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so welcome everybody to today's episode of the making it real podcast the podcast for founders who take action today is a very special day i'm super excited my personal pleasure to have the zero entrepreneur business angel vc one of the most experienced guys in the entrepreneurship scene from berlin about being active worldwide and all kinds of ventures how we call them or michael brame internationally on our show mickey or michael so great to have you thank you yeah it's a great pleasure uh to be uh be with you wonderful so we always kick it off by hearing your personal story into the entrepreneurship domain what was it that you that led that you made it real that you started the first venture and how did that come about oh that that's actually already quite a while um actually when i still was in school when i was 15 um and i grew up in the south of germany close to the mountains so i figured everybody was starting to snowboard in the 90s um and and all the clothing was about three times as expensive as for skiing so i thought i can do this as well and then started my own snowball label um and uh and and i i took two thing and i was like 14 15 years old um drove my parents crazy because i wanted to quit school um and go into the fashion industry and as you can imagine they they weren't really excited about this um so and uh but but i i took two things uh from that one is um it's a lot of fun um to do something entrepreneurial and the second one it's a lot harder than you think um and to build a decent company as a side gig next to school or maybe next to something else is is hardly possible and then i i decided to first finish school and later university but but i said so i definitely want to either work in a startup or found a startup myself and but once i do this i will do this 120 um and and not just a little bit um and then um i uh i actually i i studied uh i work for an uh for a bank uh for some time and then uh joined the founders um of a social networking site which have started just started out of a student department in berlin um for for a company called studio fotset and we managed to build that into the fastest growing and largest website at the time in germany so we actually doubled our user base every two weeks we had at some point in time we had i think 50 of everybody who had an internet connection in germany on a daily basis on our website um so us was really we were we were more traffic in 2008 2009 i think than the next that then the 10 um largest following websites together um and brought social media to germany and and also austria switzerland and several other european countries so that was a pretty exciting exciting time and then we sold the company uh for for roughly 100 million um and and that i mean we had many many many investors um and several team members um so but but it was amazing from a reputational perspective as well as gave me the first financial means to kind of do many things afterwards so that that was kind of what in a way what got me started super exciting i would like to zoom in on that one studio is a huge success story in the european space was virtually when facebook started this head-to-head game and actually there oftentimes you say the amazing founders can only come from the us or the big businesses are built there and you actually you know competing in a way head-to-head with studio for scientists you won the market you know at exit i think you had north of 90 of the market share you just as well now explain to us a bit that the volume of that business if we go to the very early stages there what made you i think you were working in an investment banking company no what made you uh change and quit a well-paying job you know having studied you now have this nice income so to say okay i'm gonna join this crazy startup that has brutal competition i think facebook had obviously much better resources to to to deploy and so that you say no i'm going for this um so i think first it was not everybody if you hear what people do or they do it do a change um that they have an idea to found a company um it's really that this is this oh this is this stroke of genius somebody has under the shower but it's very often a process and this decision was in the end was a process of 10 years from when i was like 50 into when i was 25 26 and i had hundreds literally hundreds of ideas um that um i i kind of thought through sometimes i even wrote some presentations business plans on it sometimes i tried a little bit and and um so i think i was i had a good idea in a sense of what do i want to do what not and and when i saw this idea it had many things that that i liked from where i thought the timing was right by the way also at the time i was doing at the investment bank analytics about um the kind of internet space and was just when it was coming out of this 2001 2002 crash 2003 was still flat in 2004 five fisher was the first time it took off a little bit but the general perception was still oh this is actually uh a kind of very difficult space and i just saw like everything was going up again um penetration of access uh broadband speed uh cost for uh for storage went down or for computers at the time so it was this path and then when it came i thought okay i have to do this um and um and it was it was a little bit awkward because um i quit i think three weeks before the bonus was paid out um and normally at an investment banana the bonus is like normally makes up the same amount that that your fixed salary would be or is and when i quit my boss asked me if i understand the concept of an investment bank um because you work very hard for 12 months get a bonus and if you want to quit you could then you don't quit three weeks before and he said you're also not going to get 11 12 of your bonus you only get zero i said i understand this but do you understand the concept of viral growth and of social