(1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8+9)²=2025

Carl Friedrich Gauss would probably have been a great inventor in these days and age of Startups. He had that certain something, and of course a great deal of mathematical genius. As a young boy in his home town of Braunschweig, he was given the problem 1+2+3+…+99+100 by his maths teacher in the hope that the child would be busy forever. But it didn’t take him a minute and he had the solution. Instead of mindlessly adding each number to the next, Gauss considered the first and last numbers and quickly arrived at the correct result.

The number of today’s year also contains such an interesting arithmetic equation. It brings me back to one of the core principles that you should never lose sight of as an entrepreneur. To take new perspectives, new looks at the big picture. Never look at your business idea, your product and your services too one-dimensionally, with too few degrees of freedom.

When we, the founders of Saphenus, had dealt with the goals, wishes and fears of amputees very early on in the company, for example in extensive focus group discussions, these views sprouted like delicate blossoms on a tree. In different shades of colour.

I think that a holistic, changeable approach is very important for the development of a company. In the spirit of the brilliant mathematician Gauss, if he hadn’t had these new perspectives in his mathematical thinking, he would have had to spend hours at school to achieve the right result.