Vidar Andersen

A Norwegian tech entrepreneur (b. 1975) who from time to time founds (tech) startups to scratch his own itches, currently living in Meerbusch, Germany (CGN/DUS area) - and in airplanes around the world.

Andersen started out as a professional in the digital innovation field in the mid nineties surviving the dotcom boom Web 1.0 crash. Along the way he (among other things - and in no particular order) invented, pitched, and won the contract for the first web-based Learning Management System in the world for the Norwegian Government (and managed its production), found himself at one time serving as "Head of Digital" at T-Mobile International's lead agency responsible for all things digital for five years, at one point receiving a scholarship from one of Europe's most prestigious business universities (Deusto, Bilbao), co-founded the very popular enterprise content management system Plone (users include The FBI, The CIA, NASA JPL, and many more), founded the startup behind the first real Social Discovery app for the iPhone, co-founded a Vine app six months before Vine (cue #sarcasticprisonclap), did an ICO in 2017 (flopped, launched same week as the Chinese Crypto Crackdown, central Chinese backers requested immediate removal of all traces, cue #sadfacetrombone), did a couple of crowd funding projects (one flop, one success that made the IndieGogo global frontpage) founded and organized one of the world's largest Hacker News Meetups (HN Cologne, DE), co-founded Germany's (possibly Europe's) largest startup pitching event, the Rheinland Pitch - continuously running since 2013, once minted once sold his own NFTs (just because - NFTs are a joke anyways, right?), and founded a most wonderful family.

His work has been featured and recognised around the world by the likes of New York Times, CNN, TechCrunch, and Die Welt, and has been seen and used by billions (yes, that's billions with a "b").

A popular keynote speaker, panelist, and moderator (MC), he's been invited to places like SxSW, WebSummit, LeWeb, Cambridge, Stanford, PASSWORD, RTL's Digital Shapers, World Business Dialogue, and TedX Hamburg as a speaker and moderator (MC) - as well as to keynote corporate events from well-known brands like Bertelsmann, Henkel, and Amadeus Leisure Group, GOs like NRW INVEST, the city of Dusseldorf and the city of Cologne, and more.

A central figure in the German startup world and instrumental in the formation of the Cologne / Rhineland startup scene, Andersen's "hobby" is supporting early-stage startups and spreading education on how to build startups to students and founders as a very modest non-detrimental cap table position in super-early-stage tech startups, as a certified Lean Launchpad Educator invited to and trained by Steve Blank (the father of the Lean Startup movement) at Stanford, by providing free Open Office Hours weekly since 2007, additionally he's trained over 1.700 startups - and counting - to date how to pitch investors successfully on their own terms with his Pitching Masterclass, and the slides from his educational lectures and talks have been featured as "SlideShare's Slide of the Day" globally several times.

As an educator, he's 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 in Switzerland, Dokuz Eylul University in Turkey (DEU), Qazvin Islamic Azad University (QIAU) in Iran), and more. He's also worked with USAID to help support entrepreneurship in eastern European nations, educating corporate leaders and startup founders.

And - because corporations and organisations don't stop asking - he has also been helping corporations and organisations (like Deutsche Telekom, ABInBev, AXA, Philip Morris International, Bertelsmann, Zentis, Reifenhaeuser, BARCO, Henkel, Yello Strom, Telefonica, the International Iberian Nanotechnology Laboratory (INL), and many more) with innovation and digitalisation through his company +ANDERSEN & ASSOCIATES since 2013.

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