YouSaid · the spoken record

Christian Reber

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2021-02-15
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2021-02-15
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  1. “I agree that presentations got a bad rep in the last years, but I want to fix that. I think the next five years I will spend on building the product that I'm envisioning and my co-founders are envisioning. And that's about it. And I hope by doing that, we create one of the most successful businesses Europe has ever seen.”

    2021-02-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wunderlist & Pitch Founder, Christian Reber on His Personal Relationship with Risk, Money, Whether the Sale to Microsoft was a Mistake, What Great Product Designs Means Today & Why Founders Investing External Capital is a Distraction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “I think Pitch has the opportunity to become a massive company. And I don't really want to just bring up numbers, but I think the reason I've started this is because I've realized that most major economic decisions and political decisions are based on the output of presentation software. If you get your morning briefing as a CEO, you often get like marketing reports, executive reports of some kind. You can, of course, get like memos as well. But I think DEX play a substantial role in informing leaders in our world. So I think if I build the right tools that enables the next generation of leaders to build the best decks possible and ten times faster than ever before, I accelerate humanity. That's honestly my belief. And I think all of us, students in universities, founders, executives, small companies, medium-sized companies, big companies, everyone works with presentations.”

    2021-02-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wunderlist & Pitch Founder, Christian Reber on His Personal Relationship with Risk, Money, Whether the Sale to Microsoft was a Mistake, What Great Product Designs Means Today & Why Founders Investing External Capital is a Distraction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Oh, that's such an unfair question, right? One I really love working with is Kieran O'Leary. He's the founder of Blue Yard Capital in Berlin, and he was previously at Earlybird who was invested in Wonderlist. We worked together on so many things. He's a close friend. I'm also an investor in Blueyard. He's an amazing human being because he just, he's speaking with me on the exact same level. We're just two friends who try to do cool stuff together. He's on the investor side. I'm on the founder side, so I think it's totally fair to mention him. That said, I respect all of my investors.”

    2021-02-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wunderlist & Pitch Founder, Christian Reber on His Personal Relationship with Risk, Money, Whether the Sale to Microsoft was a Mistake, What Great Product Designs Means Today & Why Founders Investing External Capital is a Distraction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Not really. I trust science. I think most startups fail. Pitch could certainly fail as well. That's just the reality. And if you view everything you're working on that way, it just makes life a lot easier and you are able to make risky decisions a lot easier. But at Wonderlist, I had a lot of moments where I felt lonely, I felt scared. But I don't really mean it like I don't experience fear. But my parents were just really good at kind of like teaching me to trust myself. So I'm not even sure if they actively did something to create that, but I felt like my mother had a lot of influence on me on that one.”

    2021-02-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wunderlist & Pitch Founder, Christian Reber on His Personal Relationship with Risk, Money, Whether the Sale to Microsoft was a Mistake, What Great Product Designs Means Today & Why Founders Investing External Capital is a Distraction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Great question. I think I want my kids just to be happy, nothing else. I don't want them to become the next generation of tech founders or like, I just want them to figure out their own careers, whatever they want to do. I want to support them. I was lucky that my parents teach me.”

    2021-02-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wunderlist & Pitch Founder, Christian Reber on His Personal Relationship with Risk, Money, Whether the Sale to Microsoft was a Mistake, What Great Product Designs Means Today & Why Founders Investing External Capital is a Distraction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Building relationships with other CEOs is very, very helpful because every founder feels the same. I think the best founders are really good at making unpopular decisions, right? Why no one believes in you, you make a decision that you trust is the right one. And that is, I think, where you feel the most vulnerable and lonely as a founder. I get a lot of support from just friends who build companies. My angel investors who are all in the same kind of mode and who live very similar lives. So I think that helps. But now, wait, we have Clubhouse now. So now we can all socialize and feel less lonely.”

