Co-working space, workshops, lectures and more: AWS offers startups a free tech program from October 15^th to November 13^th!

Amazon Web Services: technology on demand for customers of all sizes

Agility, flexibility, low costs: It’s not without good reason that numerous startups decide to deploy cloud software.  For many years Amazon Web Services (AWS) has been offering a wide variety of global cloud based services such as data processing, storage, database and analysis services to customers in Germany and around the world. More than one million customers of all sizes, from more than 190 countries, already use AWS and now the company is going offline. AWS plans to bring together tech enthusiasts from the digital world, cloud experts and startup mentors in a Pop-up Loft in Berlin, Germany’s capital.

Next stop: Berlin! The AWS Pop-up Loft is coming to Germany!

In order to help companies of all sizes better understand the potential the AWS Cloud has for their organisations and to teach them business skills needed to be successful, Amazon Web Services launched the Pop-up Loft programme this year. The program is designed for techies from the startup scene, people looking to learn more about cloud computing or anyone who is looking to start a business, and has already made stops in New York, San Francisco and London.

Berlin is the second European city to be selected: in this hotspot of the German digital scene founders, web developers, engineers and other tech-savvy startup folk can make use of the many offerings for six weeks. The Pop-up Loft is located in the Krausenstrasse 36 in Berlin-Mitte and will be open from Monday to Friday, 10 am until 6 pm – and longer into the night for evening events.

Startup support from AWS – not only all things in the cloud

AWS has been supporting startups in all things tech and business for years with teams of technologists on the ground in Berlin and various events. As well as showing recently founded companies how to boost their businesses by using secure and reliable web solutions, AWS will unite the community directly with its Pop-up Loft –to promote the exchange of entrepreneurial know-how. Mentors with various key topics will be present in the loft to share their success stories with AWS.

Anyone who feels like grabbing free coffee and snacks while continuing to work on their applications and getting some useful tips, in an open and relaxed atmosphere, is welcome to stop by. AWS experts will show, for all guests, what is technically possible within AWS Cloud – and how this ultimately accelerates business growth.

Driving startups: the Program

The four-week Pop-up Loft has a lot of things to offer. Besides training courses and boot camps, there will be panels with VCs and business accelerators. The guests can also look forward to speeches from AWS startup professionals on business creation, how to search for capital or pitching your business. Visit amazon.de/loft to register for bootcamps and technical sessions.

The Pop-up Loft Program at a glance

Co-working space

Everyone has access to the spacious co-working area which is filled with sofas and tables in a laid-back atmosphere. The AWS experts are available for visitors to ask any and all questions and inform about the functionality and the handling of the applications. This way the guests can get to know the numerous tools that navigate AWS Cloud and successfully grow their business.

Startup Know-how

What does the perfect pitch look like? How does successful PR work? How do I acquire funding? The mentors of the AWS community will answer these and many more questions in different sessions especially designed for startups.

Ask an Architect

You need a one-on-one help with your architecture? Just walk in and reach out to one of the many AWS Solutions Architects. Developers and IT folk can then deepen their knowledge and gain new and extensive practical experience in the cloud.

Technical boot camps

During the one-day boot camps Solution Architects guide the participants through the Management Console. Thus, they get a first-class, learning-by-doing experience.

Technical Sessions

During the technical sessions AWS experts give insights into subjects such as mobile, big data, gaming, databases, security and operations. Furthermore, reference customers will talk about their experiences in these areas during special events in the evenings.

AWS customer and partner presentations

The startup community can get inspiration from lectures by Plug & Play, Hub:Raum oder UnternehmerTUM. The VCs and incubators will give valuable tips on, among other things, financing. This is a fantastic opportunity for the participants to connect with renowned representatives of the startup ecosystem in Berlin.

Well-known speakers

• Petar Djekic (VP Discovery/Rocket Internet SE)
• Lars Wolff (CEO/CPO Stormforger)
• Henning Jacobs (Zalando Technical Lead Plattform)

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According to the website, the search engine donates 80 percent of its income to a tree planting program. With over 200,000 daily active users almost 40,000 trees have already been planted, making an overall donation of over € 1.5 million.