networks and like every day counts every week counts i have to do this now and as you said there there was already competition and there was more to come so i felt like literally i had to do this immediately or maybe this opportunity would have gone um and um but but it was in a way it was really this path of several years and and there are many other examples even like instagram everybody thinks just of the two years that the two founders took it from instagram till till the exit amazing success story what people forget is that for four years they were struggling with different concepts basically living in a in a super tiny basement in silicon valley and all of their friends base making jokes about them how nothing that they work on uh is kind of working out um and and it's super tough to stick to that and and if you do this then if an opportunity arises you're in the position to grab it um and did you actually meet the co-founders how did it come about that they said okay you know uh did you say okay this is my opportunity let's go for it or so we were introduced by by a common friend um and um and then i met them and i thought that they were were very complementary from our skill sets the idea was great i thought hey i i i saw that internet like penetration usage was going up monetization was going up um i thought there was a very clear need i was still like fresh in a way fresh out of university so i could see that like how social networks would appeal to young people and um and so my only question was do i think that for one we could could get people on the platform on and the second one would we be able to execute um and and i thought well that's uh that's a risk i'm i'm willing to take um and i think i can can help help with it so that's why i ultimately decided oh and one one one also one i think one thought was um if you're young um and then i thought at the time okay if this doesn't work out what's my risk my risk is i spend one two or three years on it but if i go forward and if i'm 65 or 70 how much of a difference will these one to three years have made and and the answer is or was for me probably it won't make any difference if you work for 30 40 years even with three more years it doesn't really matter um but i said in case it works out then it will make all the difference and that what was uh was what made it easy and i think that's also why if you're fresh out of university or in your first years your salary obviously is still not that high you are not married you don't have kids not no no real obligation so it's a lot easier from a risk perspective to to jump wonderful so we see you then quitting your job you just have forgotten a big bonus now yeah in this space what was the game plan because we have quite some people out there that want to start consumer web companies or consumer app companies we had the founder of yodel as well tim schmitz who was talking about how they made yodel big and now they had some amazing success in one country like finn and i think 30 percent of the whole population a certain age group is on on yoga as active members what was it what was the game plan kind of for studifatziness knowing that there were there was a facebook but there were as well a bunch of other ones really well-funded avengers and everybody hoped to get that social graph on to get the students online what was your game plan well i think first of all actually there were quite a few who were not focused so we said we always said we want to get the the students um or and even at the beginning at this year we were even more narrow we said okay who would be the um best users and we figured out from some early data that most likely um second semester female bit business administration students are the kind of perfect not only users but also from a distribution and from a spreading it by word of mouth you're perfect users so we're very focused and then went for a few universities for this target group which made it well to spread i think several others were also large especially larger companies that wanted enter they said that was too tiny for them so they said we want to do something for everybody because it needs to be huge we don't want to be just build a social network for 2 million german students want to build one for 80 million or for a whole european 300 400 500 million population but by doing this they they didn't appeal they appealed for to everybody and nobody and we we could like build a product and a wording and a kind of everything around this specific target group so it was very appealing um and and it fitted well um i think that was one second one we just worked like crazy we were on if you look at 10 20 match uh kind of potential kpis why a company should be successful i think none was in our favor we had zero experience um in building a startup we had by we had by factor 10 to 100 less money we had super young people we um we had no network um basically of everything with nothing but we said okay we hopefully we understand our target group really well because we were close to the students and secondly we just worked day and night i mean at the beginning saturday sunday was a core working day and then after half a year we introduced as a huge benefit half of sunday we we was free um it was so extreme that at a certain point of time we had i think over 10 air mattresses in our office because so many people would sleep in the office overnight and we said it's okay if we kind of don't win and if we lose but the one reason we really don't want to lose is because we don't work hard enough um and so so that was i think hard work and it's it's insane as a startup at the beginning how much people work it's like really going in many cases i've seen this is going to the limits of your physical and psychological um boundaries and borders and we've started other ventures no afterwards but i think this is as well as a fascinating point and a struggle for many kind of how