6 min read

10 reasons why SpinLab is interesting for more established startups

By Eric Weber on 11 January 2022

You have come across our Accelerator program, but you are not quite sure if it is suitable for your startup? We often receive questions from established startups asking whether they still fit into the program and what added value the participation has. In this article, we will show you 10 strong arguments why established startups should definitely apply for our free program. Let's go!

Topics: Startup Tips applynow
6 min read

Tips and tricks for improving remote work in your startup

By Franziska Schultze on 20 December 2021

Going in to the new year, we have the time to reflect on the way that remote work is currently organized in our team. Do you have long-term solutions to common challenges in remote work? In this article, I will highlight five challenges of remote work and tips on overcoming them.

Topics: Startup Tips Learnings Leadership
6 min read

How to Quantify Your Product Market Fit

By Valeria Clement Caicedo on 30 November 2021

​​Dear reader please note this is NOT a regular product market fit blog article. Here we neither explain you what Product Market Fit is (we already did in our Product Marktet fit and your startup: 7 things you need to know blog nor will we repeat you that a bad product market fit is the reason #1 why startups fail. With this article we want to introduce you to a methodology to quantify your product market fit.

Topics: Startup Tips Learnings
9 min read

Debunking 4 myths on gender diversity in the startup world

By Marina Chkolnikov on 19 October 2021

Not really unexpectedly, the startup environment is not very diverse but rather homogeneous. Let the numbers speak: Let the numbers speak: 16 % of founders in Germany are women and roughly 75 % of VC money goes to male-only startup teams. Many companies, advisory boards, political parties have picked up these facts and want to contribute to change, for example by offering startup accelerator programs for (gender) diverse startup teams (Grow F, SpinLab Summer School), VCs that especially support female or mixed teams, quotas or scholarships. It has even become a trend in many industries.

Topics: Startup Tips Learnings Diversity
8 min read

Guidelines to avoid broken cap tables

By Eric Weber on 20 September 2021

A cap table- short name for “capitalization table”- is a spreadsheet with an overview of who owns a portion of equity of a company and how this equity is distributed among shareholders. When entrepreneurs are looking for financing rounds, the cap table is one of the main files that investors will check to assess whether the venture has a healthy distribution of equity or not. Generally, investors prefer cap tables where all or at least the vast majority of shareholders will contribute to value creation in the future. In some cases, entrepreneurs with appealing and promising business ideas miss funding opportunities due to the so-called broken cap tables. This refers to an inadequate distribution of equity among shareholders or inacceptable terms and conditions, which generates misalignment of interests or interferes with an efficient business management. As a result, the startup losses the ability to raise funds or requires going through a painful restructuring process.

Topics: Startup Tips startups
12 min read

A step by step guide to build a cap table

By Eric Weber on 06 September 2021

When preparing financial rounds, investors usually ask for cap tables (short version for “capitalization table”). Basically, this is a list or spreadsheet with an overview of all shareholders who have a participation on your company. Sounds easy? But in fact it isn’t, especially in later financing rounds. Why? Well, in the easiest case is the simple share distribution to founders and investors round by round, but in practice the deal structures are more complex. Typically, due to special rights and agreements, the allocation of equity shares deviates from voting rights and from money proceeds distributed after a cash event like an exit (e.g. a trade sale or an IPO). Very often it is complex enough to hire (and pay) external consultants and lawyers to reproduce the contractually fixed distribution and it is a frequent discussion point in due diligence processes on that way. Thus, it is worth paying some attention right from the beginning.

Topics: Startup Tips Learnings
10 min read

Why many Startups fail

By Clara Fischer on 06 May 2021

"2021 will be the year of the unicorns," "German startups are raising more money than ever," "From a garage to the most valuable corporation" – there are great success stories of founders to read about in the news. However, barely anyone talks about the many failures in the startup world. And believe me, there are way more than you might think. While it seems deceptively easy to found a successful start-up, this is not really the case. Rarely is a start-up so well-tuned to its niche that it can be kept afloat with minimal effort. The momentum among founders is high, but in the long run only one in ten companies survives. In this article, we present the most common reasons why start-ups fail.

Topics: Startup Tips
17 min read

B2B Sales for Startups in 2021

By Dennis Birkhölzer on 03 March 2021

Acquiring new customers and generating revenue is the fuel to keep a company running.

It therefore creates pressure on the sales representative as they are in charge of generating these revenues by acquiring new customers. In addition, they have got to deal with rejection in their daily routines, which is mentally challenging.

Topics: Startup Tips
4 min read

How to improve your chances of being accepted into a startup accelerator (2021)

By Shawn Segundo on 26 February 2021

The application round for our 12th cohort in the SpinLab is officially open, and with that, we wanted to take some time to highlight some tips we’ve collected over the years to help you make your startup accelerator applications really stand out.

In case you want the short and sweet video version

And believe us, we’ve seen some really bad applications. So we definitely know what you shouldn’t be doing. Collectively between all projects, our team has evaluated over 4,000 applications to various programs, and we are now ”trained” to easily find the most outstanding applications.

Topics: Startup Tips
12 min read

Venture Capital Definitions: Important Deal Terms in Plain Language (2020)

By Eric Weber on 26 January 2021

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.

Topics: Startup Tips