Thought Leaders in Corporate Innovation: Max Wessel, General Manager of SAP.io (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: In terms of areas of interest for these kinds of seed investments, what degree of relevance do you need with SAP’s current technology? Does it need to be built on HANA? Does it need to be built on something else within the SAP stack? What are the constraints?

Max Wessel: There are no constraints from an underlying technology perspective. Obviously, we would love for everybody in the world to build on HANA and on SAP cloud platform, but we also understand that there are plenty of viable open source components and cloud infrastructure providers that startups want to work with. Instead of requiring that technical definition >>>

Thought Leaders in Corporate Innovation: Max Wessel, General Manager of SAP.io (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Our model is actually complete customer immersion. It’s a one-year program. Each person who gets to be part of the program has one year including side-by-side methodology training, customer immersion, customer validation, and TAM analysis. It’s not in vacuum at all. I’m sure your program is effective. I’m just comparing notes. That’s the whole point of these discussions – to understand the different processes that are working.

Let’s switch gears and talk about your external innovation methodology. When SAP launched HANA we 

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Thought Leaders in Corporate Innovation: Max Wessel, General Manager of SAP.io (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: When the team comes forward, is it required to present a business case analysis or a hackathon style development first?

Max Wessel: They tend to do a very light back-of-the-envelope business case – nothing substantive. We teach people to think by analogy. If you’re building a tool to get into the recruitment services market or start to automate what recruiters would otherwise do for a large organization, the question is, “What’s the scope of the businesses that have been launched like that before?”

You don’t have to develop an in-depth business plan but you have to have some conviction. We hope that you have some >>>

Thought Leaders in Corporate Innovation: Max Wessel, General Manager of SAP.io (Part 2)

Max Wessel: From an intrapreneurship perspective, we have a program that we’ve been running for close to four years now. We have all sorts of ideation programs around the company for decades but four and a half years ago, we launched a program that’s aptly called Intrapreneurship.

At one point, we kicked off the campaign. That campaign started locally. We have a network of venture labs that operate in actual physical locations. SAP has development centers around the globe. Those labs will come to the employee base and will give them a series of challenges. They’ll say, “Here are the topics that are most interesting to us.” These could be cutting energy utilization >>>

Thought Leaders in Corporate Innovation: Max Wessel, General Manager of SAP.io (Part 1)

This interview explores the nuances of SAP’s Corporate Incubation strategy in great depth.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us about what SAP’s thinking is in the domain of corporate innovation. What are your goals, activities, strategies and structure? Let’s dig into the programs.

Max Wessel: Let me start off with the high level description of what SAP is for those who are not familiar with the organization. SAP is Europe’s largest software company. We also happen to be the largest enterprise applications business in >>>

Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum On The Startups Investors Invest In

To help entrepreneurs to learn which qualities VCs and seed investors are looking for in the startups they will invest in, we have asked a variety of investors to share their specific perspectives as part of our Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum. Naturally, different investors have different interests. As we teach within our virtual accelerator, an entrepreneurs seeking funding needs to figure out who are the best matches for the type and stage of their business. My interviews with the following investors share a range of options available for different sorts of startups that are looking for funding.

Vinny Lingham, Co-founder and CEO, Civic.com, and Managing Partner of Newtown Partners, discusses his investment thesis in B-to-C seed ventures. We also discuss the role ICOs are playing in filling the gaps in certain seed-stage ventures.

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Building a Two-Sided Marketplace: LawnStarter CRO Ryan Farley (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Did you raise funds at the Techstars demo day or did you raise funds afterwards?

Ryan Farley: Most of it was afterwards. We pieced together a round of a lot of individual angel investors. We didn’t have any VC funds in the million-dollar round. One of the 20 angel investors came from demo day. The rest came from our network or the Tech Stars network. Demo day is a great event, but it’s not like when you do your presentation, investors come running to you. That’s when the work begins; not when it ends.

Sramana Mitra: How much did you raise at this point? >>>

How to Increase Your Odds of Getting into TechStars

TechStars rejects 98% of all applications.

Is there a strategy for raising your odds of getting into TechStars?

The short answer is yes.

Watch this 1 minute 22 second video on how Nevin Shetty, CEO of Blueprint Registry, bootstrapped to validation, traction in fact, before applying.

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