While their layout is similar to the one of Google, search results come from Yahoo and Bing, enhanced with Ecosia’s own algorithms.

“Next step will be a revamped and greatly improved search experience, which we will be launching later this month,” Tim Schumacher told VentureVillage.

Unlike other startups, he states in his blogpost on the Ecosia’s website, the company “certainly doesn’t run Ecosia looking for an exit: We run it because the Internet needs a search engine alternative that leverages the enormous revenue generated by web search” and “We don’t look at profits, we look at our ‘triple bottom line’”.

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Gentz could not forget the deal. He wanted to found his own internet company. His situation could hardly be better: Gentz was 23 at the time with a degree from the WHU in his pocket along with internships at Boston Consulting Group and Morgan Stanley. He also had a love for Latin America, which he shared with his friend from university David Schneider. A few months later they founded their first startup in Monterrey, Mexico, where Gentz studied for one semester. It was called Unibicate, a social network for universities in Mexico, Argentina and Chile.

As well-connected WHU graduates, they did not have any difficultly finding investors. They even went to Oliver Samwer who responded to their idea with: “Ridiculous!” And Samwer was right. Programmers for Unibicate were hard to find and the money from investors became scarce. In 2008, Robert Gentz and David Schneider ended the project. At this point, both were living for eight months with no salary, as Gentz told author Hagen Seidel years later.

The failed founders were so broke that they did not have enough money to buy a plane ticket back to Europe. Once again, they turned to Oliver Samwer – and this time with success. Samwer paid their return flight for them. In return, they both worked for many months at his price comparison portal tarifas24.

A short time later Gentz and Schneider were already looking for their next idea. They did not let themselves be discouraged by their failure. Instead, they claimed to have learned from it. “It was very clear to me that we should not try to found another social network,” explains Gentz. The model was “hardly predictable and difficult to scale.”

They began their second attempt back in Germany: an online shoe store that was modeled after Zappos in the U.S., which was later acquired by Amazon. This time Samwer invested: Alexander, the youngest of the three brothers, participated at the start with €50,000 and provided them with programmers from Rocket Internet in Berlin.

They tested their model with an online shop for flip-flops. Gentz looked mainly after online marketing and customer support. “We were so always so happy when a customer would call,” recalls Gentz. “We could then ask the customer what works well on the website and what does not.” In the fall of 2008, they moved into their first office on Torstrasse in Berlin. Zalando was officially founded and the success story began.

Today, five and a half years later, Robert Gentz, David Schneider and Rubin Ritter, who joined in 2010, are still managing the company. Zalando today, however, has little in common with the startup that began in 2008. The company now employs over 5,000 employees and had €1.8 billion in turnover in 2013 – up by more than 50%. Financial experts believe that we can expect an IPO either at the end of 2014 or latest by early 2015.

Is a startup founder also the right leader for the management of a corporation? Robert Gentz is convinced, “We have done everything ourselves, and we still know how the process works.” He believes that this is a huge benefit “in comparison to big corporations that come from the outside of the company’s management.”

Meet Robert Gentz

Robert Gentz will speak for the first time on stage at the HEUREKA Conference – and there is no one better to interview him than Gründerszene’s Joel Kaczmarek.

Date & Time: May 6, 2014, 9:00am to 11:00pm
Place: Alte Münze, Berlin
Tickets: Only by applying – See link
Website: http://heureka-conference.com/

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Users can book a ride through Blacklane via its app, website, or hotline. It does not own its own fleet but instead aggregates the excess capacity of local partners. The startup explains that business travelers drive bookings, as they are looking for a one-stop-shop to organize their premium transport around the world.