    2021-02-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wunderlist & Pitch Founder, Christian Reber on His Personal Relationship with Risk, Money, Whether the Sale to Microsoft was a Mistake, What Great Product Designs Means Today & Why Founders Investing External Capital is a Distraction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “I think the hardest aspect of being a CEO is often feeling lonely with the toughest decisions you have to make. I think I have phenomenal co-founders who really have my back at any time and I have theirs. But yeah, some of the hardest and toughest and most critical decisions you have to do as the CEO because it's your responsibility. And I think that is the most challenging aspect of that.”

    2021-02-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wunderlist & Pitch Founder, Christian Reber on His Personal Relationship with Risk, Money, Whether the Sale to Microsoft was a Mistake, What Great Product Designs Means Today & Why Founders Investing External Capital is a Distraction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Good quote from the book. It kind of teach me that at the beginning of my career I shouldn't care about money at all. I should just try to absorb as much as I can as fast as I can. And I've just lived by it. Later on, I've realized that it's kind of like a cheesy marketing book or whatever, influenced my childhood so hard. It was phenomenal.”

    2021-02-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wunderlist & Pitch Founder, Christian Reber on His Personal Relationship with Risk, Money, Whether the Sale to Microsoft was a Mistake, What Great Product Designs Means Today & Why Founders Investing External Capital is a Distraction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “As a kid, I picked up this cheesy busy business book that's called Rich Dad Poor Dad. I'm born in East Germany with normal background, like working class family, right? And in my youth, my parents were working for really rich family from Ireland. I met that family constantly. I've spent time with them. Like, because I was a nerd, I basically fixed their computers when I was young. I found that book in their home Rich Dad Portaded and I read it. For me, it was like my biography when I was like 14 or so. It was about a kid with poor parents who got told like you have to study hard to get a great job, which had a friend with rich parents who constantly told his kids, you have to be smarter than everyone, to like you have to make people work for you. And I was like, huh, interesting. And it had a god of good wisdom in it, like work to learn, not to earn was a really good.”

    2021-02-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wunderlist & Pitch Founder, Christian Reber on His Personal Relationship with Risk, Money, Whether the Sale to Microsoft was a Mistake, What Great Product Designs Means Today & Why Founders Investing External Capital is a Distraction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Appreciate product thinking and you can make mistakes as founders like all the time, but just because you get feedback from a successful investor doesn't mean that the investor is necessarily right. I think you can still learn from your investors. I think the unique advantage is investors just see a ton of different companies. They recognize patterns, which you don't as a founder. And I think if you build a good relationship with your board and you kind of try to learn from them, you are set for success.”

    2021-02-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wunderlist & Pitch Founder, Christian Reber on His Personal Relationship with Risk, Money, Whether the Sale to Microsoft was a Mistake, What Great Product Designs Means Today & Why Founders Investing External Capital is a Distraction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Down in the board meeting, and I was like, Hey, are you sick man? Are you not doing well? And he stood up and said to me, like, yeah, I'm not doing well because of you, man. Like what you are selling here is nonsense. It makes absolutely no sense. Promoting real-time synchronization to your customers is like promoting breathing air to humans. It just makes no sense. And I was mentally destroyed. My confidence was at an all-time low. And we had a pretty bizarre board meeting. And it turned out that it was the best release we've ever had. And actually, in the end, it was the reason Microsoft bought us because of the real-time synchronization we've had. It was an absolutely fascinating thing. Like if you think about team first productivity software, everyone is having real-time synchronization these days. It's an absolute standard. I think at that time, I kind of learned that, again, like I want to have a good time with my board. So I'm trying to partner with people that...”

