Encouraging and enabling are our main pillars to sustain our vision: bringing more diversity in the landscape of founders and investors. In terms of enabling, we strive to provide both parties with a solid network and with a sophisticated educational offer.
Our start-up academy
Therefore, we started our start-up academy in January. The objective is to offer founders with start-ups during the early stage to pre-seed and seed stage free access to the most relevant trainings via online sessions. Our academy is directed towards diverse founding teams, e.g. at least one of the founders has to be female.
The program is organized in different modules per month and takes place during the whole year 2023. The modules will cover a broad range of topics which are relevant for the founders such as fundraising, financial planning, marketing, sales, legal, and many more.
The academy comprises impulse sessions, masterclasses, and workshops provided by members of our network with relevant expertise and backgrounds.
In January, we started with @Anna Kaiser and @Vanessa Fischer who presented the program to founders of the encourageventures network.
In February, we proceeded with the topic business models. The founders could participate in an introductory speech, a masterclass, and a workshop. The impulse and masterclass were provided by @Mindshift.One with the speakers @Coleen Dannroth and @Kate Manon Sio. The workshop was held by @Prof. Dr. Heike Hölzner.
In March, the academy will continue with the next topic marketing. You can be sure, that there will be exciting and insightful subjects for everyone!
Our business angel academy
In 2022, we also started an academy for business angels. After a very good response and many positive feedbacks, we will start a second edition in May. In addition to the modules around deal flow and deal making that we already held in 2022, we will also roll out other formats. We intend to offer deep dives on topics around female investing as well as on sectors and selected topics.
We will also invite our members to talk formats with top-class female investors, to coffee talks, panels, lunch & learn sessions, and fireside chats. You can look forward to an extensive and exciting program!
One of our participants in 2022, Sabine Raebinger, said: “An intensive academy with lots of theoretical knowledge and even more practical know-how. A clear encouragement to invest!”
And another participant, Judith Kühne, said: “Through the Business Angel Academy from encourageventures I was able to learn the most important tools as an investor, clarify many open questions and build a great network. Now I’m really looking forward to investing together!”