There are things that no startup should be without. But what has hard founder-
Working with laptops in a café? A guest article by Thyra Andresen from BayStartUP, published in magazine startUPdate.
The first call at nine in the morning to one of the founders who accompanied us in this issue: Bene Seitz from evaluate He receives it, of all places, with a cappuccino in hand, in a café on Munich's Goetheplatz. He laughs out loud when he learns about the cover story – the ice is broken for the interview, cliché fulfilled. Or is it? The reality at evalu when it was founded was a little different than the oft-quoted Berlin hipster café cliché.
"There is a café on the Munich TU campus, which we fully utilized. But before that, it was a struggle for us to even find a place where we could work in peace,"
says Seitz.
It was initially a small temporary office run by Seitz's parents. Eventually, EXIST funding came along.
“We then spent 40 minutes every day driving from Munich to Garching to our incubator.”
Founder reality meets public startup perception
However critical one might be of its results, the German Startup Monitor 2016 allows us to check the cliché. According to the report, table football is played in less than a quarter of all surveyed companies. Club Mate is the standard beverage of choice and source of caffeine in just under 17 companies. And most founders (94.6% of respondents) are relaxed about employees showing up at the office in sweaters or hoodies. And what about barbecues until dawn? Bureaucracy and back-office management often put a stop to this cliché in Germany. Bene Seitz, however, views the effort involved in funding programs, for example, from a positive perspective.
"Personally, I didn't see this as a problem at the beginning of the startup phase. If you want to survive in the German market, you have to familiarize yourself with the system. EXIST was good groundwork in that sense: you learn how to quickly adapt to slower systems."
The corporate culture among founders is often characterized by intensive collaboration and flat hierarchies. Those who prove themselves can quickly assume a lot of responsibility. Founders and their early employees must get used to being responsible for a lot of things very early on, but then sharing this responsibility with others as the company grows. Many underestimate the time required to successfully build a company. For comparison: voxeljet and va-Q-tec Both took about 15 years to go public, with many milestones and development steps.
Want to pull the strings and be the boss yourself?
Bene Seitz says that he is not so much concerned with being his own boss,
"But I don't want to be part of a large corporation—because the corporate mentality and processes there are simply not for me. They usually lack the necessary speed and freedom to act."
Also Sabine Engel from Mioments it was important to take personal responsibility instead of being “small cog in a corporate machine” to work.
No matter what the founders' motivations may be, absolute freedom and a life without deadlines are far from the norm, even in startups – whether they're bosses or not. Customers also have demands, expect availability, and value adherence to agreements. Working hours can also become a problem. Many founders hardly consider their self-employment to be work. Their private life sometimes falls by the wayside. That doesn't always have to be the case, says Sabine Engel:
"Our working hours are from approximately 9 a.m. to 5 or 6 p.m. We operate a flexible working model with home office. There are no core working hours. If someone can concentrate better at home or needs to look after their child, that's okay."
What becomes clear in conversations with founders is that social pressure often outweighs the economic challenges of starting a business. Tobias Bahnemann from Toposens explained:
"My family is shocked when I tell them that I work until 10:30 or 11:30 at night. Being a founder is a never-ending rollercoaster ride; you need incredible perseverance."
So, when starting a business, you need a good dose of optimism – it makes little sense to constantly question whether everything you have planned will work.
"What definitely helps, though, is critically questioning the reasons why your own idea might not work. Of course, there's a lot of work involved, but also some luck. You have to be flexible in your mind and be able to adapt to new things—something's always changing."
says Dr. Alexander König, founder of Reactive Robotics GmbH.
Cooperation with established companies still difficult
Startup-industry collaborations dominate the news, at least in the startup media.
"Even if it's sometimes misunderstood, there's a certain startup hype in Germany. Politics, business, and industry all have founders on their radar. Especially for companies operating in the B2B sector, Germany is a great location: we have an established industry here for which we can build services and products,"
describes Catharina van Delden from innosabiUnfortunately, the number of companies that use innovation scouts or R&D departments to scan startups and look beyond their own horizons is still manageable. “Unfortunately, German medium-sized businesses hardly do this at all.”, says Bahnemann. There are still very different attitudes toward working methods between SMEs and founders.
“There is so much potential for the industry if it were to make the necessary adjustments,”
says Bene Seitz of evalu. Established companies are often unaware of the resource constraints of startups.
"Startups and SMEs have different time horizons. Industry looks at the calendar, startups look at the clock."
Given the high number of solid German medium-sized companies, the prejudice that 'Germany has no entrepreneurial mentality' is, according to Bahnemann, “complete nonsense”.
“We just need to create the right ecosystem so that ideas find fertile ground.”
When it comes to money, things are getting serious in the startup scene too
Studies announce a record VC result for Germany. Critically scrutinized, individual investments in startups that are no longer quite startups account for a large portion of the total. For many even younger founders, the situation is different. Take evalu, for example: The company is VC-financed, and it found business angels through the BayStartUP financing network. However, last year's financing round required considerable effort from the founding team.
“This is also due to the fact that Germany feels a little behind in terms of financing,”
said Seitz. In his opinion, the money supply is not always the main problem – “You can see that in successful startups such as KONUX." The situation is particularly challenging in the hardware sector. Traditional VCs often focus on internet and software investments. Financial investors are rare because they don't fully understand the complexity of the technologies.
"So far, there are hardly any funds that provide sufficient support in the high- and deep-tech sectors. Access to the American investor market is improving, but is still not entirely transparent,"
says Bahnemann. The crux of the matter is that technology companies in particular—see again the examples of voxeljet and va-Q-tec—need more time for technology development than an online startup. “Risk aversion in Germany is still too great in this area”, says Bahnemann. Many investors tend to come from the private sector and are rarely visible in public, yet they have a lot of capital at their disposal.