    2021-02-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wunderlist & Pitch Founder, Christian Reber on His Personal Relationship with Risk, Money, Whether the Sale to Microsoft was a Mistake, What Great Product Designs Means Today & Why Founders Investing External Capital is a Distraction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “It is definitely different because as a first time founder, you have no idea what you're doing. You're really learning with every board meeting, every product launch, every iteration. So I do board meetings every three months, and I'm just trying to have a good time and explain everyone exactly what I'm planning to do on the product side, tech side, business side, marketing side. And that works really well. I had a really interesting board meeting at WonderList, actually. So I had a pretty spectacular board partnered with firms like Atomico and Sequoia and Earlybird, a local fund in Germany. And we were working on the next iteration with real-time synchronization. So like seeing your lists and tasks in real time why someone else is typing. I really believed that real-time synchronization in software is the future of productivity apps. And I've pitched my board the latest version in one of my board members pretended to fall asleep.”

    2021-02-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wunderlist & Pitch Founder, Christian Reber on His Personal Relationship with Risk, Money, Whether the Sale to Microsoft was a Mistake, What Great Product Designs Means Today & Why Founders Investing External Capital is a Distraction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “I approached my co founders by just saying, Hey, I have this idea of building a team first presentation tool and I've pitched them the product, they fell in love with it. But then we worked with our designers to build a great interface and we just worked on it really, really hard. I constantly have moments where I feel like we're just not good enough. We're not good enough in, I don't know, certain features we're building or branding or copywriting or whatever. And I think I'm giving my team a very hard time. I want to publicly apologize for that to everyone who's listening from Pitch and Super List. I think I'm giving everyone a really hard time because I guess I am a perfectionist. I assume that's what my investors think of me as well as I'm just not giving up. I'm always trying to build the best possible product I can. And that leads to what it leads to.”

    2021-02-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wunderlist & Pitch Founder, Christian Reber on His Personal Relationship with Risk, Money, Whether the Sale to Microsoft was a Mistake, What Great Product Designs Means Today & Why Founders Investing External Capital is a Distraction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “I mean by instinct, I don't think you get born and just have a good instinct. I think if you are building software like I am, you have to spend an enormous amount of time with software and hardware of all kinds. Like I'm a nerd, right? I play most computer games. I know most tools. I use Windows, Mac, Chrome, OS, Android, iOS, I know everything in tech. I have the latest gadgets all the time. I'm a super nerd. So I think I developed over time a pretty good sense for how software is evolving, how hardware is evolving. And I think as a founder, I'm just trying to identify an upcoming trend, like the rewide of the office suite, for example, and therefore the opportunity to reinvent PowerPoint and to really build the next generation of it. In terms of building a product, I don't think I'm a genius at all. All I provide is the idea.”

    2021-02-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wunderlist & Pitch Founder, Christian Reber on His Personal Relationship with Risk, Money, Whether the Sale to Microsoft was a Mistake, What Great Product Designs Means Today & Why Founders Investing External Capital is a Distraction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “It's just, I'm just trying to emotionally protect myself. So like I said, when I sold Wanderlist, it felt like I'm selling my child to the enemy. I didn't want to get bought by Microsoft. I viewed Microsoft as the enemy. And it was just stupid. It made no sense. In order to avoid that from happening again, I just tried to emotionally distance myself from what I'm doing, to not burn myself out. That doesn't mean that I don't love what I'm doing. I clearly have a strong passion about pitch and what we create and create well-designed tools. I just want to avoid this from happening again. It's a way to protect myself.”

    2021-02-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wunderlist & Pitch Founder, Christian Reber on His Personal Relationship with Risk, Money, Whether the Sale to Microsoft was a Mistake, What Great Product Designs Means Today & Why Founders Investing External Capital is a Distraction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “I don't is the honest answer, so at Pitch where eight founders in total. I think every new hire asks me the same question, like, how do you create culture? The answer is we just don't. It just happens. We hire good folks that we feel like fit our company DNA, like understand the product we want to build and have a similar way of working.”

