2016 -Tobias' Silicon Valley journey
Tobias often heard the term "Sillicon Valley" in his environment and the way people talked about it was the place where everything innovative came into being. Tobias was thinking about what to do next after the project was finished. Should he continue studying physics? He also had the idea to fly to the Silicon Valley with the money he had earned and have a look at it - and he did. In September 2017 he got on the plane. He didn't know what to expect, he had no contacts in the Valley and his English was mediocre. His original plan was to do unpaid internships with innovative companies to broaden his horizons.
Prior to that, Tobias had completed the Stanford machine learning course of Professor Andrew Ng online and then developed a program with the knowledge that could accurately predict how long it would take someone to make mathematical tasks. When he arrived to the Silicon Valley, he introduced the program to people he met. So, before he started applying for an internship, a millionaire was so excited about his program that he founded Startup Gnosker Inc. together with Tobias. However, the whole thing resembled more a research project than a start-up and the feasibility of the project was uncertain. The founders quickly lost touch with each other, and the situation continued to intensify. Finally, the founder left the team, took all the results with him and threatened Tobias with a complaint if he continued to use the company's name.
The whole venture could be considered a complete failure. But when Tobias thinks about what he has learnt about start-ups during this time, it is certainly more than would have been possible with any internship. In the further time in the Silicon Valley Tobias read many books to Startup topics, met with various venture capitalists and absorbed all knowledge, which he could get. At the end of his stay in the Silicon Valley, Tobias learned the most important lesson from his time: how is it important to work together in the founding team and that founding a company together is almost like a relationship - only with a shareholder agreement and not with a marriage contract.
Tobias' entrepreneurial spirit was awakened and when he returned to Germany, he thought back to the administration software he had developed. What was it that created such great added value for the sailing school? He suspected that the following principle was decisive: specializing in the business. Because the program was developed especially for the Pieper Sailing School, it fitted the requirements perfectly. So Tobias asked himself why not all companies have specialized software that best meets their requirements? Because software development is expensive and complicated, and not every company can afford it, he concluded. And so the question arose: So what if you could offer specialized software at a low price?
Webbee's idea was born: a modular software system with which specialized software can be assembled like Lego bricks. The result would be software specially tailored to the requirements of the company, at the cost of standard software.