In an interview, we asked Blacklane Cofounder Jens Wohltorf about the challenges of scaling quickly to new markets. “It involved a lot of homework that we had to prepare,” says Wohltorf. In the beginning, Wohltorf faced questions like: “Are we well known in the cities we are about to launch in? Do people know our brand? How can we select the right partners? But because of our size and our launches we are in the good and comfortable situation that we are well-known when we are about to launch in new markets such as what we have just done in Budapest and Shanghai.”

Blacklane is not the only chauffeur portal with an expansion mission. Competitor Uber raised $258 million in funding last year from Google Ventures and Texas Pacific Group Capital and is currently present in 87 cities including Manchester and London in the UK. When asked about the competitive landscape, Wohltorf acknowledged that “there are a bunch of those services basically competing in the same market. What Blacklane was always built on was not the on-demand world but a reliable on-order market. We are positioning ourselves to be the ideal travel companion for all business travelers – when they are booking their hotels and when they are booking their flights.”

Wohltorf says that expansion will no longer be the sole focus now that Blacklane has “basically covered the entire world.” Its plans to go deeper into its markets to acquire new customers and partners. In Berlin, Backlane chauffeured smarts are currently on the road for a limited test period. As for the potential of the other Blacklane markets, Wohltorf maintains “we have only scratched the surface.”

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Peretti is the brains behind the website and was also involved in the beginnings of the Huffington Post in 2005. A year later, he began working on the side on a viral experiment: Buzzfeed Labs, which began as little more than a collection of links to popular internet content. When AOL bought the Huffington Post in 2011, Peretti could finally start fully concentrating on Buzzfeed.

Within a few years, Peretti, whom Business Insider once named “the web’s king of viral content”, was able to build a media empire out of this experiment – over 400 people work for the website. In 2012, Peretti was even able to hire recognised political journalist Ben Smith, who took charge of building up Buzzfeed’s more serious journalism. Today, the journalist reports from crisis areas, while the investigative section is allowed months to research a story.

Buzzfeed now has new offices in London and Sydney to serve the British and Australian audiences, while French, Portuguese and Spanish versions are already in the works. And, soon, a German Buzzfeed will be launched – a handful of journalists based in Berlin will be tasked with building a localised version, Peretti confirmed at the Online Marketing Rockstars conference in Hamburg last Friday. There, we caught up with him for an interview…

Where do you get your news from?

I get a lot of my news from Twitter and Facebook. Although they are only social platforms, not journalistic organisations, they’re great at connecting me to The New York Times, to The Atlantic or to various tech publications.

But you don’t have a subscription to a physical newspaper anymore?

I don’t know. For a while, my wife used to get The New York Times. I’d take the sports and business section with me and read it on the way to work. Now I read on my phone.

Let’s say you lived a few decades earlier, in the age of print. Then you wouldn’t have founded Buzzfeed, but would’ve done what? Something like Time Magazine, for example?

The interesting thing is that Time Magazine started out as a clipping service. At the time, there weren’t any journalists there, they just subscribed to a bunch of newspapers and synthesized them into short articles. It was only later that Time began to hire its own reporters and correspondents until it eventually had foreign bureaus all over the place and a whole lot of serious reporting. And now the magazine is struggling as things transition to digital. But the point is: it has evolved over the decades. People forget that even Time Magazine started as a modest operation.

You can see the parallels to Buzzfeed…

When Buzzfeed first started, we summarised trends on the web: this and that is happening at the moment. We didn’t have a team, we’d publish four things a day. Now, we publish 400 things a day. We have an investigative journalism team and correspondents reporting from Syria, Kiev and Nairobi.

We were able to expand because the model worked for our readers, because they love the brand, the site and the work we’re doing. You see that happening throughout the media industry: MTV started with music videos. Because people were turning the channels, they put these cartoon characters between the videos: Beavis and Butthead, introducing the videos and making fun of the videos. The viewers liked watching this, so a whole show was made with those characters. And then they started to do fewer music videos and eventually they had almost all original programming.

You see: people judge companies by the moment they’re looking at it. But if you’re part of a company like Buzzfeed – or MTV or Time Magazine – then you see it more as a trajectory or evolution.

That means the Buzzfeed of today is not at the end of its development?