    2021-02-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wunderlist & Pitch Founder, Christian Reber on His Personal Relationship with Risk, Money, Whether the Sale to Microsoft was a Mistake, What Great Product Designs Means Today & Why Founders Investing External Capital is a Distraction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “I think if you're the sea owe everyone kind of looks up to you. Your team members can smell and see if you're killing yourself and if you are just working in an unsustainable fashion. Most founders I know and like most first time founders are really emotional weirdos I would say including myself and I think you just have to find a balance and be a role model. I don't really communicate anything special. I just try to say that I want to provide an environment where people have autonomy, can do their best work, can also take care of their families. I think we have done a pretty good job during COVID, like helping our team in the right way. We've given parents the option to just work less during lockdowns to be able to somehow manage their lives with children. There's nothing special I'm doing. I'm just trying to be a normal human being.”

    2021-02-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wunderlist & Pitch Founder, Christian Reber on His Personal Relationship with Risk, Money, Whether the Sale to Microsoft was a Mistake, What Great Product Designs Means Today & Why Founders Investing External Capital is a Distraction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “So I think I'm trying to build a culture where we are a bunch of very ambitious individuals, but we also have a good time. It's the journey really that is the most fun and not like the potential exit you might have at some point.”

    2021-02-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wunderlist & Pitch Founder, Christian Reber on His Personal Relationship with Risk, Money, Whether the Sale to Microsoft was a Mistake, What Great Product Designs Means Today & Why Founders Investing External Capital is a Distraction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Yeah, I think that all goes back to my Wonderless days. I had the exact same belief that you need to kill yourself to build a business successfully, especially a startup with like that's permanently under-resourced. Getting sick from it, like truly burning out from it, made me realize that obviously this is not sustainable. And I think I've learned to emotionally disconnect from what I'm creating. So I'm like trying to view building a business more as a project. So I don't get too attached. I work 10 hours a day or something like that, roughly. So it's a lot, but it's not too crazy. I eat breakfast with my kids. I eat dinner with my kids. I do that every single day. I play games like Minecraft with my kids. I just want to have a good life and I'm not really sure if I have a detailed philosophy there, but I just want to find a way to sustainably build a business. And I also want to be a role model for our employees.”

    2021-02-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wunderlist & Pitch Founder, Christian Reber on His Personal Relationship with Risk, Money, Whether the Sale to Microsoft was a Mistake, What Great Product Designs Means Today & Why Founders Investing External Capital is a Distraction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Engineering effort, so we are currently 100 people, and I want to scare the company to 160, 170 people by the end of this year, and that just requires cash”

    2021-02-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wunderlist & Pitch Founder, Christian Reber on His Personal Relationship with Risk, Money, Whether the Sale to Microsoft was a Mistake, What Great Product Designs Means Today & Why Founders Investing External Capital is a Distraction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “The idea and asked me would you raise funding? Is it not really? Because I just closed the seed run. I don't really have the need. And then again, they made me an offer I couldn't resist. And then I took it again and I've noticed, okay, I can really accelerate the development. So I've scaled the team, hired a lot of engineers to build v1. And the next funding round, by the way, happened exactly the same way. We weren't fundraising. An investor of Wanderlist was just reaching out, wanted to hear about pitch. I pitched the idea, got a really good offer. We raised 50 million in total exactly that way by not fundraising. But the money we kind of need, if you think about it, we have to build the next generation of PowerPoint, which is hard on its own, but then we kind of integrate something like Docsend and Slideshare right into the product. So we built multiple products all at the same time. We build a developer platform into the product as well. So you can build plugins for Pitch, doing all these things is a big”

    2021-02-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wunderlist & Pitch Founder, Christian Reber on His Personal Relationship with Risk, Money, Whether the Sale to Microsoft was a Mistake, What Great Product Designs Means Today & Why Founders Investing External Capital is a Distraction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “The true story there is we've never wanted to raise any funding. I've made like really bizarre experience with investors in the past and I was really anti-VC when I started my own company. I kind of said, I'm going to fund this myself. I'm going to build this my way, no board meetings, nothing. And we started pitch that way. The first fund that made us an offer made us an offer that I just couldn't believe. I think the seed valuation was 20 million with nothing, no co-founders, no Dick, just the idea. And I was like, holy shit, this is insane. Okay, I'm going to take this offer. I think this makes sense. So that's how the fundraising has started. And then three months later, index ventures wanted to chat with me. Sarah Keller, in fact, and Neil, I just told them what I'm working on. I just said, like, I'm going to build this pitch platform and we'll have real-time data integrations and its own distribution platform built in. I really think this can be big. And they loved it.”

