Munich Startup: What career path have you had so far?
Katja Ruhnke: As a child of an entrepreneurial family, after graduating from high school I spent ten years working as a musical theater performer and theater producer in the cultural sector. After my studies in cultural management, my path led me back to Munich to work in the family business. While searching for new business areas, in summer 2019 I caught the startup financing bug and have since been working as an angel investor with great passion alongside my sister Conny Hörl. In January 2023, we also opened the “CK-Workspace,” a coworking space and shared office where we bring together the old economy (real estate) and the new economy (startups). In autumn 2021, my first book “Female Money – how investors are transforming the startup world” was published.
Munich Startup: What motivated you to invest in startups?
Katja Ruhnke: I had a life-changing moment in 2019. I got to accompany my best man to a startup conference. Before that, I only knew “The Lion’s Den” and wasn’t aware that startups are an asset class that pretty much anyone can invest in. The passion and energy combined with the ideas and solutions that will save our world captivated me so much that I more or less immediately decided to become a business angel. It gives me incredible hope and makes me more than optimistic when I see how many wonderful founders are working on the problems that are currently piling up. I feel I must and want to do my part here.
Katja Ruhnke: A weakness for hardware
Munich Startup: What technology or industry do you find particularly interesting at the moment?
Katja Ruhnke: Conny and I have specialized in impact investments, so I still find everything in this area exciting. Recently, we invested in Hey Circle, a startup in the circular economy sector. I find that an incredibly important industry because consumer excess sometimes really scares me and we need to get it under control. But the topic of education also fascinates me repeatedly, although that’s really difficult to finance. We also have a weakness for hardware, which is also difficult to finance. We like to choose topics that not everyone wants to work on.
Munich Startup: In your view, what advantages do diverse founding and VC teams bring?
Katja Ruhnke: Female investors bring different perspectives and experiences to investment decisions. Furthermore, women tend to invest more frequently in startups led by women. This is particularly important because female founders often have less access to funding opportunities than their male counterparts. Support from female investors can help close this gap and reduce gender inequality in entrepreneurship. Additionally, women more often invest in companies that address social challenges and pursue sustainable business models, and I believe the world urgently needs that right now. Diverse teams, on the other hand, demonstrably perform better because they make better decisions.
Munich Startup: What are your three favorite work tools?
Katja Ruhnke: I like to work with Asana. I use Microsoft OneNote the most; I used to write by hand in notebooks and could never find anything again, OneNote was my salvation. In general, though, I use very few tools because I don’t have time to familiarize myself with them properly.
Pitch tip: “If you don’t master this hurdle well, you have no chance”
Munich Startup: Your top tip on “pitching”?
Katja Ruhnke: Pitching is a performance and needs to be practiced. Factors like facial expressions, voice, and gestures can be decisive. It’s a sales conversation whose impact is far too often underestimated by founders. It’s the ticket to deeper conversations. If you don’t master this hurdle well, you have no chance of securing sufficient capital.
Munich Startup: Does it seem like a good time to start a company right now? Why?
Katja Ruhnke: Yes and no. Bad phases offer tremendous opportunities because the market consolidates and it’s proven that major companies have emerged during these phases. But I think the founding conditions in Germany are mediocre—we’re expensive, complicated, suffocated by bureaucracy, and we have far too little respect for entrepreneurship. The starting conditions in other European countries are sometimes much better, so as a founder I would really have to think carefully about whether Germany is the right location. Furthermore, rapid technological development is very hard to assess, and even for us investors that’s difficult. What seems current and like a good solution today can be outdated tomorrow. In my opinion, speed is a key criterion for the future, and that’s not a core competency of Germans.
Munich Startup: What could be improved at the Munich startup location from your perspective?
Katja Ruhnke: We would need much more networking and collaboration between the different players. Here everyone cooks their own soup and has their own group or event. From what I’ve observed, this works better in Berlin. There’s a larger shared community there.
Munich Startup: Which investor would you like to meet in person? And what would you ask them?
Katja Ruhnke: Catie Wood from Ark Invest. How she selects investments and where she gets her convictions from. That would really interest me.