We are continually evolving. A year ago, we didn’t have video operations. Now, we have 100m video views per month. We didn’t have foreign correspondents, or an investigative journalism team. In the course of a year, our traffic has grown from 40m unique visitors to over 140 million. We constantly ask ourselves “what can we do now that we’ve reached the next level?” We can now attract different types of talent. We can build certain kinds of tech. We can use data in new ways. We can offer new ad products.

When you’re a very small company and decide to start doing foreign reports, then it’s either arrogant or stupid or both. But when you’re at the scale we’re now, having an investigative journalism team that spends six months on a story, then that’s not only possible, but also a smart business decision. Why? Because it is only a small percentage of our overal budget, but it can have a big impact. So we always have to keep stopping and asking ourselves “what can we do now?”

What about your plans for Germany?

We’d love to come to Germany. We need to find the right people. As soon as we find someone who is the right person we’ll do it.

And you’ll stand by doing it by yourselves and not working with a publishing house from Germany?

We’d do it on our own, and fairly modest. That’s what we learned when we opened our London office – you should start with three or four people and then let them really invent what Buzzfeed should be for their audience. In Britain, it took a few months of them trying new things before they got a sense which things worked well for the British audience. Today we are one of the biggest sites in the UK now. It worked well. We are going to take a similar approach here, starting with a small number of people who we’ll let experiment. They would need to be very entrepreneurial and build something that has a lot of their own vision in it, not just carry out what is predefined in New York.

You were just in Berlin and apparently had talks with Axel Springer. But you still decided against a partnership?

Springer was just curious about what we’re doing with Buzzfeed. And I was curious about the German media market. So we just had a conversation as colleagues – talking about where the industry is heading, what sort of things they’re working on and so on.

The general prevailing feel you get from the Buzzfeed site is very positive, correct?

Of course. We sometimes use the phrase “no haters”. That doesn’t mean that we don’t do critical work. We just ran a profile of Donald Trump, which he was really upset with. He tweeted that Buzzfeed is a terrible, irrelevant site. But the piece was very fair. Or our piece about the terrible conditions in an Afghan military hospital that was in part run by the U.S. government. We ran that story with graphic pictures in it, exposing this terrible abuse. That’s not being a hater, that’s being a good journalist, that’s exposing corruption and wrongdoing. We do that as part of our mission.

Being a hater means writing a long thing about how a mediocre movie sucks. And in such a way that makes the author look cool. We don’t like that kind of stuff. There was a period on the internet in the mid-2000s when a lot of bloggers were very sarcastic and found everything shit. It was almost a lazy way of criticism. There’s lots of mediocre things in the world. Just ignore those things. We’re probably more generally positive than other publications. We do not think being critical in itself is a virtue. Being critical of a deserving target and exposing something real is a virtue. But we also think people are looking for things to enjoy and to celebrate. We want to show people things that are worth their time. We believe people are curious and want to discover new things.

You studied environmental science, fought against gun lobbyists and became famous for your email conversation with Nike in 2001. Do you see yourself as an idealist? Do you want to change the world? And does Buzzfeed make the world a better place?

I think that in anything you do, you want to do it in an ethical way. If you work as a journalist, you want to create high-quality journalism, advancing the field. If you are doing entertainment content, you want to make people laugh or cry. If you’re in advertising, you might want to go from banner ads that interrupt you and block the content to advertising that adds to the experience. I think you should look at things and ask yourself “how should they be?” And then work towards that direction. In a way, that makes the world a better place.

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Lendico will be led by Christoph Samwer, Philipp Petrescu, Dominik Steinkühler and Clemens Paschke. According to Linkedin, Petrescu recently became Vice President Corporate Finance at Rocket Internet after stints working at JP Morgan and McKinsey. Steinkühler, according to Xing, previously worked at the Boston Consulting Group. Both Paschke and Christoph Samwer previously worked at McKinsey.

Lendico – a Lending Club rival?