    2021-02-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wunderlist & Pitch Founder, Christian Reber on His Personal Relationship with Risk, Money, Whether the Sale to Microsoft was a Mistake, What Great Product Designs Means Today & Why Founders Investing External Capital is a Distraction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Amount of people that work in startups, et cetera. But it's clearly on the rise. I think it's our duty now, our generation.”

    2021-02-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wunderlist & Pitch Founder, Christian Reber on His Personal Relationship with Risk, Money, Whether the Sale to Microsoft was a Mistake, What Great Product Designs Means Today & Why Founders Investing External Capital is a Distraction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “I had a meeting with a really influential billionaire investor in 2013 and I've asked him why don't you really invest more in Europe and why don't you have a team in Europe? He took a napkin and he wrote down US, China Europe. For US he draw a circle. For China he drew an even bigger circle to like illustrate the market cap of tech combined of all companies. And for Europe, he drew a dot. And he said, like, this is Europe. That's why we don't have a team there. Just to explain you the situation. Now, seven, eight years later, I think that has totally changed. So we have multiple Deca Corns, I think four in Berlin right now. We have tons of unicorns. I think the startup industry is growing like wildfire right now. Everyone wants to start businesses. So I think that is absolutely incredible. We're still behind in terms of the size of the ecosystem, so the amount of companies, the amount of talent, like the”

    2021-02-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wunderlist & Pitch Founder, Christian Reber on His Personal Relationship with Risk, Money, Whether the Sale to Microsoft was a Mistake, What Great Product Designs Means Today & Why Founders Investing External Capital is a Distraction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “The chairman, or whatever. So I think there are a lot of founders who do this for fame or personal wealth. I think if you commit yourself to something starting a company, you should commit your entire life to it. It's okay if you do a few things on the site. That's how the ecosystem works, but there needs to be a clear limit on how much time you spend on ancient investments.”

    2021-02-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wunderlist & Pitch Founder, Christian Reber on His Personal Relationship with Risk, Money, Whether the Sale to Microsoft was a Mistake, What Great Product Designs Means Today & Why Founders Investing External Capital is a Distraction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “So, Angel investing absolutely is a distraction. I think if you, as a founder, run your own seed fund and raise capital on the site while you are building your own product and business, I think it's a massive distraction. I wouldn't recommend that. What I am doing is I invest four to five times a year, mostly in people I kind of already know. The superl thing was really just pure passion. I started that company because I really believe this product should exist and the team was already in place. So I think if you balance it out, it's okay. I spent an hour a week, I would say, on angel investments, maybe one to two hours a week on super list, and the rest of my time is pitch nonstop. Before I started super list, talk to my board, try to make sure I'm not going to build this product myself. I will give feedback on product design and who we should hire, what we should build. But that's about it. The team has the responsibility to create that company. I am just like...”

    2021-02-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wunderlist & Pitch Founder, Christian Reber on His Personal Relationship with Risk, Money, Whether the Sale to Microsoft was a Mistake, What Great Product Designs Means Today & Why Founders Investing External Capital is a Distraction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “I think I've taken 50% of my personal wealth and reinvested it into venture capital by investing into funds and startups. I love our ecosystem, right? That's kind of why it grows so fast. And that's my relationship with money.”