much effort what's the life like and so would you say is that uh looking back at the studio fed scientists and later on you start other ventures is that almost required in the first couple of years that you do have to put in so many hours or so would you say now having done a few maybe we should have like found some way to better delegate or some other form to actually make it work i mean 100 there are in many many things that um i would do differently and i have done differently but still and obviously you also have to work so much because in many ways you're so unexperienced you do everything the first time you do many mistakes but still building a company from scratch is always a incredible amount of work and it's yes it's a huge in a way issue um that it's just really really hard um uh at the beginning and and i've you know this everybody dreams about uh oh i just do a little bit of work and then suddenly there's this huge company and obviously the most most famous is this four hour work week week from tim ferriss i think um and you know what but what's really funny if you read the book at the beginning he describes like for the first eight years he worked 16 hours per day plus weekends to then be able to just work four hours per week dude i mean that that's that that's that's not uh that's uh that's not the the kind of glorious thing the glory thing is not i mean i've i know many things where you work for five or ten years a lot and then you can kind of um be happy about the fruits the question is how do you save the five to ten years super hard work and directly go to the four hour work week and that one i haven't really found and also don't trust probably many of the maybe sometimes pr stories i would even say every single person i've met in my life who was successful no matter where they worked insane um no and it doesn't matter if it's an entrepreneur if it's a manager if it's even like sports sports stars a good example is like ronaldo i just read a story from another um soccer player and he said he was just over for drinks on a sunday with ronaldo and he thought he had some good time and then after lunch he said like now it's two hours training and he said honestly he he made him a hardcore training on a sunday where he thought he could relax um uh so it's um yeah anyway so but maybe coming back to so that was one success but the other one is that i think we just try to be very creative because we didn't have so much money we just had to try to be uh kind of really smart and one one thing one marketing campaign we did which was really lots of fun is when we launched then also a pupils network so i wanted to go down something for a little bit younger people not just you know high school students um so for something for high school students and and and we uh we we said how can we give it some like notoriety or something and we said and we wanted to make it first of all we wanted to make it pink why pink because um it was about who are we okay a 15 16 year old boy what is he interested or at least most of them um it's not math for sure uh it's uh it's it's most likely girls so we said okay forget about the boys um we need to build the perfect product for girls so we built the perfect product for girls and part of it was we made it pink um but then also we we went and we activated some of this berlin underground sprayer community and all over germany and we had them ping a thousand schools um and and we gave them not real spray but this chalk spray um and uh and and then also lots of post-its they put on the schools um and from one sunday midnight to monday morning six o'clock uh we had i think in total we had 400 people who were pinking a thousand schools and obviously that gave uh gave it also quite uh uh quite a street cred and um an action and it's a marketing buzz i imagine too did you do actually before doing and no cause some people think about this as well these like buzz hacks and so on what can we do to kind of a drum and get attention did you do some legal check on that actually like oh yeah of course i mean we actually we had um so we asked five marketing agencies up front three declined because they said it's illegal you can't go at night into a schoolyard and ping a school and two said we would do it and one gave us a proposal for four million and the other one for six million euros so that was uh completely out of out of budget and nd then we we said we we checked what would be the maximum fine and it was like something like a hundred euros maybe per school or 200 because you have to kind of take the post-its off um so so we ended up i think paying everything including like for the lawyers for the material and just two or three fines for a few hundred years we had costs of 10 to 20 000 euros um versus um and obviously we organized it ourselves versus uh this uh four to six million uh-huh an amazing marketing bus um and uh what what were some other things one one thing as well i found fascinating and we heard something similar from tim as well this going by university by university for them it was a lot about going in early in the morning when people are kind of they they sit around maybe it's a boring lecture having good internet connectivity that was a core thing then driving it having local content there and then they they optimize for this very local content there are maybe a few highlights for people that want to make it big in the consumer space and so on that really have this issue how do i activate in a very cost efficient way my people my users i i mean at the time you need to see not everybody had a computer on their own uh like smartphones didn't exist back in 2005 to 2006 or they were just coming i think the first iphone was just about to be launched um and um so i mean what we did we did for example stuff they were like normally people use the computers in the university labs so we went to the labs and then put our website as a screensaver on