Startup Notes

Gunnar Froh is Founder & CEO of Wunder Mobility. Based in Hamburg, Germany, the startup is one of the globally leading technology providers for new mobility solutions. With its platform, the company enables startups, corporations, and governments in 100+ cities around the world to launch, scale, and analyze shared transport solutions. Founded in 2014, Wunder Mobility pivoted twice to find its optimal business and operating model. Today, it is the fastest-growing company in its sector in Europe. The tech startup has also successfully raised $70m from notable investors like Blumberg Capital and Piton Capital along the way. In this episode, Gunnar shares why the founding team decided to pivot Wunder Mobility and how to successfully manage such a wide-ranging task when building a startup.

Gunnar Froh is Founder & CEO of Wunder Mobility. Based in Hamburg, Germany, the startup is one of the globally leading technology providers for new mobility solutions. With its platform, the company enables startups, corporations, and governments in 100+ cities around the world to launch, scale, and analyze shared transport solutions.   Founded in 2014, Wunder Mobility pivoted twice to find its optimal business and operating model. Today, it is the fastest-growing company in its sector in Europe. The tech startup has also successfully raised $70m from notable investors like Blumberg Capital and Piton Capital along the way.   In next week’s episode, Gunnar shares why the founding team decided to pivot Wunder Mobility and how to successfully manage such a wide-ranging task when building a startup.

Katharina Jünger is Co-Founder & CEO of TeleClinic. The Munich-based startup is one of the leading digital health companies in Europe. Its vision is to provide better healthcare for everyone through online doctor visits. Raised in a family of doctors, Katharina knew early on about the advantage of medical advice that is always available - something that she wanted other people to benefit from as well. For this, TeleClinic is building a platform that is a digital one-stop-shop for all health-related questions. With its app, it enables simple and secure communication between doctors and patients anywhere in Germany. Like this, patients can consult physicians, get prescriptions, and sick notes in just minutes. Since the startup was founded in 2015, TeleClinic has raised 9m€ from Digital Health Ventures and renowned Idinvest Partners, which has notable success cases like Onfido and Zenly in its portfolio. In this episode, Katharina shares how TeleClinic reacted to the COVID-19 crisis and why she thinks th

Katharina Jünger is Co-Founder & CEO of TeleClinic. The Munich-based startup is one of the leading digital health companies in Europe. Its vision is to provide better healthcare for everyone through online doctor visits. Raised in a family of doctors, Katharina knew early on about the advantage of medical advice that is always available - something that she wanted other people to benefit from as well. For this, TeleClinic is building a platform that is a digital one-stop-shop for all health-related questions. With its app, it enables simple and secure communication between doctors and patients anywhere in Germany. Like this, patients can consult physicians, get prescriptions, and sick notes in just minutes. Since the startup was founded in 2015, TeleClinic has raised 9m€ from Digital Health Ventures and renowned Idinvest Partners, which has notable success cases like Onfido and Zenly in its portfolio. In this week’s episode, Katharina shares how TeleClinic reacted to the COVID-19 crisis and why she th

This week, we have a special episode with some great entrepreneurial insights from Silicon Valley. We had the pleasure to talk to Ilya Volodarsky, Co-Founder & President of Segment, a few months ago. Once close to failure, the Y Combinator-backed tech company was pivoted twice on its journey to unicorn status. Based with its HQ in San Francisco, Segment is the world’s leading customer data platform (CDP) that democratizes access to reliable data for all teams and offers a complete toolkit to standardize data collection, unify user records, and route customer data into any system where it’s needed. More than 20,000 companies like Intuit, FOX, Instacart, and Levi’s use Segment to make real-time decisions, accelerate growth, and deliver compelling user experiences. Amongst others, leading VC firms like Accel, e.ventures and GV (formerly Google Ventures) belong to its investors. In this episode, you’ll find out how founders can and should use analytics to drive their company towards success. +++  Apolog

Next week, we’ll have a special episode with some great entrepreneurial insights from Silicon Valley. We had the pleasure to talk to Ilya Volodarsky, Co-Founder & President of Segment, a few months ago. Once close to failure, the Y Combinator-backed tech company was pivoted twice on its journey to unicorn status. Based with its HQ in San Francisco, Segment is the world’s leading customer data platform (CDP) that democratizes access to reliable data for all teams and offers a complete toolkit to standardize data collection, unify user records, and route customer data into any system where it’s needed. More than 20,000 companies like Intuit, FOX, Instacart, and Levi’s use Segment to make real-time decisions, accelerate growth, and deliver compelling user experiences. Amongst others, leading VC firms like Accel, e.ventures and GV (formerly Google Ventures) belong to its investors. In next week’s episode, you’ll find out how founders can and should use analytics to drive their company towards success. +++ 

Everything in life evolves, and like you, we have changed. Today, we make a step forward by becoming #InvisibleMedia. Stay tuned! We will be bringing a whole new immersive audio experience to you soon.  