    2021-02-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wunderlist & Pitch Founder, Christian Reber on His Personal Relationship with Risk, Money, Whether the Sale to Microsoft was a Mistake, What Great Product Designs Means Today & Why Founders Investing External Capital is a Distraction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Yeah, it has changed quite a lot. I think I went through some kind of depression after selling my business to Microsoft because I didn't want that really. And I've never celebrated the exit. I've never posted a party with the Wonderless crew. It just was a really weird time. I wasn't happy about it. What money gave me was freedom. I could do whatever the hell I wanted. Through time and overcoming like that kind of frustration, I've realized freedom is amazing. Money doesn't buy you happiness. Money buys you freedom. I'm the luckiest guy on the planet, I feel like. We still live in the same house as we have before the exit. I don't own like 10 supercars or something like that. So I don't think my life could be any better because I have like wonderful family. I'm living the dream. I can work on whatever I want. And I think that is awesome. If I would gain more wealth, I would just reinvest it faster. I have actually...”

    2021-02-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wunderlist & Pitch Founder, Christian Reber on His Personal Relationship with Risk, Money, Whether the Sale to Microsoft was a Mistake, What Great Product Designs Means Today & Why Founders Investing External Capital is a Distraction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “Recover and like regain energy. So I am actually incredibly thankful to Microsoft for giving me this opportunity. Am I satisfied about the outcome? Clearly not. I think Microsoft has screwed up multiple acquisitions like Yammer or Skype, and they promised me when we sold it that they will try their very best not to screw up Wanderlist. And I think they did. I think we could have turned it into something much bigger and better. That's why I started SuperList last year together with the X Wonderless crew. I mean, I'm not building the company actively myself. I'm just on the board and an investor basically. But I think Wonderless had a very unique character and could have grown to hundreds of millions of users and could have had a successful business product. So I believe the acquisition didn't work out. But that's totally fine. I'm not mad about it.”

    2021-02-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wunderlist & Pitch Founder, Christian Reber on His Personal Relationship with Risk, Money, Whether the Sale to Microsoft was a Mistake, What Great Product Designs Means Today & Why Founders Investing External Capital is a Distraction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “No, I don't. I know I've created quite some buzz around wanting to buy it back. What really happened there, and I think I've never really told the true story in public, is I got really sick when I sold Wonderless. Like I was physically ill and I didn't know what was happening. I really was shocked by it myself, but I basically got rich by selling Wonderless, got my first child, and then I got a really bad diagnosis of just being ill. And I'm good today. During the time I've sold Wonderless, I felt deep regret. I didn't want to sell it to Microsoft because I really, truly believed I could turn this into a massive company. Now, years later, I can reflect on it and I can honestly say it was the right moment in time. I think Evernote hasn't worked out. Evernote was kind of the poster child at the time for productivity apps. Again, I have also trusted my instinct in the selling process. I felt like this is a good opportunity. I should probably do this. I had a few years to”

    2021-02-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wunderlist & Pitch Founder, Christian Reber on His Personal Relationship with Risk, Money, Whether the Sale to Microsoft was a Mistake, What Great Product Designs Means Today & Why Founders Investing External Capital is a Distraction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “Ah, that is such a tricky question. I think my programmer background really helps me there, because I learned the hard way that every line of code I write will be overwritten by another engineer at some point. Like even the products that I create might not exist at some point in time. So like Wanderless is a very good example, right? After selling it three years later, it doesn't exist anymore. Nothing is forever, and I think that's how I approach product design and”

    2021-02-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wunderlist & Pitch Founder, Christian Reber on His Personal Relationship with Risk, Money, Whether the Sale to Microsoft was a Mistake, What Great Product Designs Means Today & Why Founders Investing External Capital is a Distraction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “Fonts publishing it on Slideshare, I felt like this is all so weird. And I came up with the idea of pitch, like the all-in-one presentation platform. And now we're here. That's my story.”