maybe 50 or 100 computers um things like that we we distributed flyers we i mean sometimes we called the local radio or the university radio um and had five or ten different people calling it and saying hey have you heard about this new website and i thought oh if so many people are calling maybe we need to do a report about it um and then always we try to get like critical mass in a in a certain um kind of very small area so it was much better to have a hundred people um in one university than having a hundred people in one city um over different uh universities and so so like this this really gaining critical mass in in a certain target group and i think this plus being just very close to the customer so i would say um the probably the means would be very different but what's always important is be as close as possible to your customers talk with them early and and then try to create a critical mass and be it just if it's in a very small area um so but but that you you get a value out of it here would be the density of the students or certain like student group that as you said maybe the business student second new female for example we chose the the areas we'd go after for percentage of students and students versus total population so we like cities where you have a high student population um that that was very important and then we checked for we we tried to get to let's say 30 40 um kind of customer penetration in certain maybe faculties or even down to certain years we knew once we had 30 40 percent of a certain year um and of a certain class normally automatically and by virality it went to you never get to 100 quite but 98 99 and then once you have a certain class then probability that it goes to the class above and below is also high um and that way then it spreads so really anyway you have to think of it like concentric rings wonderful i think it's really helpful advice here for people maybe looking back at the studio fat science experience as well uh core mistakes that you did where you say i assume as well i see them knowing the different ventures in my investments so a common way are problems and struggles that people have because they do things incorrectly and where you say hey please listen to this that will help you to make it real and it would be a lot i imagine they're really at that there's i mean in the end you you always do so many mistakes you just need to make sure that you do a little bit less mistakes than things you do right um but but so i would say a core core thing is it would have saved us a lot of headache if we would have hired a few more experienced people earlier um [Music] so i think that the biggest problem one once you when you start a company or in many new areas in general you don't know what what you don't know um and um and to to be kind of a little bit self-critical about that um helps this is this is definitely one um [Music] the the other one then what we did uh we we internationalized and unfortunately we didn't connect the platforms because we thought we could save a few months this time if we just replicate it and launch it but that means that we didn't have these network effects i think if we would have waited a few months more and build a platform um uh then then it would have a connect platform we we would have had the opportunity probably to really build a global global force not just one in in central europe um so we we had a certain point of time we had a separate website in france in poland in italy a lot in latin america actually were in four or five latin american countries and they were all kind of successful but it lacked the connected network effect that it would have had otherwise uh which is a little bit sad and then the the last one um i mean we we sold the company end of 2006 beginning of 2007. but and we thought i mean at the time from from a student perspective for just somebody who's in a kind of in his uh kind of second year of work it was a huge success and and i would have never dreamt about having so much success so fast but but looking back i mean the company was was valued just 12 months later it was valued 10 times of that and was even bigger and i think to really not to sell so one of the learnings was for me not to sell too early like think even bigger um obviously by now there are also a lot more means and people say hey at the time i was still like oh you can't sell shares either you sell everything or nothing and even if you sell a tiny bit you're not committed which is uh completely really stupid i mean at the time we're living off a few hundred euros and i was leaving on an air mattress in in one apartment that i had sorry in one one uh um little um room that i had subleased because i couldn't afford more um fascinating that's actually to uh have a peril we had lucas gardovsky on on the making it real podcast as well and he actually said exactly that as well that was a core learning for him seemed like every time you have a huge accident so you feel like looking back you're always sold in a way too early so at times it would be just like let's build it out even more more more no in a way and to really think gigantic there i think that i mean the one of the core learners for me is one tends to overestimate what you can achieve in a very short amount of time in in one or two or three years everybody is super unpatient but you really underestimate what you can achieve over course of 10 years so over the long term and so so that's um but but overall i mean it was a it was a great success story it paved the way for uh for a lot of people from our investor side from employee sides uh it's amazing how many great careers came out of it and and as we i mean we also because we scaled so fast we had to solve a lot of really um complex technical issues we we had one of the largest server farms in in germany at the time and a lot of experienced people so for example the um the cto for for four years for zalando