Author: Oliver Eidel
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How To Found a Company In Germany: 14 “Easy” Steps And Lots Of Pain
While Estonia has famously introduced its e-residency which enables future founders to incorporate their company in minutes, things are still quite different here in Good Old Germany. Germany has a reputation for precision and adhering to rules. I’m not sure how any of these aspects apply to the founding of companies though. It’s just damn…
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Don’t Make These 9 Mistakes When Building Your Startup
I see many founders focusing on the wrong things when building their startup. I briefly mentioned this observation in my other post. Here’s a more expanded list of things which don’t matter. All of this is my personal opinion, of course – but I thought I’d share it because not many people state this publicly, yet…
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How I Built a Bootstrapped Consulting Company: From Zero To 60k€ Revenue
I’m part of a few incubators where I mingle with future startup founders and pretend to have knowledge on how to build a startup. Generally speaking, I perceive myself as being relatively clueless, but then again, when the founders ask me some questions, I briefly think that I actually have something useful to share. One…
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Don’t Take VC Funding – It Will Destroy Your Company
I’ve talked to quite a few people who were considering founding their own startups. Many of them were quite inexperienced regarding, well, everything, as they were either fresh out of University or currently in a day job which was completely unrelated to startups, the economy and broader reality (mostly doctors). All of them tell me…
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Six Years of Back Pain, Episode 1: Mouse Shoulder
This is episode 1 of my medical mystery. As all medical mysteries, it led me to physiotherapists and doctors – but, in contrast to most medical mysteries, it also led me to stuff my scrotum into a leather-lined pouch. And I also ended up shooting gut bacteria into various cavities of my body. But let’s…
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From Two to Three
In 2020, I founded a company called OpenRegulatory. At that time – the height of the pandemic, with low interest rates and near-unlimited funding – most startups were rocket ships – VC-funded, growth-oriented and, most notably, not profitable. I wanted OpenRegulatory to be different – bootstrapped by me, small, profitable – more like a tuk-tuk. Now, while you’re chuckling,…
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From Clojure to Ruby
Back in 2017, when dinosaurs roamed the earth and I got my first coding job, I was super excited about Clojure. And what’s there not to be excited about? It’s super fast, it’s concise, and it’s a lisp. But now I’m coding in Ruby. Why? Superficially, Ruby and Clojure are similar (bear with me): They’re…
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From One to Two
In his book Zero to One, Peter Thiel writes: It’s easier to copy a model than to make something new: doing what we already know how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. But every time we create something new, we go from 0 to 1. The act…
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Why I’m Publishing My Consulting Templates For Free (and Launching My Startup)
In the beginning of 2020, I left my job at Vara, where I worked as a Software Engineer, Soccer Mom and Regulatory Affairs Person. I didn’t really know what to do next. While I enjoyed the Coding and Soccer Mom Duties, one thing was for sure: No more regulatory work, ever. Fast-forward one year. I spent the year…
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Regulation Is Killing Medical Software Innovation
I’m back from cryosleep. After leaving Merantix Healthcare 7 months ago I haven’t been writing much. I took the summer off to finish my pilot’s license and to try out a few things on the side. One of them was doing regulatory consulting for medical software startups. Remember: At Merantix Healthcare (now: Vara), we managed to pass…