Never slice the Zelephant.
Three hours on why breaking a venture into deliverables is how it stops being one — and what to do instead when the work genuinely has to be split.
Thursday 17 September · 14:00–17:00 CEST · Vienna + online
With Michael Laussegger and Stephan Riess
Reserve my placeWhat you leave with
- Your own venture written as one thing rather than a backlog — and the honest list of what that costs you this quarter.
- The three places a split is genuinely necessary, and the test that tells them apart from the eleven where it is avoidance.
- Your leap-of-faith assumptions, named in writing, and the evidence this week would need to produce for each one.
How the three hours run
- 14:00Why the split happensTwenty minutes on where a venture turns into a backlog, using real roadmaps we accepted and later regretted.
- 14:30Writing it as one thingYou write your own venture as a single claim. Harder than it sounds, and the difficulty is the diagnosis.
- 15:15BreakCoffee in the room, and the online room stays open.
- 15:30Cutting it properlyThe three cases where a split is genuinely necessary, tested against what you just wrote, in pairs.
- 16:30Deciding on FridayClosing hour on the weekly decision — what evidence this week produced, what it says about each assumption, and what that means for the next one.
Come if
You are pre-seed to Series A, you have a thesis, and your roadmap has quietly become a list of unrelated parts.
Skip it if
You want an intro to investors, or feedback on a deck. Neither happens here, and we would rather say so now.
Who runs it
Michael Laussegger
Growth and go-to-market
Has asked founders to cut their roadmap to one line several hundred times, and been wrong out loud often enough to know which cuts hold.
Stephan Riess
Product and delivery
Spends the session pushing back, which is the part people say afterwards was worth the money.
I came in with a roadmap of nine things. I left with one thing and a reason the other eight could wait.