Olivier Ramel is Co-Founder & CEO of Kymono. The Paris-based startup has developed into Europe’s leading „culture design“ company. As its core product, Kymono offers customized clothing for startups that is affordable, high-quality, and of the highest ethical standards. Companies like Airbnb, Zenly, Google, and LVMH are already wearing its clothes. Kymono’s ultimate vision goes further though: It wants to help its clients to infuse a company’s particular spirit into every object and space like their office. Not even 30 years old, Olivier is a true young serial entrepreneur. Already while he was a student, he started his entrepreneurial endeavours. Before co-founding Kymono together with The Family in 2017, he has started and led 4 other startups. In this episode, we talk with Olivier about his journey as an entrepreneur, why company culture is so important, and how to land your first customers.

Martin Bell is a global startup advisor, angel investor, and Founder & CEO of Bell Ventures. He advises corporates, investors, governments, and start-ups. He is a thought leader and a keynote speaker on the topic of company building within organizations. Martin was previously with Rocket Internet and helped to build ~50 companies. At Rocket Internet, he was the chief architect of a 100-day launch process through which he took 20 companies. Moreover, he led more than 100 due diligences for 25 growth-stage companies and was an interim executive in 5 companies, including great success cases like Zalando, Delivery Hero, and Foodora. In this episode, we talk about Martin’s journey in the startup world and dive deep into his „100 Task Playbook“ for setting up, launching, and scaling a tech company.

Thomas Wilke and Alex Meyer are the founders and General Partners of VC firm 42CAP. Based in Munich, they are currently managing two funds with a focus on seed-stage investments. Their portfolio includes investments into startups like Kaia, CrossEngage, and MoBerries. Thomas has a vast background as a technology & product leader for complex marketing and e-commerce applications. He was a founder of eCircle, which was sold to Teradata in 2012. Alex has a longstanding experience in scaling SaaS companies and exec-level M&A transactions. He was the initial VC investor in eCircle and quickly after that joined the company as its CFO. In this episode, Thomas and Alex tell us about their journey of building 42CAP from scratch over the last years. Among others, we discuss their VC approach and outlook on the current market for tech investments.

Since 2014, Sebastian Stricker has been a true trailblazer of social entrepreneurship. First, by founding award-winning app ShareTheMeal that collaborates with the UN World Food Programme and helps to feed children in poverty and crisis situations around the world through donations. And for the past two years, by building startup 'share' that is showing that an FMCG business can also create a direct positive social impact. The concept behind share is simple, yet unique: If you buy one of its high-quality consumer products like snack bars or soap, another one of it gets donated to people in need. The startup’s '1+1' principle is the foundation for the 'social consumption' approach it is bringing to the FMCG industry. In this episode, we speak with Sebastian about his learnings from building a social FMCG startup. Among others, we talk about mistakes he made, why scale matters, and how luck plays an important role in being successful. --- We already once spoke to Sebastian about social entrepreneurship back

Being a serial founder and investor, Frank Thelen has an impressive track record over the last 25 years with having reached 100+ million consumers in 60 countries, receiving several awards, and becoming not just a renowned keynote speaker but also one of the leading voices of the German startup scene. As CEO of Freigeist Capital, Frank invests in early-stage tech startups as well as promising companies in the food industry. Notable investments and ventures as a founder include among others ip.labs (sold to Fujifilm in 2008), Scanbot, MyTaxi, Wunderlist, Lilium, Pitch, and Little Lunch. In 2014, Frank joined the prime time TV show "Dragons’ Den", broadcasted in Germany as "Die Höhle der Löwen", making him known also to the wider public. His bestselling autobiography “Startup-DNA” was published in 2018. In this episode, moderator Christian Miele (Partner at e.ventures) and Frank elaborate on different exit options, whether founders should have an exit strategy from the beginning or not, the process of selling

Kaya Taner is Co-Founder & CEO of Honeypot. The startup offers an innovative online recruiting platform for the best tech talent out there. It makes it easier for specialists like software developers or product owners to find new jobs that actually match their expectations as companies have to present and pitch themselves to them instead of the traditional other way round. Recently, Honeypot got acquired by Xing (the leading online business network in German-speaking markets) for a sum of reportedly up to 57m€ only 4 years after it was founded. In this episode, Kaya shares what it takes to find, hire, and retain the best talents to build world-class tech teams from scratch.

Daniel Stammler is Co-CEO & Co-Founder of Kolibri Games. Founded under the original name Fluffy Fairy Games by a group of IT and Business students in 2016, Kolibri Games is a vibrant mobile gaming studio based in Berlin. The team developed its first title Idle Miner Tycoon in just eight weeks, following the startup’s signature lean approach.
 By now, their games Idle Miner Tycoon and Idle Factory Tycoon have cumulatively reached over 100 Million downloads. With a team of more than 100 dedicated engineers, artists, and game designers, the startup is raking in millions in recurring revenue and has been profitable since Day 1 - without having raised any VC funding. Kolibri Games’ exceptional growth story has been recognized several times: LinkedIn added the company to the 2018 list of Top 25 startups in Germany; Red Herring placed Kolibri Games among the 2018 Top 100 Global and Deloitte awarded the company with a first place in the "Rising Stars" category of 2018’s Deloitte Technology Fast 50.  In this ep