which is now a huge company at the beginning was one of our lead engineers that then switched to zalando and there are like dozens if not hundreds of these stories and many people really you know well core driver of the berlin ecosystem i see it as well from the early 2000s and ones twos it really made this big push because people in companies like yours learned really how to scale and know and got these skills and that generated than the second generation of very successful entrepreneurs so i think there's as well lots of additional benefits i think we have so much more to cover we didn't uh uh get very far here yet we we just covered the first venture there's so much more to it i think roundabout we know we could do another five minutes or so but i think definitely as well we'll have to do it as almost a second follow on the episode here of this what i definitely like to cover is so you then you you helped uh launch and and grow rebate networks was a big success you launched a vc redstone digital you as well right now and i think uh quickly zooming forward now to the current venture uh you've you co-founded i2x you're the managing director of itux maybe going jumping right into the present for now and and looking at that first how did you determine that there's an opportunity and kind of what were the first steps to get it started and then we extract a few lessons learned there yeah um so so many so after rebate was e-commerce network daily deals website which became quite quite large where in 30 countries 10 000 employees and and out of them two and a half thousand telesales and customer support agents and i figured how incredibly difficult it is to run large service and sales organizations uh not to speak even for scaling it um so i thought that there was a very big kind of business problem how do you make people good in communicating with customers and until today there is just a limited amount of things you can completely automize and i think especially if you have a human interaction and it will still take many years till you can automize that but so that was one the other one is that i thought i wanted from an x company i wanted to solve a very complicated technical problem um and uh and i thought okay what's complicated and then you say okay genetics is complicated astronomy is complicated but then also human speech and i have no clue about astronomy and i have no clue about genetics so i thought about human speech about software that that's something i'm interested i'm interested in in ai and in machine learning i want to dig deeper into it so i thought i can combine an interesting problem um with with a clear business need and if you go like what makes humans humans are are defined by their brain by their hands as tools but then also by their voice and their ability to speak and to communicate with each other why are we so successful as a species because we can communicate very complex topics and i thought if i built a software layer on top of the human brain to augment the human communication and help people to communicate better with each other it's kind of in a way like cracking the code for humanity and i thought that was a a very nice and actually pretty it's still a very complicated problem to work on um and that's why i decided they are in a very clear market need so we're building a software that taps into telephone calls um sends them to the cloud transcribes them we've built our own speech to text engine um then analyzes it and sends back in real time so within less than 0.5 seconds on the agent screen tips what they can do plus a whole suite of analytics tools for near real time and post call analytics for team leads for managers and and that way we really help the organizations to interact better with their customers but also and that's great really support the agents the people who work on the ground to do a better job um to maybe get more bonus um to have a more fulfilling um kind of uh career and and yeah and so far it's it's going quite well we're quite happy tell us a little bit where you are right now in terms of uh so how many years in are you there so so we're now in a in a fourth uh fourth year we have uh 50 people um extremely product focused so probably 80 90 are are working on the product um very engineering driven several patents um several large uh large companies several smaller and medium-sized ones um and yeah so and and and they're growing but i one of the learners also from rebate where we had like these close to 10 000 people is i want to keep it as long as small as possible rather try to scale with tools with technology with software um it's like running the more people you have the more headache you have um at least that's my my learning what was that as well one of the drivers because as as you said you know i wanted to tackle a really big technology challenge i was thinking like why would you self-impose yourself you don't have to have to do that right yeah so you know no it's sorry you know it's a good question but but it was really in a way i've built um kind of large companies two large companies before i mean one basically brought social media to to to germany and the other one was just out in every perspective from an economic business perspective large but i thought it was was it something i was extremely proud of to tell my my my my children um i thought i wanted to make something where i thought is like really special you are working on the frontier of what's technically possible um and it was just more for me probably a personal desire or challenge where i wanted to prove myself i can work on something that's just hardcore difficult um and um and so i thought hey trying to crack the code for com for humanity and trying to crack the code for human interaction and communication is something that i like if my kids ask me what are you doing i i tell them hey i'm building a robot i think that's cool um and that's probably one of