Lendico is understood to follow the model shared by Lending Club in the US and Zopa in the UK. Lending Club received a huge investment of $125m this year from Google, amongst others. The company’s valuation jumped accordingly to $1.5bn and speculation about an imminent IPO is rife. These are Samwer-sized dimensions.

Copying one of these companies would fit with Rocket Internet’s usual strategy – find a successful company and launch a similar business model in a number of different markets. Lendico already has offshoots in Austria, Denmark, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Russia, Spain, Sweden and Turkey. The companies are held under the roof of Luxembourg-based Lendico Holding, which is, indirectly, a daughter company of Rocket Internet.

One big difference from Rocket Internet’s usual tactics, as outlined by Marc Samwer at TechCrunch Disrupt on Monday: the incubator isn’t launching Lendico in emerging markets in Asia, Latin America and Africa but in Europe.

Existing lending platforms in Germany Auxmoney and Smava may struggle to come up with the capital to compete with a Samwer-backed rival. Last July, Rocket Internet announced it had secured $500m in recent funding.

Germany is ready for disruption

The finance sector is screaming for disruption in Germany. Lending platforms face one major challenge: the country’s legal framework. Lendico currently plans to offer only transactions that don’t require a bank licence (“Activities that require a license under the Banking Act or the Payment Services Supervisory Act are not provided.”)

Will Lendico need to partner with a bank? Both its potential German competitors, Auxmoney and Smava, are working with banks, while Hamburg-based Kredito left its original business model behind precisely because it didn’t have a bank license.

Kredito is now Kreditech, which offers credit checks for customers to banks, eCommerce shops and collection agencies. It offers “scoring as a service”, a rival service to Germany’s Schufa rating agency. Last December, Kreditech received a $4m funding round and in April another seven-figure investment from the Samwer brothers and others.

The brothers became involved in that company via their investment fund, Global Founders Capital. In September, Kreditech also announced €5m in credit from Kreos, a deal mediated by the Samwer fund.

How this fits into Rocket Internet’s model

With Kreditech, the Samwers already have a credit scoring system, which could be repurposed to check potential Lendico lenders’ credit history. A lending platform would also fit with Rocket’s various eCommerce offerings, including Home24 and Zalando – these customers could be potential loan takers and their payment behaviour could be analysed, which in turn allows reliable behaviour patterns to be mapped.

Rocket Internet is also involved in mobile and online payments via Payleven and Paymill. Through these companies, the group is in contact with online and mobile shoppers along with mCommerce or eCommerce providers outside the Samwers’ empire.

Aside from any strategic aspects, lending platforms have high potential. Lending Club has a $1bn valuation and investors that include Google. Experts forecast hedge funds will enter the market soon. A market with a lot of money and high exit potential? A very interesting concept for Rocket Internet.

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Greylock Partners, one of the oldest venture capital firms in the US, will be eyeing up marketplaces and the enterprise cloud with its new $1bn fund. It’s the firm’s 14th fund since 1965 and first since moving from Boston to Silicon Valley.

The firm has managed several big internet hits over the last decade: including relatively early investments in LinkedIn and Facebook. Among its mistakes, at least according to Bloomberg Businessweek, are deals with Groupon and Digg and a “pass” on Twitter.

Still, it’s a good track record – and the firm apparently raised its latest fund in a matter of weeks, with oversubscription and no new limited partners. Top priorities for the new fund are marketplaces – which alone deserve a $100m focus, Greylock partners David Sze and Reid Hoffmann wrote – and cloud-based enterprise products and services.

From its 13th fund, also worth $1bn after a top-up in 2011, Greylock has made over 140 investments – 120 of them at seed or Series A stage. Raising such large sums doesn’t mean all of it will actually be used, with only about half of the 13th fund actually invested.

As well as its Silicon Valley headquarters, Greylock Partners has offices in Cambridge (US), Beijing and Bangalore. Sister firm Greylock Israel takes care of Europe, with offices in Tel Aviv and London.

