My experience in for parts: Motivation, Partners, Planning and Starting:
In the next four articles, I will tell you about my own experience when I founded my company: motivation, finding partners, planning and start.
During and after my studies at Technischen Hochschule München (THM, later TUM), I was gainfully employed at Siemens and Softlab. It did not take long before, after having finished my studies, I wondered if it might be a good idea to become self-employed.
The general attitude in electronic dataprocessing was on the up, so the idea was self-evident. Yet I did not feel brave enough.
At Siemens, it was difficult to put one’s own ideas into practice. More often than not, it was a struggle like “Don Quichote and the windmills”, no matter if it was about new technologies for projects or just a coffee machine or refrigerator for the office.
After seven years with Siemens, I changed to Softlab. The company culture was more modern than at Siemens. To me, it seemed nice around the year 1980.
The problem was the conduction. Very functional, not at all individual. So my foundation ideas grew.
I wanted to put my own ideas and concepts into practice:
Being on par with people you communicate with, no hierarchical structures, an area free from fear, working together instead of against each other, small, autonomous teams …
and
using new technologies like UNIX based on modern hardware.
Of course, I also wanted to improve my own financial situation. Getting a monthly wage of between 2,500 and 3,000 DM, Softlab got around 20,000 DM value out of my if you base the calculation on an hourly rate of 150 DM. At least that was how I saw it at the time. So this was another argument for becoming self-employed.
There were various reasons why I did not want to turn freelance. I am not much of a loner. Founding an enterprise all by myself, on the other hand, seemed too risky to me.
So I needed to find partners.
RMD
(Translated by EG)
P.S.
I already wrote about how InterFace was founded, see here. In the following article, I will relate the difficulties I was confronted with on my way to finding founding partners.
P.P.S
On the pictures, you see the beach of Gythio during dinnertime viewed from a nice fisherman’s tavern. You can also see the Gythio lighthouse and the beach of Neo Ithylo beyond.
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