the drivers apart from just trying to build a really useful um platform when norfolk we do have quite some people out there that are interested in starting these they're more maybe at times have a very engineering background they have these big uh let's say engineering tech challenges that they work on or they've discovered that something often times it sounds then as if the development time delete uptime to actually get revenues in and so it's quite long that's the classical like three four five years or so easily till you get to market to actually sell it which then begs the question how can you finance this in the meantime obviously you know having a reputation so now would help what would you advise people that have know that focus on the big tech challenges the big technology challenges solving really big technology problems how could they get started how could they get that confidence to make it real um so i think i mean luckily now there is a large enough ecosystems of investors in on every stage to to also support um really large and bold ideas um one of the things i mean first of all is it to to try to have a clear vision and be very convincing and and one of the things sometimes more technical people they are in love with their technology but they can't really pitch in a way the market the vision so so i think that's something to really uh work on on on somebody's pitching and even sales skills if you just if you're an entrepreneur you're always in sales uh even if you think you're not you you have to sell to to to win employees you have to sell obviously to sell to to win customers but then also to to get partners even to somebody to lease you just in office because you're newly funded company why should they lease it to you and not to the lawyer um you you need to sell obviously to investors so you're constantly selling and pitching um so so that's that's something i would recommend and try to test as soon as possible um and you can do this also in a business context a lot earlier than you than you think because on the on the one inside you could readily develop your product and then go out and sell it or you just pretend you have it and i'm not not saying that you have it but do like say okay if i had it what would i do and then you create your sales deck and you go out and try to sell it is there interest um do you get lois i would always try to get hey i get maybe 10 lois of people who say yes if you build the product like you describe it to me i would be willing to buy it and it can be it should be legally non-binding of course and just a very very weak loi but just the the process of somebody having to sign something will make them think um and and it gives you valuable feedback because otherwise people will just just tell you yeah it's all good just to get rid of ou because that's the easiest way uh to kind of get rid of somebody tell tell him everything is great um fantastic go build it and then you are stuck with your engine and you build it and then later on well now it's a different story and what not no because i had this i mean the problem is where do you get that really true feedback your family always thinks what you do is great um and then the people everybody who you don't know very well or even don't know at all if you ask them for something they know if they give you negative feedback you all start questioning why how what should i improve so immediately they are in a half an hour hour discussion with you so the question is you really need to force this half an hour discussion and to force this negative feedback and you do this by asking them to sign it because if they don't sign it then you have if they tell you everything is great but they don't want to sign the loi you have a reason to say okay if it's so great why wouldn't you want to sign it and then you get the true feedback and by the way if they if they sign it then you know you're on the right track um what would you do if knowing the common objection here is well but my project still then would take a year or so till we have the first version to ship or so uh i mean why would they sign now well they don't have any risk it just look i just would like to to have some uh some some kind of security or i would just have some indication and uh tremendously um if with like potential co-workers maybe with a potential investor normally if you ask people nicely for something um and and if you're friendly and say hey i'm not going to take a lot of time just maybe 20 30 minutes um i mean normally people or at least i don't know every second one would would help you it's always if somebody if you if people feel you're passionate about an idea um they oftentimes also they get passionate themselves and they think it's cool so um but but also that goes also back to um how how how much time it could uh could take for example with uh i mean you mentioned redstone which is a so a little bit different topic but similar to the b2b space it's a company that advises large corporations in investing into startups now this is something that takes sometimes years if you discuss with a large corporation it's about strategy which startups which areas should we build a fund shouldn't we um and uh it it took a few years to to convince the first uh first customer um and and then you just have to hustle and maybe you do some advisory business on the side um and by now it's it's the world's leading vc as a service company that basically builds vc funds uh to uh third-party specifications be it corporations be it financial investors um in specific industry sectors um and and also and i was just also speaking there with the founder and ceo and and he said look it's really amazing how much you overestimate the first years what you can do but how much you underestimate what um what you can do long term so then as well really the call to action go in there with a mindset this is not a sprint it's really to build something over