In our 11th #FromScratch masterclass, Johannes Reck (Co-Founder & CEO of GetYourGuide) taught our audience how to grow and scale fast. Johannes is one of Germany’s premier startup founders. As Co-Founder & CEO of GetYourGuide, he has built a truly global a tech unicorn out of Berlin over the past 10 years. Recently, the travel startup raised one of the largest financing rounds the tech scene in Europe has seen so far by collecting $484m in its Series E led by SoftBank. Based on a personal need, Johannes founded GetYourGuide by chance when he was still at university with the original intention to pursue a career in academia. Having evolved from an idea of a group of students into the leading booking platform for attractions and activities that serves millions of travelers anywhere in the world, Johannes credits especially to the team’s attitude for “infinite learning” at a high speed. In this episode, moderator Christian Miele (Partner at e.ventures) and Johannes discuss the right timing for starting

Til Klein is Founder & CEO of Vantik - a Berlin-based PensionTech startup. Launched in 2017, it is the startup’s vision to provide a simple and secure private pension that is as flexible as life itself. Vantik aims to inspire millennials to start saving for their future. Recently, the promising tech company that was founded by Til and Lara Hämmerle raised a seed round led by STS Ventures, Atlantic Labs, Seedcamp, and prominent business angels (like N26 Co-Founder Maximilian Tayenthal), bringing its total funding amount to over 2m€. In this episode, we speak with Til about how to use early user feedback to build a great product. Among others, we cover how to design a product depending on your users’ motivation to use it, do customer interviews the right way, and translate feedback into features. +++ If you register and open an account via Vantik’s website www.vantik.com/en/voucher, use the following code to get a 25€ starting bonus: STARTUP25

In our 10th #FromScratch masterclass, Michael Brehm (Founder & CEO of i2x) taught our audience how to build a sales-driven organization. Michael Brehm is one of the most influential people in the German startup scene. As former Executive Director and investor at social network startup studiVZ, he left his mark already in the early 2000s. Over the course of his career, Michael has built several companies, successfully sold some of them to Google and eBay, and taken one venture public. Michael is one of the cornerstones of the Business Angel scene in Germany, having invested in more than 50 startups and being the launchpad for a lot of entrepreneurs. He is also a Partner at VC firm Redstone, which has helped corporates to invest in over 200 tech startups. In 2017, Michael decided to found a new tech company himself: With i2x, he is leveraging his renowned expertise in sales and marketing, bringing real-time AI-powered speech analytics to companies for improving their sales calls. In this episode, Michael

In our 9th #FromScratch masterclass, Tamaz Georgadze (Co-Founder & CEO of Raisin) taught our audience how to build a sustainable high-performance culture. Backed with more than 170 million EUR by prominent VCs like Index Ventures and corporates like PayPal, the FinTech startup is the leading European marketplace for investments and deposits. More than 10 billion EUR have been deployed by Raisin’s customers throughout Europe since the startup was founded in Berlin in 2013. In this episode, Tamaz and moderator Jan Miczaika (Partner at HV Holtzbrinck Ventures) - who kindly jumped in for our usual host Christian Miele (e.ventures) on short notice - discuss how to build a sustainable high-performance culture in a startup. The two elaborate on how first employees shape a company’s DNA, how to create high-performing teams and increase internal efficiency, as well as the importance and ways to measure your company culture. ------ “From Scratch” is an exclusive series of masterclasses produced by Startup Notes

Inspired by numerous requests of our listeners, we created some special episodes based on different key themes. We have put together the best pieces of timeless advice that we found most insightful from all the conversations with founders and VCs that we have published so far.   In our third special episode, we focus on what makes great teams and company cultures. Find out what successful startups do right in this regard - we hope you enjoy!   01 - Uwe Horstmann (Project A Ventures) [01:33 - 06:12] Who you should hire first when starting a company [06:13 - 07:31] How to best set up the compensation scheme for your team   02 - Florian Heinemann (Project A Ventures) [07:36 - 09:35] What type of expert your first marketing employee should be [09:36 - 11:50] The background and experience your first marketing employee should have   03 -  Friedrich A. Neuman (MAKERS.do) [11:55 - 12:59] The ideal setup of a founders team   04 - Benedikt Franke (Helpling) [13:04 - 15:20] The conditions for making it

Inspired by numerous requests of our listeners, we have created some special episodes based on different key themes. We put together the best pieces of timeless advice that we found most insightful from all the conversations with founders and VCs that we have published so far. In our second special episode, we focus on the traits of great founders. Find out what successful entrepreneurs have in common - we hope you enjoy!   01 - Christoph Gerber (Talon.One, former Lieferando) [01:52 - 03:46] What mindset entrepreneurs should have   02 - Uwe Horstmann (Project A Ventures) [03:50 - 05:34] What traits and skills of founders stand out for early-stage VCs [05:35 - 07:57] The #1 trait of great entrepreneurs [07:58 - 12:02] What startup CEOs must do and what they should not   03 -  Julian Riedlbauer (GP Bullhound) [12:06 - 14:43] Being ahead of the market and knowing when to change roles   04 - Jasper Masemann (HV Holtzbrinck Ventures) [14:48 - 16:52] How founders leave a lasting positive impression w