Great businesses don’t stand out by accident. They make deliberate choices about how they are experienced, how they build relationships, and how they attract the right people.
This Thursday Gathering explores the different ways founders and teams can design their edge—from creating memorable experiences and building a strong employer brand to finding the right approach to fundraising and developing a distinctive personal brand.
Expect practical insights, interactive sessions, and honest conversations around the choices that can help businesses and people stand out, build trust, and create meaningful connections.
In the Demo Table zone you will discover various products, technologies and projects being presented by the founders or startup-representatives.
In the Info Table zone you will find out about projects, organisations and ideas.
Want to present your organisation? Send us an application!
However remember, this is NO HARD SALES zone.
Unwind, connect, and vibe to the rhythm! This lively session blends casual networking with great music, offering the perfect atmosphere to meet fellow innovators, exchange ideas, and forge new collaborations. Enjoy the beats, and build meaningful connections in a relaxed, energetic setting.
A working session for startups and SMEs that hire
Why now?
Reputation is what others talk about you when you're not in the room. Candidates read Kununu, Glassdoor, Reddit and LinkedIn before they ever reach your careers page, so every hiring company is already doing employer branding, whether they mean to or not. Employer branding beyond job ads is not just about party days, employee-vested shares, or tokenistic DEI pics. It starts at the value proposition: if the value prop tokenises anyone, everything downstream tokenises too. The legal context sharpens this.
What this session is?
Founders and hiring teams stress-test their own live artefacts and leave with a concrete plan. Culture as defined by your value proposition, not by toxic workplace traits. If that holds, the performativeness can go from the website to the job ad, and what remains is checkable.
Who this is for?
What participants should bring?
A laptop and at least one live artefact they have authority to change: a current job ad, careers page, rejection email, or social media posts.
What participants leave with?
A stress-tested artefact and an action list that separates what their communication claims from what their practice can back.
About the facilitator:
Dr. Vijay Shankar Balakrishnan is the Founder of NarraTricks, a fractional Chief Communications Officer practice working with science- and tech-driven startups, SMEs and Mittelstand companies, positioning visibility and credibility upstream of sales, marketing & PR. He holds a PhD in interdisciplinary nanoscience and brings 13+ years of science journalism across leading media outlets, plus 3+ years of combined corporate communications at Boehringer Ingelheim, Neutrolis, and as NarraTricks Founder.
Great experiences don’t happen by chance—they’re intentionally designed to create emotion, drive behavior, and achieve strategic outcomes. In this interactive keynote, you’ll discover how to design memorable experiences that align with your business objectives, whether for events, brand activations, customer engagement, or internal gatherings. Through audience participation and real-time co-creation, you’ll learn practical principles and a proven methodology to maximize the impact and ROI of every experience—regardless of budget or resources.
Requirements:
- company website
- an active product with customers/users or an active research study, pilot project
- What's the difference between a Family Office and a VC partnership?
- What can you realistically expect from a Family Office?
- Is my business at this stage attractive to Family Office investors?
- What does it take to attract entrepreneurial capital for my innovation? Ulf is Founder & Managing Partner of 2998 Capital, and has worked with more than 200 European entrepreneurs on vision, strategy, and commercialization.
The Multihyphenate Advantage: Building an Unforgettable Brand
The Core Philosophy: Embracing your unique identity is not just about self-acceptance; it is a strategic business advantage. Growing up as a Black Italian woman, the traits that initially marked me as "different" became my most powerful assets, ultimately driving a dynamic marketing career and fluency in connecting across six languages.
The Power of the Multihyphenate: Being a marketer, singer, painter, and dancer is never a distraction. Instead, this intersection of art and strategy provides a sharp competitive edge, fueling the kind of out-of-the-box thinking that modern brands desperately need to stand out.
From Fear to Growth: The obstacles we avoid are often the exact places where our greatest potential lies. Identifying and facing the one thing you fear most in your career or business is the key to unlocking hidden avenues for unprecedented brand growth.
Actionable Takeaways
-
Identify Your Edge: Pinpoint the unique cultural and personal "wildcards" that set you apart from the competition.
-
Conquer the Fear: Transform career anxieties into stepping stones for innovation and business development.
-
Build the Brand: Translate your multidisciplinary hobbies and personal heritage into a cohesive, memorable professional narrative.
AI is moving beyond prompts, apps and screens. In the next five years, it will become more personal, contextual and proactive — understanding what we need and supporting us in real time.
The talk will explore the shift from AI as a tool to AI as part of everyday life, and what this means for the future of technology, wearables and human-AI interaction.
I believe you truly can do it all.
Driven by this conviction, I expanded my career across three European countries. Today, I leverage my fluency in six languages to connect global audiences, seamlessly fusing artistic creativity with measurable marketing performance.
