As a young entrepreneur and recent founder of smart-collectors.com I was eager to come to Bits & Pretzels for the first time this year. No matter who I asked prior to my trip to Munich, a large bunch in the scene heard about this event and I realised some kind of hype around it.
Their marketing machinery is quite strong and well done as well. As I worked in hospitality for years, I know what it takes to organise an event that size and signing guest speakers like Richard Branson and Kevin Spacey.
So long story short I was ready and eager to finally get to Munich and experience this founders festival.
The first day however caught us a little off guard, as Stefan Raab certainly was very funny during his opening speech. I still wonder however, which relevant core message was to be noted in the quintessence of his performance.
Further it was somewhat surprising to me that a panel discussion about “how to grow internationally as a start-up” centred around the finding, that a solid English competence and the market size of the home country is rather a Scandinavian advantage to grow international than one of a German start-up as Scandinavians overall speak better English and their home market is much smaller than the German market.
Lastly, the shallowness of the interview let by Kevin Spacey was embarrassing. I even felt bad for Kevin Spacey as his questions were answered partially only by one word or not at all and he ended up interviewing the energy drink fridge between one interviewee and himself. Further the question about who had more drinks the night before was discussed multiple times and left the audience wondering about the relevance of this information.
Despite these few surprises it is nevertheless relevant to mention, that the audience appeared to be quite rich in variety & relevance and networking opportunities occurred not only throughout the conference program but also during the side events of the festival as well as after day two of the conference.
Certainly it is a remarkable job that the founders of Bits & Pretzels accomplished so far and such an event is a treasure for the start-up community in Germany, which still has a lot of growth potential.
And we might have been just a little young as a start-up founded in April 2017 to meet investors and apply for the start-up pitches.
So our expectations might have been just a little to high for 2017, but we most probably will come back and apply for 2018.
This leads me to my final words and my resume. Very early-stage start-ups, I recommend you not to raise your expectations to high and think carefully about your ROI of this event. 2018 we will be out there rolling for about 18 months and hence hopefully ready for a good chance amongst the applicants for the start-up pitch. And we hope that some agenda points will be more motivational and profound. See you there next year!
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