Vidar Andersen

Hi, there. I'm a Norwegian entrepreneur who occasionally found my own startups to scratch my own itches, regularly help startup founders, support startup programs like accelerators and incubators, teach students at universities and colleges, and enable employees in companies and organisations to go farther faster and achieve better outcomes, living in the greater Cologne / Dusseldorf area of Germany since 2005.

I probably missed my shot at becoming sitcom-famous when I was chased off the set of "Sex & the City" in NYC back in 1999, I since wrote & recorded a Billboard Hot 100, and created things used by billions. (Two out of the three are actually true so far; Can you guess which?).

My work has been featured and recognised around the world by the likes of The New York Times, CNN, TechCrunch, Business Insider, BBC, Wirtschafts Woche, and Die Welt, and my work has been seen and used by billions (yes, capital B).

Sometimes I get invited as a keynote speaker, panelist, and moderator or MC, to events and conferences like SxSW, WebSummit, LeWeb, PASSWORD, Digital Shapers, TedX Hamburg, World Business Dialogue, etc. Universities like Cambridge, Stanford, KIT, and Cologne University as a speaker and moderator - as well as to keynote corporate events from well-known brands like Bertelsmann, Henkel, and RTL - or GOs like IHK, AHK, Business France, USAID, NRW INVEST, the city of Dusseldorf and the city of Cologne, and more.

The media and peers have conspired to name me a central figure in the German startup world, instrumental in the Cologne / Rhineland startup scene. My main "hobby" is supporting early-stage startups and spreading education on how to build startups to students and founders - as a very modest occasional investor in very-early-stage tech startups, as an educator teaching at universities and colleges, as an founder and organizer of a variety of events and programs, by providing free Open Office Hours weekly since 2007, by training over 3.000 startups - and counting - in-person how to pitch investors with my Pitching Masterclass, as a mentor and coach in different startup support programs worldwide, all because I wish that someone would have been there for me to help me get going when I started out on my entrepreneurial journey.

As an educator, I've been invited to teach and speak about startup entrepreneurship at Standford, Cambridge, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), BITS Iserlohn, WHU, Maastricht University, Cologne University, Cologne Polytechnical, NW University of Switzerland, Dokuz Eylul University in Turkey (DEU), University of Dusseldorf HHU, University of Applied Sciences Dusseldorf HSD, Qazvin Islamic Azad University (QIAU) in Iran, and more. The slides from my educational lectures, keynotes, and talks have been featured as LinkedIn's "Slide of the Day" four times to date.

And because corporations and organisations keep asking, I've also been helping the likes of Deutsche Telekom, ABInBev, AXA, Philip Morris International, Bertelsmann, ottobock, Zentis, Reifenhaeuser, BARCO, Henkel, Yello Strom, Telefonica, the International Iberian Nanotechnology Laboratory (INL), USAID, Business France, and many more with education, innovation, and digitalisation through my company +ANDERSEN & ASSOCIATES since 2013.

In the 15 years preceding more or less all of the above, between 1996 and 2010, I was an on-and-off employee in various small-ish digital development companies specialised in innovation and digitalisation for large international companies and government organizations like Equinor (nee Statoil), TeeKay, VG (largest Norwegian newspaper), Shell, Esso, Exxon, T-Mobile International, Deutsche Telekom, Lufthansa, The Royal Norwegian Government, The Norwegian Ministry of Education and Research, the Norwegian Directorate for Higher Education and Skills (nee VOX), and Nestle - in between founding my own things.

The last position I held in somebody else's company was "Head of Digital" and "Member of the Board" between 2005 and 2010 at T-Mobile International's digital Lead Agency responsible for all things digital. There's more information about those parts of my past over on LinkedIn.