Great businesses don’t stand out by accident. They make deliberate choices about how they are experienced, how they build relationships, and how they attract the right people.
This Thursday Gathering explores the different ways founders and teams can design their edge—from creating memorable experiences and building a strong employer brand to finding the right approach to fundraising and developing a distinctive personal brand.
Expect practical insights, interactive sessions, and honest conversations around the choices that can help businesses and people stand out, build trust, and create meaningful connections.
In the Demo Table zone you will discover various products, technologies and projects being presented by the founders or startup-representatives.
In the Info Table zone you will find out about projects, organisations and ideas.
Want to present your organisation? Send us an application!
However remember, this is NO HARD SALES zone.
Unwind, connect, and vibe to the rhythm! This lively session blends casual networking with great music, offering the perfect atmosphere to meet fellow innovators, exchange ideas, and forge new collaborations. Enjoy the beats, and build meaningful connections in a relaxed, energetic setting.
A working session for startups and SMEs that hire
Why now?
Reputation is what others talk about you when you're not in the room. Candidates read Kununu, Glassdoor, Reddit and LinkedIn before they ever reach your careers page, so every hiring company is already doing employer branding, whether they mean to or not. Employer branding beyond job ads is not just about party days, employee-vested shares, or tokenistic DEI pics. It starts at the value proposition: if the value prop tokenises anyone, everything downstream tokenises too. The legal context sharpens this.
What this session is?
Founders and hiring teams stress-test their own live artefacts and leave with a concrete plan. Culture as defined by your value proposition, not by toxic workplace traits. If that holds, the performativeness can go from the website to the job ad, and what remains is checkable.
Who this is for?
What participants should bring?
A laptop and at least one live artefact they have authority to change: a current job ad, careers page, rejection email, or social media posts.
What participants leave with?
A stress-tested artefact and an action list that separates what their communication claims from what their practice can back.
About the facilitator:
Dr. Vijay Shankar Balakrishnan is the Founder of NarraTricks, a fractional Chief Communications Officer practice working with science- and tech-driven startups, SMEs and Mittelstand companies, positioning visibility and credibility upstream of sales, marketing & PR. He holds a PhD in interdisciplinary nanoscience and brings 13+ years of science journalism across leading media outlets, plus 3+ years of combined corporate communications at Boehringer Ingelheim, Neutrolis, and as NarraTricks Founder.
Great experiences don’t happen by chance—they’re intentionally designed to create emotion, drive behavior, and achieve strategic outcomes. In this interactive keynote, you’ll discover how to design memorable experiences that align with your business objectives, whether for events, brand activations, customer engagement, or internal gatherings. Through audience participation and real-time co-creation, you’ll learn practical principles and a proven methodology to maximize the impact and ROI of every experience—regardless of budget or resources.
Requirements:
- company website
- an active product with customers/users or an active research study, pilot project
- What's the difference between a Family Office and a VC partnership?
- What can you realistically expect from a Family Office?
- Is my business at this stage attractive to Family Office investors?
- What does it take to attract entrepreneurial capital for my innovation? Ulf is Founder & Managing Partner of 2998 Capital, and has worked with more than 200 European entrepreneurs on vision, strategy, and commercialization.
The Multihyphenate Advantage: Building an Unforgettable Brand
The Core Philosophy: Embracing your unique identity is not just about self-acceptance; it is a strategic business advantage. Growing up as a Black Italian woman, the traits that initially marked me as "different" became my most powerful assets, ultimately driving a dynamic marketing career and fluency in connecting across six languages.
The Power of the Multihyphenate: Being a marketer, singer, painter, and dancer is never a distraction. Instead, this intersection of art and strategy provides a sharp competitive edge, fueling the kind of out-of-the-box thinking that modern brands desperately need to stand out.
From Fear to Growth: The obstacles we avoid are often the exact places where our greatest potential lies. Identifying and facing the one thing you fear most in your career or business is the key to unlocking hidden avenues for unprecedented brand growth.
Actionable Takeaways
-
Identify Your Edge: Pinpoint the unique cultural and personal "wildcards" that set you apart from the competition.
-
Conquer the Fear: Transform career anxieties into stepping stones for innovation and business development.
-
Build the Brand: Translate your multidisciplinary hobbies and personal heritage into a cohesive, memorable professional narrative.
AI is moving beyond prompts, apps and screens. In the next five years, it will become more personal, contextual and proactive — understanding what we need and supporting us in real time.
The talk will explore the shift from AI as a tool to AI as part of everyday life, and what this means for the future of technology, wearables and human-AI interaction.
I believe you truly can do it all.
Driven by this conviction, I expanded my career across three European countries. Today, I leverage my fluency in six languages to connect global audiences, seamlessly fusing artistic creativity with measurable marketing performance.