Time to get out again, I thought, and searched Meetup for exciting events for the evening. Pitch & Poetry in E-Health struck me as a rather odd combination. I pictured the startups preparing their pitches in the usual jargon. The hinted link with poetry made me curious. So off to hub:raum. Three startups dared to take the stage:
E-health startup Cary uses “radar cameras” in a room to analyze people’s falls and raise the alarm. The concept sounded familiar – after all, a similar startup had been part of the Grants4Apps startup program last year. The only thing new to me was the name of the market: the so-called “beachhead” market, which is of course really “tough.”
The next startup – Labiotech – wants to become the information portal for biotech. Why that requires capital rather than simply going it alone wasn’t entirely clear to me.
Dongji, startup number three, had long since left the seed phase behind: activity tracking for “chubby” kids. What I found exciting here was a question from the audience: Is it really the parents of “chubby” kids who buy the app and the sensor – or rather fitness-minded parents whose kids don’t have a weight problem at all? Desiree Ludewig admitted that they had noticed this too. Health insurers or others need to step in here, because parents aren’t willing to pay.
But now to the poets. Their main job was to loosen things up. They made sure that between the startups, our minds shifted into a higher gear – away from the meet-and-greet culture and toward the question of why we actually do all this. Startups and poets don’t really go together – but only from the point of view of each group. From the audience’s point of view, the combination is fantastic.
Especially Karsten Lampe. When Jannis Busch wrote to ask whether he would speak about startups and e-health, since it has an “innovative spirit” and you can “connect,” he responded with a new text showing that our language creates “closed societies.” A phenomenon not only of our time: we become intelligible to our own group, but not to others. Jannis promised to change the language of his emails from now on. That’s something. If you want to know what a poet like that writes, here’s a sample.
I stayed until midnight and enjoyed chatting with Doris Lohrmann, Gerd Graumann from Evicare and Carolin Auschra from FU Berlin
PS: If you record startup pitches or have your own recordings, be sure to contact Carolin. Her doctoral thesis explores what pitches reveal about startups’ intentions.
Thanks to Jannis and co. for a great evening. And of course a big thank-you to the organizer hub:raum and sponsor Grants4Apps.
You can find more photos from the event at: http://www.meetup.com/de/health_and_life_science/photos/
