visalyze - Failure also needs to be practised.

The best team of all

The Forbes list ranked the multiple state prize winner among the 21 Heroes of Data Visualization. Together we founded a company in 2012 to make the invisible connections within Facebook, Twitter and Co visible - visalyze. We already had an inkling that these new media would not only have a major impact on business and society, but also on politics.

Here you can see the sound wave of the most expensive suicide attempt in history. visalyze shows the comparison of Likes, Comments and Shares during the jump, flight and landing of Felix Baumgartner's Stratos mission:

Public funding as a self-fulfilling prophecy

It was an important confirmation of our business idea that we received several 100,000 € in start-up capital from several institutions for public business promotion. It was only many years later that we realized that public funding bodies are subject to a logic all of their own. These institutions do not judge the business idea itself, but the quality of the applications. Then they check whether the idea has already been implemented elsewhere. At the end, the administrator asks the most important question: Can a positive funding decision endanger my career?

Among the top 13 European startups in Berlin in 2013

Every year there are dozens of top 10 or 20 rankings for startups. We made it into the top 13 at the next Berlin conference, which means that we were among the top 13 of more than 100 startups.

Looking for investors in Silicon Valley

In spring 2014, the Austrian Chamber of Commerce offered us the opportunity to relocate to Silicon Valley with visalyze. Since my wife Carmen was still on maternity leave, I was able to persuade her to move to Mountain View in California with bag and baggage and two children. It had been my plan to let my employees slave away in California and relax myself. But as you know, things always turn out differently than you think. I've probably never worked as much as I did during that time. We went from elevator pitch to elevator pitch. At some point, we were asked to go behind the scenes and won the preliminary round of the Keiretsu Forum. A round trip to their exclusive meetings throughout Northern California followed.

Of course, it didn't stop at three months in Silicon Valley. After two years of shuttling back and forth, I finally had a list of nearly 30 potential investors together. I approached my chapter leader in Europe, who still had a say due to ongoing funding. In his kind and authoritative way, he told me to negotiate a contract with the American investors first. He would then tell me whether I was allowed to sign it. Under these circumstances, the U.S. investors naturally refused to negotiate with me.

European investors only invest when there is no risk.

Back in Europe, I spent a good year and a half looking for investors. However, risk behavior in Europe is different. On the one hand, this has to do with the much-cited mindset, but also with the lack of resale value of companies. In the U.S., there are specialists who prepare a value appraisal for startups for €2,500. This works in a similar way to European real estate valuation. One orients oneself to transactions in the neighborhood. Social media startups are compared with Facebook or Twitter, for example, but depending on the stage of development.

Social media, which was still a sought-after investment at the time, requires less money at the beginning because of the relatively simple technology and only in later phases a lot of money for marketing. Analytics software like ours requires a lot of money for development at the beginning and then not so much for marketing when the user base is limited. So it doesn't matter so much how a startup is valued, as long as all startups are valued using comparable methods. In Europe, on the other hand - in the prevailing conservative valuation method - a company without customers and sales has no value at all, no matter what potential it can develop.

State Prize Digitization and the End

The last highlight for our company was making it to the finals of the State Prize for Digitization. When the General Data Protection Regulation came into force shortly afterwards, I didn't want to go to the extra trouble of creating more legal certainty and instead let the project expire.