Image credit: Flickr user TechCrunch

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Millicom offers digital lifestyle products and services to emerging markets. Late last year, Millicom and Rocket Internet signed a deal which gives Millicom shares in Rocket’s Africa Internet Holding and Latin America Internet Holding, allowing them to jointly build internet ventures in the two regions. Currently Millicom has 35 per cent of the holding company, but has the option of upping its stake to 100 per cent at fair market value by September 2016.

Founded in 2011, Easy Taxi is available for Android and iOS, plus new BlackBerry devices and works in a similar way to its German compatriot MyTaxi and London’s Hailo. Users confirm a pickup location and book a taxi within the app, which they can then track in real time as it approaches. So far, Easy Taxi is available in Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo and a number of other Brazilian cities, plus Botoa, Salvador, Lima and Venezuela. It’s looking to expand in Asia – it’s already live in Seoul and Kuala Lumpur, with Manila, Hong Kong and Bangkok in the works. In October last year, Rocket provided Easy Taxi with €3.77m funding.

EasyTaxi’s Dennis Wang said today: “With more than 30,000 taxi drivers in our network and nearly 1,000,000 downloads and counting, we already gained a strong competitive edge in 30 cities across nine countries. With the recent round of funding, we want to reinforce our position as market leader and continue our global expansion.” The new investment will be used to add functions to Easy Taxi’s applications, develop new channels and work on customer service.

The taxi service offers a slightly more personal touch via an extra feature dubbed “Bibliotaxi” – passengers can borrow books from Easy Taxi cabs and return them when they take their next trip.

This is the latest in a long list of recent funding rounds for Rocket Internet ventures, including $120m for Lamoda, $100m for Zalora and $100m for Lazada.

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Berlin-headquartered online food ordering empire Delivery Hero is delivering a new $5m investment to its partner in India, TastyKhana.

The news – with the size of the deal confirmed by TastyKhana founder and CEO Shachin Bharadwaj in a tweet today – follows an earlier seed investment in 2012. Since the seed deal, TastyKhana, founded in 2007 in Pune in western India, has expanded from two cities to seven and over 3000 restaurant partners. The company said in a blog post today it would aim to continue its “exponential growth”.

Delivery Hero, founded about two years ago, operates food ordering services in 14 countries, mostly in Europe but also in Australia, South Korea, China and Mexico – it claims to now be leading in six of those markets. A good part of that expansion has taken place through strategic investments in local partners – it recently completed a full takeover of former rival HungryHouse in the UK.

The company is talking up the mobile strengths of TastyKhana as the clincher to today’s deal:

The focus of TastyKhana lies especially in the mobile sector. Mobile has shown an increase in sales by 40 per cent within the last months. TastyKhana is also the only Indian online food delivery company which offers apps for Android, iPhone and Blackberry.

Delivery Hero – plans to break even in 2013

In exchange for facilitating online orders and bringing in new customers, Delivery Hero (and presumably its partners) take a cut of purchases made through its web and mobile apps. The company made about €25m in revenue on about €250m worth of orders in 2011, according to the Financial Times – those figures are likely to have increased significantly last year. The group aims to break even in 2013.

Delivery Hero itself has raised over $100m in investment from backers including Team Europe (also an investor in VentureVillage’s parent company) and Kite Ventures. Its rivals include JustEat – already well established in India – and Rocket Internet’s FoodPanda, which raised an additional $20m to support its global expansion in May.

Image credit: Flickr user mastermaq

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Blacklane – which is targeted at business types – does not actually own vehicles, but instead aggregates limousine services so that they can be easily bookable through its website and app. Currently, the startup operates in Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the UK, France and Austria.

Unlike San Francisco-based on-demand private driving competitor Uber, Blacklane offers a fixed price for bookings rather than the common charge-as-you-go pricing system for car services.

With Uber already available in many US cities, Blacklane will be facing stiff competition across the pond. Not only that, if Uber’s recent setbacks – the company is facing legal troubles in Washington DC and was forced to shut down in New York – are any indication, the German startup is in for a bumpy road ahead.

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