time and it know well definitely i think core lesson learned here it is a a tiring process as well at times don't think that it will be easy to walk in the park and so and everybody will celebrate you there's a lot of work days a lot of dark days like you know um like in many areas too yeah that's also for example i i i think there there are two things which because of that are really important um and and one is in a way passion and resilience um so because it's so hard and there will be so many setbacks if you're not really passionate about it it's easy to give up and it's like everybody around you normally they make a career some people work for let's say scale-ups um successful tech companies other maybe for large corporations and they climb the career ladder they earn more um and then you think oh i'm the only stupid person out of my whole friendship kind of psych circle and out of my university who is working on this idea and it doesn't get really forward and i don't know if it's going to be successful um and and it's easy to do this for three or six months to do it for 12 months this is already hard for for two years or three years without knowing what happens everybody around you they kind of build their career that's that's tough um and so so that's why for i i think one important factor is is passion and the other one is um it's it's quite interesting it's really timing no matter how great your team is how much funding you have if you have a wrong timing it doesn't help so now once if i look at ideas or also investments et cetera i really think a lot about timing what's interesting is there are there are various success or huge hugely successful um e-commerce companies out of the 90s but there is no really successful i think social network out of the 90s because why it was the wrong timing there were hundreds of social networks founded in the 90s but you didn't have the internet penetration you didn't have the bandwidth the storage everything you need from a technical perspective and from an uh even from a kind of uh social perspective wasn't there um and and there are there are many many examples of that and you need to see like and there's normally there's a sweet spot of maybe half a year one year three or three years where you can build certain types of companies or start them if you are too early it doesn't work um because the kind of framework factors are not there but if you are obviously too late then there is too much competition and there are large companies so it's really about hitting this sweet spot in timing which is extremely important very quickly or that i mean we could definitely turn off your phone it's always so exciting to talk to you and so many learnings um very briefly for the ones that are now thinking well on timing if that's so important do you have a quick suggestion how they can judge if it's the right timing for them for their project right now is that the general rule of thought if i knew this um i mean it's it's really one of the the toughest uh questions uh but unfortunately i don't have the the magic answer but i think the one is just to to truly and very critically think about it and actually trying to force a negative answer on that one asking why why could it not be the right timing and then actually make it real in a way no push the project out then and see that you have a chance to be rejected in a way and find out hey they are not buying it learn why is that i mean obviously this is like the best thing is always trying to hit the market and trying to sell it to market it i mean not for example with consumer products it's so easy you build a landing page you do some advertising on uh i don't know instagram facebook or in in europe with united internet on their platforms so that's uh that's that's easy that's the best one but then also like from uh i mean there are many different ways sometimes from a regulation perspective another one is uh like in europe the bus market was was kind of deregulated um and and there is now flixbus um where they have built once it was still still possible um to to ride buses um but but they have built a huge company but they hit except they they founded the company shortly before there was a new regulation that would free the market um and you had a window of literally a few months were uh where there was the best timing to found this company there were companies that have been built two or three years earlier and they they they obviously were too early and the market was not deregulated so they weren't allowed to operate and then the ones that came a year later and even like for example deutsche post founded a bus company but a year later and they weren't able to then win the market because uh at the time flixbus was already so large wonderful maybe for now because we definitely have to follow an uh session here maybe for now having started these many ventures looking into investing and supporting other entrepreneurs that launch businesses what would you say for you personally is the thing that you personally enjoy the most of all of these challenges solving these challenges these rights um i i would say it's it's clearly two things one is it's just amazing to kind of be part of a process where at the beginning you have nothing and then you create something this creation process building something um being creative this is uh this is really a lot of fun um the one secondly um you normally in in technology and startups tend to work with a lot of very smart and very ambitious people and that's also great um like it's in a way inspiring and motivating to work with other smart um and motivated people wonderful well michael brim we went a little bit over the normal time here but it was just so fascinating so many learnings thanks so much for sharing all of that and much looking forward to see you move forward and and reconnecting then in the future all the best thanks so much jan thank you very much bye-bye