The invitation to work with what would become Startup Burgenland came through Michael Sedlak and Martin Trink — Michael heading innovation management at the regional development agency, Martin a former colleague from my time at the 360 Innovation Lab where he’d been Head of Accelerator.
They had budget for a startup program and needed someone to design and run it. I was honest about my primary motivation for joining: both my wife Julia and I had lost our income when the 360 Lab collapsed during the pandemic, and we needed the work.
One conversation became several. The conversations became a contract. The first year started with four startups. The initial program became a multi-year mission. I looked up from what was supposed to be a practical career move and discovered I was building Austria’s youngest startup program.
This is a story about what happens when you say yes to the right small thing.
The Side Project Trap (and Why This Time Was Different)
I’m usually allergic to side projects. They diffuse focus, consume energy disproportionate to their scope, and have a way of expanding until they’re no longer “side” anything. The subtraction audit exists partly because I’ve said yes to too many things that should have been nos.
This one was different for three reasons:
First, it had a defined scope. A small cohort of startups. A specific budget. A specific outcome: did the startups generate revenue? The constraint wasn’t limiting — it was clarifying. I knew exactly what success looked like before I started.
Second, it aligned with my existing knowledge. Fifteen years of consulting had given me frameworks for diagnosing business problems and designing solutions. The accelerator was an opportunity to apply those frameworks at a different scale — working with founders building from zero rather than executives optimizing from ten.
Third, it scratched the itch. The restlessness I’d been feeling in my consulting career — the sense that I was building frameworks for other people’s businesses — found a partial answer in the accelerator. I was still working with other people’s businesses, but at the formative stage, where the impact of good guidance is exponentially higher.
Designing the Program
Most accelerator programs I’d seen were modeled on Silicon Valley templates: pitch decks, demo days, investor networking, growth hacking workshops. These templates work in ecosystems with active venture capital, large addressable markets, and a culture of rapid scaling.
Burgenland had none of these. It had agriculture, tourism, and small-scale manufacturing. The Silicon Valley template would have been like teaching swimming techniques to people who live in the desert.
So I designed something different:
Revenue first, always. No talk of funding rounds. No pitch practice. Every activity in the program was oriented toward one question: how do you get your first ten paying customers? The 70/30 rule — 70% selling, 30% building — was built into the program structure.
Customer development, not market research. Instead of slide decks about market size, founders spent the first two weeks talking to potential customers. Not surveying — talking. Face to face. “Tell me about this problem” conversations that produced more useful intelligence than any desk research could.
Weekly shipping. Every Friday, every startup had to show something new. A product improvement. A customer conversation. A published piece of content. A closed sale. The weekly shipping habit was non-negotiable.
Peer accountability. Every Monday morning, the cohort met. Each founder stated their three commitments for the week. The following Monday, each founder reported on whether they’d delivered. The group dynamic — seeing peers hit their commitments while you missed yours — was a more powerful motivator than any mentor could provide.
What Five Years Taught Me
Running the program for five years produced a dataset I couldn’t have assembled any other way: real-time observation of 40+ companies being built from scratch.
The patterns were clear and consistent. Problem-first founders outperformed idea-first founders. Speed of execution correlated with survival. Revenue focus beat product focus. Simplicity beat cleverness. Discipline beat inspiration.
But beyond the patterns, the accelerator taught me something about my own work that consulting never had: the difference between advising and building.
In consulting, you advise. You diagnose, prescribe, and sometimes stay to help implement. But the ownership belongs to the client. The success is theirs. The failure is (mostly) theirs.
In the accelerator, the line blurred. I was deeply invested in each founder’s outcome. When a startup failed, I felt it. When a startup succeeded, I felt that too. The emotional investment changed the quality of my guidance — I was more honest, more direct, more willing to say the uncomfortable thing because the stakes felt shared.
This emotional investment is what eventually led me to start building my own things again. Watching founders build while I advised made the restlessness louder. If I believed this strongly in the frameworks I was teaching, shouldn’t I be applying them myself?
Vulpine Creations was partly born from that question. The exit from consulting was partly motivated by it.
The Accidental Career Path
I didn’t plan to become a programme director. It wasn’t on any five-year plan. It wasn’t part of any strategic career development. I said yes to a side project because the scope was clear and the work was interesting.
This pattern — saying yes to specific, bounded opportunities that align with your skills and interests — has produced more career-defining moments for me than any deliberate planning.
The connection that led to the accelerator. The hotel room where I picked up a deck of cards and found performance magic. The kitchen-table prototype session where Vulpine Creations began.
None of these were planned. All of them were possible because I was available — not overcommitted, not too busy, not too locked into a rigid career path to respond to something unexpected.
The accelerator was an accident that became a mission. And the mission — helping founders build real businesses that employ real people — is still the center of everything I do.
The Results That Mattered
Numbers are easy to cite and hard to contextualize. Here’s what the accelerator actually produced, in terms that matter beyond a report:
Companies that employed people. Not “startups that raised money” or “founders who attended workshops.” Companies that hired at least one person beyond the founder, paid that person a salary, and continued operating for at least twelve months. This was the measure we’d agreed on, and it was the measure that justified every euro of public funding.
Founders who learned to sell. Many of our founders came in as technical experts who couldn’t articulate why anyone should pay them. The 70/30 rule forced them into customer-facing activities from week one. By the end of the program, most could pitch their product, handle objections, and ask for the sale without crumbling. This skill transfer persisted regardless of whether their specific startup survived.
A network that self-sustains. The alumni of the program continue to refer customers to each other, share operational knowledge, and provide peer support years after the formal program ended. The network we built wasn’t dependent on the program continuing — it had its own momentum. Former founders from cohort one mentor founders from cohort four. The ecosystem feeds itself.
A proof of concept for regional innovation. The program demonstrated that startup creation isn’t limited to capital cities with venture funding and co-working spaces. It can happen in rural regions with agriculture-based economies and no existing tech infrastructure. The demonstration effect — other regions seeing Burgenland’s results and asking “can we do this?” — may be the most lasting impact.
The Career Lesson
The most important career decisions I’ve made weren’t decisions at all. They were responses to opportunities that arrived when I was paying attention and available to say yes.
The accelerator wasn’t planned. It arrived as an email on a Tuesday, and I almost deleted it. The career that followed — working with founders, developing frameworks, writing books — grew directly from this accidental directorship.
The lesson isn’t “say yes to everything.” That’s a recipe for energy depletion and scattered focus. The lesson is: maintain enough margin in your schedule and your identity to recognize and respond to the right opportunities when they arrive. If I’d been overcommitted when the opportunity that changed my career arrived, it would have passed me by.
Permission to start small applies to careers as much as businesses. The small yes to a side project can become the defining work of a decade. You just have to be available when it arrives.
