Sharing the fascination for Entrepreneurship, Silicon Valley and General Aviation

Talking with Tim O'Reilly

Had the chance to meet Tim O'Reilly, Founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media, last week and of course used this opportunity to pull out my camera to shoot a short movie. Tim defined the term "Web 2.0" which is now in ubiquitous use throughout the whole internet community. He's continuously spearheading new trends and developments in the online space. At the "Graphing Social Patterns" conference he propagated that social graph systems should be designed more intelligent. E.g., your cell phone already has your contact data and the contact data of your friends. Why do you need to re-enter it in Facebook, studivz, xing and so on? Good point. I think that we'll see interesting developments coming up in this space.

Unfortunately his reply to the last question was not taped as the camera striked out (empty battery) after about 2 minutes. He basically replied with "Twitter". Now go and watch the movie to find out what the question was :)

Link: sevenload.com

Rollercoaster Drive with Frank Boehnke from Wellington Partners

Here we go with the next rollercoaster drive - this time with Frank Boehnke, one of Germany's best known (and best!) VCs in the internet space. Frank's apparent passion for rollercoasters can be clearly seen in this video... Actually, this has been the second drive in sequence with Frank as the camera striked out on the first one - big props go out to Frank for agreeing on a second ride :) He's giving some insight into his opinions on social networks and his advice to upcoming founders, so let's start with the video:

Link: sevenload.com

By the way, the videos were done just a couple of weeks ago in the "5-er Looping" at this year's Oktoberfest in Munich. The location made it easy for me to sneak over from the amiando office for a couple minutes which is just a few minutes walking distance away. The only exception is this video with Frank which originated during a (my only one) full-day visit to the Oktoberfest.

Rollercoaster Ride with studivz founder Ehssan Dariani

Just returned back from Silicon Valley and finally have some time to uploade the first videos which I've done over the last few weeks. Let's start right away with the first video of my "Entrepreneurs in the Roller Coaster" series which grew out of an crazy idea at the Oktoberfest in Munich. Life as an entrepreneur shares some similarities to a roller coaster ride - up's and down's and it never gets boring. So why not speak on entrepreneurship while going through some loopings?

Let's start off with Ehssan Dariani, founder and first CEO of studivz, genius of the term "gruscheln" and genius in general. His entrepreneurial life can be truly matched with the characteristics of a roller coaster ride - however having a huge updraft at the end :)

Link: sevenload.com

Thanks Ehssan for the ride and good luck on your next endeavours!

Back in the air above Silicon Valley...

Using a few hours from my very spare freetime, I just did two checkout flights with Andy McMahan at San Carlos Airport to be current again in the Diamond DA-40 and the Cessna 182. We combined some touch and goes at San Carlos Airport with a nice cross country flight to Santa Rosa Airport (up in Napa Valley), had a hamburger there (the famous "$100 hamburger") and had a beautiful flight back at night. Total flight duration was 3 hours. On the way back, we filed an IFR clearance and shooted a practise ILS approach into Oakland. Just can't get enough from the view at Silicon Valley at night from above... too cool :)

Philipp, frontend designer at amiando, arrived in the valley the day after the checkride. Instead of picking him up by car, we agreed to split the costs of picking him up at San Francisco International Airport with the Cessna :) Crazy idea, but big, big fun. Flying into SFO is pretty simple, air traffic control vectors you a bit for sequencing (Boeings and Airbuses coming in all the time, watch out for the wake turbulence) but then usually clears you for visual approach for runway 28R. After that, you taxi to Signature terminal where they'll send a shuttle to the international terminal to pick up your passenger. After arrival of Philipp, we stowed his bagage in the Cessna and headed back to San Carlos Airport (with a short de-route over Golden Gate Bridge). In the end, I spent maybe an hour or two more in comparison to taking the car - but the fun was definately worth it :)

Talk with Reid Hoffmann, CEO of linkedin

Had the chance to video interview Reid Hoffmann this week here in Silicon Valley (as you might know we flew in the whole amiando IT crew for two weeks to the Silicon Valley for some collaborative high productivity hackathons :). Reid talks a bit about linkedin (14mio users, soon 15mio) and his advice to upcoming entrepreneurs in general.

Please note his special shoes at the very end of the video :) Pure silicon valley style ... Any startup in Germany that features this type of clothing?

Coming to Silicon Valley again...

... and taking six of my amiando collegues with me. On very short notice we organized a two week stay for the amiando IT crew here in the Silicon Valley. That sounds like fun (and it is! :) ) but is primarily hard work: Organizing accomondations for seven people (ended up in a two-bedroom apartment for cost reasons), transportaton (two cars) and most of all: Managing operations of a "temporary two week" office is very time consuming. I unfortunately cannot reveal the purpose of this trip yet, but rest assured that this is very exciting news for amiando.

Bonjour!

Welcome to my blog on internet entrepreneurship and aviation - I call it "entreviation" :-) On this blog I want to share thoughts, ideas and insights on these two passions with you.

Some background information about me:

I'm an internet entrepreneur from Germany and CEO of amiando.com, Europe's event platform for online event invitations and do-it-yourself-ticketing. From 1997 to 2000, during final years at school, I ran a private company operating an online network of fansites. The network attracted several millions of visitors and pulled revenues from website and newsletter marketing. In 2000, I started studies of Electrical Engineering at the Technical University of Munich. During this tenure, I worked at some great companies (BMW Munich, BMW Technology Office Palo Alto, Wellington Partners Venture Capital), spent quite some time abroad (ETH Zurich, Silicon Valley), met tons of interesting people (and good friends) and founded the non-profit organizations STARTmunich (fosters the spirit of entrepreneurship among unversity students) and SiROP-TUM (fosters interdisciplinary science projects). During the final year at university, I supervised a CS class project at Stanford University and contributed to the creation of the Google / BMW "Send to car" service. In fall 2006, I assembled the founding team of amiando and led the founding of the amiando AG which ultimately became Europe's first online portal for event organization and event online ticketing. I'm very proud of being a member of this great founders team and highly enjoy every minute of working together. Just a few months ago, we started expansion in Europe with very small offices in Switzerland and France. Entrepreneurship is fun :)

I set up this blog here in order to share my passion for two addicting activities that I highly enjoy: Avitation (especially airplanes and flying small planes in California. I am a private pilot and work on advanced pilot ratings in my spare free time) and entrepreneurship (especially in the internet domain). I know there are more people that share those passions out there - there you go, let's inspire :-) Furthermore, one of the advantages of being an entrepreneur includes the fact that you get the chance to meet many interesting people. Occasionally, I record short interviews with them which will then be posted here.

Updates will probably be infrequent here, most likely you'll see some periods with high posting activity surrounded by periods of silence...

I hope that you will return often. Enjoy and thank you for your feedback, Felix