    2021-02-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wunderlist & Pitch Founder, Christian Reber on His Personal Relationship with Risk, Money, Whether the Sale to Microsoft was a Mistake, What Great Product Designs Means Today & Why Founders Investing External Capital is a Distraction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “Experience, then I launched mobile apps, built a team around it, turned it into a typical venture startup, venture backed startup. And then I sold it five years later to Microsoft. And at that time, my wife and I were expecting our first kid. So I was really ready to end this kind of startup roller coaster or at least give it a break. So I spent two years at Microsoft. I don't know. I just never felt like I'm finished with what I really wanted to accomplish, which is building an independent and global software company that really cares about well-crafted and well-designed products. So I was looking into all sorts of different product categories and noticed that presentations are really ready for a overhaul. I felt like, hey, creating Dicks in PowerPoint is so tedious, so time consuming, so complicated. Never build a deck myself without the help of a designer. And then distributing is painful, converting it to like PDF format, caring about.”

    2021-02-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wunderlist & Pitch Founder, Christian Reber on His Personal Relationship with Risk, Money, Whether the Sale to Microsoft was a Mistake, What Great Product Designs Means Today & Why Founders Investing External Capital is a Distraction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “As a service, so building cool products that you can launch for free with a freemium model and then people can come in, use them, try them, and subscribe to them to use them. And my idea was, why don't I build the next generation project management tool? And I started WonderList. And my first Angel Investor said, like, before you start with this project management thing, why don't you build an appetizer product? Like it's a really simple tool that gives you credibility in front of investors to raise funding. I said, yeah, what should I build? Well, maybe I build it to DuWeb. So I wrote WonderList myself with two of my first engineers within six weeks or so, launched it for Meck and Windows, and it was an insane hit. It just went through the roof and I didn't know what was happening. And then the app store launch we put it on the app store. It was like super popular there. Most downloaded app worldwide for quite some time.”

    2021-02-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wunderlist & Pitch Founder, Christian Reber on His Personal Relationship with Risk, Money, Whether the Sale to Microsoft was a Mistake, What Great Product Designs Means Today & Why Founders Investing External Capital is a Distraction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “Later, an investor approached me, said, Hey, do you want to take money for this thing? And I was just really honest. Honestly, I don't even know if this is a company. I just built a playlist feature for YouTube. I don't think this is a thing, but why don't you want to buy it? So I sold a company, I think, four or five months later. And it was right enough money to like buy my first car and start my next company, which was an agency business. So I built websites and products for all kinds of like small and large companies in Berlin for three years where I met most of my co-founders these days doing like those agency days. We had a blast and then after three years of agency life we almost went bankrupt because all our clients went bankrupt at the same time couldn't pay the bills and I was like damn running an agency so hard and so exhausting and risky why don't I go back to where I came from just writing software I was fascinated with software”

    2021-02-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wunderlist & Pitch Founder, Christian Reber on His Personal Relationship with Risk, Money, Whether the Sale to Microsoft was a Mistake, What Great Product Designs Means Today & Why Founders Investing External Capital is a Distraction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “Yeah, so I accidentally started a company when I moved to Berlin at the age of eighteen. I'm a programmer myself and YouTube at that time had no playlists. So I had the idea like, why don't I build online music player that uses YouTube API as a back end to curate music and charts? So I build a simple website called it Muccelli, put it online on Muchelli.com. People could listen to like Korean charts, Japanese charts, German charts. I launched it. It got super viral, free music on the internet, right? People, I think I had like 200,000 users within a month. And then I was like so scared of getting sued because for me that was just a tech experiment, like a programmer experiment. And I asked my mother to borrow me money to start a legal entity or form a legal entity around it just to avoid having to file personal bankruptcy in case of lawyers suing me. Started a company one or two months.”

    2021-02-15 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Wunderlist & Pitch Founder, Christian Reber on His Personal Relationship with Risk, Money, Whether the Sale to Microsoft was a Mistake, What Great Product Designs Means Today & Why Founders Investing External Capital is a Distraction · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source