Oliver Eidel's Blog

Category: Startups

  • How To Found a Company In Germany: 14 “Easy” Steps And Lots Of Pain

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    Oliver Eidel
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    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…

  • Don’t Make These 9 Mistakes When Building Your Startup

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    Oliver Eidel
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    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…

  • Don’t Take VC Funding – It Will Destroy Your Company

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    Oliver Eidel
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    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…

  • Pioneers vs. Process People

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    Oliver Eidel
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    Today is my last day at Merantix Healthcare. While I am very sad to leave behind a stellar team which I helped build, it’s the right thing for me to do. Why? At any company, there are multiple projects going on: Developing a product, getting regulatory approval, recruiting for a team.. you get it. Whatever…

  • Become a Full-Stack Person

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    Oliver Eidel
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    Let’s look at how most software is developed. I’m not talking about those shiny SaaS products like Slack. Those were built for developers, by other developers. No, I’m talking about the large underwater iceberg of boring software running enterprises, governments, hospitals and nuclear reactors. Real-world software. Software outside the Silicon Valley tech bubble. How does any such…

  • The Rush of Shipping

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    Oliver Eidel
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    Recently, one of my posts made Hacker News #1. That brought back childhood memories. The Paidmail Site When I was thirteen, I launched a hacky Paidmail site. The concept was simple: You signed up to receive ad e-mails. At the end of the month, you got money in proportion to how many e-mails you had received. How…

  • Don’t Be an Engineer, Be a Producer

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    Oliver Eidel
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    I’m currently reading Range by David Epstein [1]. I was deeply impressed by the section about Gunpei Yokoi, the guy at Nintendo who was the driving force behind the NES and Game Boy. I have fond memories of the Game Boy; everyone who was a kid in the nineties does. This awesome thing you could hold in our hands,…

  • Businesspeople Are Useless

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    Oliver Eidel
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    Interacting with businesspeople never ceases to amaze me. They presume that they’re qualified to run companies. Why? Because they are businesspeople. What makes a good businessperson, anyway? There seems to be a factory-like process of creating “great” businesspeople: Take some random people with above-average self-confidence. Toss them into business school, teach them how to write…

  • Asking Stupid Questions

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    Oliver Eidel
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    After graduating from Medical School, I started working at a startup as a software engineer. While I did learn a lot of things in this time, one thing which sticks out particularly is asking stupid questions. You may have noticed that businesspeople have the striking ability to talk about things very persuasively and in a…