San Francisco, Düsseldorf The German start-up and venture capital scene (VC) moved into the clubhouse within a few hours at the weekend.
The app of a startup from San Francisco offers a social audio platform on which people can discuss live in so-called rooms – a mixture of radio talk show and Twitter-Discussion. Investors like Frank Thelen, known from the TV show “Die Höhle der Löwen” and politicians like FDP leader Christian Lindner have already participated in discussions there.
Their speeches were mainly about tips for the search for investors, the relationship between founders and investors and the best financing models. The quality of the content fluctuated between further discussions and self-adulation.
The “VC Talk – Insights into the European VC Scene” on Sunday evening attracted a lot of attention in the start-up scene and beyond, to which around 700 people have now listened – including football professionals André Schürrle, Mario Götze and TV presenter Joko Winterscheidt.
Among others, the founders of the erotic shop Amorelie, Lea-Sophie Cramer and Sebastian Pollok, who are both active as investors today, and the President of the Federal Association of German Startups and e.ventures investor Christian Miele discussed at the panel.
A listener wrote on LinkedIn that she had read interviews from the participants, a book on the bedside table, followed them on the career platform “and then all together in one room on Sunday evening to talk about the VC scene!” We will still see whether a clubhouse “The new crime scene 2021”.
Or the new meta talk show: users came together in one room to watch Anne Will’s talk show on ARD. Experts from the group of users were able to explain to other listeners how such a political panel discussion is designed.
You can only come in by invitation
Some politicians also discovered Clubhouse for themselves at the weekend. Right at the forefront: Digitization Minister of State Dorothee Bär (CSU). She discussed the question, “Will 2021 be the year of diversity?” With the founder of About You, Tarek Müller and Tijen Onaran, head of the Global Digital Women network.
It is not even particularly easy to use the app that was launched in March 2020. It is currently only available in Apple’s App Store, and a new user must be invited to the clubhouse by another user.
At Ebay– These invites were sometimes traded for 50 euros. Public lists are circulating on Twitter, in which German interested parties can register in regionally divided Telegram groups in order to receive an invite. To do this, they are then asked to invite the next person on the list.
Daniel Stammler, founder of the gaming start-up Kolibri, has been a registered clubhouse member since Saturday. As a consumer you can “zap through very easily like on TV”, you meet very nice people in a casual environment.
He also explained his enthusiasm with the special situation after months of corona restrictions. There were “informative rounds with people from the German and international tech scene” that he had not seen for a long time due to the pandemic. He himself spoke on a panel about his founding experience and the challenges of rapidly growing his company.
You meet legendary investors and Justin Bieber’s managers
In Silicon Valley, Clubhouse has been popular with entrepreneurs and investors practically since it was launched in March: Marc Andreessen, the legendary founder of the investment company Andreessen Horowitz, regularly visits clubhouse chats, and some partners from Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund are also regulars.
Andreessen Horowitz won the race among venture capitalists to join the clubhouse parent company Alpha Exploration and led a $ 12 million financing round for the Hype app in May.
Over the course of the year, Clubhouse grew beyond the startup scene, and music managers such as Justin Bieber manager Scooter Braun and some well-known rappers often discussed in the clubhouse.
However, the platform is also regularly criticized: On the one hand, the discussions are dominated by white men, like the tech scene, which comes from the clubhouse.
On the other hand, because they neither moderated racist or anti-Semitic statements nor put members in front of the door. “In a clubhouse room is currently being discussed why it is okay to hate Jews and I’ve had enough of this app for now,” tweeted entrepreneur Sara Mauskopf in September.
This is not a new problem for clubhouse founder Pete Davison. The Stanford alumni worked for the social network Pinterest until a few years ago. A new feature, developed under Davison’s aegis, let users comment on posts without scanning them for problematic content. They were promptly inundated with pornography and hate speech. Even so, Davison and his co-founder Rohan Seth ignored the problem in their new startup clubhouse until criticism fell.
At the beginning of October, the company announced in a blog post that it would improve the moderation on its platform. Since then, functions that are common on other platforms, such as being able to block individual users and training for moderators, have been helping all users to feel safe on Clubhouse.
The further success of Clubhouse will depend on this. And whether the app will develop from its few niches into a broad social audio network.
In San Francisco, the home of Clubhouse, there was an interesting experiment on this last Thursday: When two investors from the Founders Fund complained about the allegedly high level of crime in the city and the responsible district attorney in a room, he spontaneously appeared in the clubhouse room and answered the questions of his perplexed critics.
A spontaneous political radio talk show with audience participation – the format could find supporters in Germany in the election year.
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