Rhine-Ruhr Valley – the new number one

From October 11-12, 2018 the largest start-up conference in the region took place at the Jahrhunderthalle Bochum.

With over 4,500 participants, the RuhrSummit broke all records of the previous years. Two days packed with deep dives, insight talks, renowned experts on stage and a Startup Pitch Challenge endowed with prize money awaited the participants.

500 startups met each other and represented almost 50 nations at the Founders Expo as well as on stage. Together this led to a relevant and interesting exchange with the attending middle-class companies, investors and organizations.
Among the 140 top-class speakers were Carsten Mashmeyer, well-known from the TV format “Die Höhle der Löwen”, as well as successful founders such as Stefan Peukert from Masterplan or Max Wittrock from mymuesli.de.

Setlog was also involved and was represented by Nora Breuker, Digital Marketing Strategist, who gave a lecture on “How to build Digital Communities”.

The RuhrSummit shows symptomatically what is currently happening in the Rhine-Ruhr area.

A few years ago, young people in particular fled the Ruhr area due to a lack of perspective, less exciting jobs and uninteresting employers. Today though they are building the companies they want to work for themselves.

More and more start-ups are being founded in the so-called Rhine-Ruhr Valley and are competing with the typical startup scene – which is particularly present in Berlin.

While some news articles report that the Rhine-Ruhr Valley has meanwhile passed Berlin as the number one location, the capital denies these statistics and continues to claim to be THE startup scene in Germany.
Whatever the statistics may be, one thing is certain:
The Rhine-Ruhr Valley is not to be underestimated as a founding location and is becoming more and more important.

Especially in Setlog’s “home country” – the charming Ruhr area – the founding scene is growing and thus actively supports the change from a soot-covered mining and steel area to the home of young, innovative brands that have not forgotten their roots.

At the RuhrSummit both international and national startups competed against each other in the Pitch Challenge. In the final, a wide variety of young companies from Germany, Finland, Bulgaria and Russia entered the competition and presented their (mainly IT) solutions for relevant problems within a few minutes.
Despite the top-class competition, the company MotionMiners from Dortmund won the prize money of € 5,000.00 and thus prevailed against all other brands as a Ruhr Area startup.

These trends show that as a young founder you no longer have to move to the big, overwhelming capital city. The success of a company no longer depends solely on locating itself in the stronghold of the start-up scene in order to profit from the network of investors, other start-ups and start-up funds – because this stronghold is no longer a monopoly.

If you want to learn more about the startup scene in the Ruhr area, you should definitely take a look at the following start-up events for 2019:

RuhrSummit  – Fall 2019

Gründerstammtisch Bochum – Every 2 months at various startups in Bochum

Fuck up Nights Ruhr – Regularly in different Ruhr cities. 

Startup Nights – 1 x a month in Essen or Dortmund

startupweek:RUHR – 1 entire week in September (Attention: Setlog is one of the event locations each year!)