What do you do as Chief of Staff?
The idea behind this role is to flexibly allocate resources to important problems. At rapidly growing companies like Verve Ventures, the teams across the company become ever more specialized and focused on getting the absolute most out of their area. But rarely can you sort a task neatly into just one team, so having cross-team resources who can help coordinate and solve problems can be very valuable. In the beginning, this primarily meant building internal structures, now my work is very diverse: I review the content we publish, act as an in-house consultant to other colleagues, help with strategic projects and lead HR and investment operations. I’m obviously biased, but having enough people focused on tackling cross-company work is one of the key ingredients to build a company that can grow.

What does the Operations team do?
A very important part of our job is essentially customer support. Many of our investors make their first investments in startups, and this is slightly more complicated than just typing in a buy order for ABB stock in your online banking – but certainly also more exciting. So our job is to make startup investments as easy as possible. Even if our platform model is highly scalable and we process hundreds of contracts every month, we must be easy-to-reach if someone has a question. It would be fatal to say “we’re an online platform, don’t talk to us”. Our goal isn’t to become more efficient by becoming less friendly. The team is working very hard to make sure that investors can focus their time on the startups presented, not the investment process behind it.

Why are startup investments complicated?
Startup investments are rarely “business as usual” processes – contracts and timelines are always a product of entrepreneurs and many different investors working together towards the closing of a financing round. What we do is bring our experience from dozens of similar deals into the process, to move everything along and avoid bad surprises. Additionally, most of our startup investments are held by a fiduciary, a regulated Swiss financial intermediary, and from a legal compliance perspective, we need to ensure that everything is neatly and fully documented. However, since Verve Ventures’ founding, we have built software to automate what can be automated and to make the investment process as pain-free as possible. As an example, we obviously can’t change anti-money laundering laws, but we spent a lot of time and effort to build a tool that only asks very focused questions to investors and then automatically generates a contract set that they simply can review and sign.

Why did you choose to work for Verve Ventures?
I’m motivated by solving problems that don’t have an obvious and simple solution. This is why I didn’t want to tie myself down to a corporate career – and with my somewhat unusual background, I’m glad I didn’t have to. In a large corporation, you never have the chance to work in so many different fields like in a startup, and I quite cherish this opportunity.

What are the drawbacks?
Many times you’re confronted with issues you’re not sure how to handle. An example is when I started to do HR, where we didn’t have any structure to speak of or somebody with years of experience in running a team inside a startup company. But not many things matter more to a young company than its team. So you need to adapt, improvise, and improve. Luckily starting from scratch means you can do your research and quickly learn from your mistakes, without being bogged down by the typical bureaucracy that many big companies turn their HR departments into.

How did you get to Verve Ventures?
I’ve always been fascinated by technology. My professional life started as a technical admin and writer for a video game journalism network while I was in high school. Then, growing up in a city where chemical giant BASF has its headquarters and with my interest in engineering and science, my path seemed quite clear. I came to Zurich to study engineering but quickly found out that I’d enjoy the field more from a distance. So I switched to political science, my other line of interest. The most obvious career option would have been to go into political consulting, but this would have meant committing to Germany’s special kind of party politics, which is something I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. I had done an early internship when Verve Ventures was five people in a room and had stayed in contact with the founders. So when it came to looking for a job, we talked and I was very excited to join the company full-time. There was a great team to join and a lot of work to do. Thankfully that hasn’t changed.

In daily interactions, you’re very helpful and friendly. But in the meetings of our investment committee, which decides if we want to accept a startup for our platform or not, you’re often a very critical voice. Why?
My going-in position is usually “no”. To some extent, I’m just encouraging our Investment Managers to be well-prepared, but most importantly it is crucial to have precise answers about the potential rewards and risks of any startup and technology. We’re looking at hundreds and hundreds of new startups every year and we need to prioritize and say no, not just to hopeless cases, but also to really good ones. Startups are high-risk investments and so you have to go in there with an eye for what can go wrong, not to avoid investment but to be prepared when things inevitably don’t work exactly as you planned. And in any case, our investors will certainly ask all these questions as well.

Can you explain the investment committee’s position in the investment process?
The investment managers, helped by the analysts, prepare deals to a point where the investment committee can make a decision and they put in an immense amount of complex work. If the investment manager is not convinced that this is a truly great opportunity, the deal won’t even make it to the committee. The point of that investment decision is to be the final challenge the investment manager, to make sure we thought about every aspect of the case. Only then do we present a case on the platform. We apply that same principle of only choosing the best options to hiring, by the way. No matter who it is, if the future boss of a candidate is not convinced deep down that it’s the best candidate, we won’t hire the person, no matter what other colleagues think.

Sometimes I get the impression that no matter how complicated a startup’s technical solution is, you easily understand it. Are you a born geek?
I’ll take it 😉 I’m curious and want to understand what problems companies solve and how. “Sounds interesting, I guess” isn’t good enough, especially as we are investing so broadly across almost all industries. You have to look closely and make sure you really understand what’s going on, or you might as well leave the investment decisions to others. I’m certain that this approach, where we invest in the best startups no matter the industry, gives us an advantage over most of the VCs out there. There are only so many interesting deals per industry at a time. And while a normal VC might do two or three deals per year, we make 30. There are only very few teams out there with that kind of constant exposure to actual dealmaking. Our industry keeps telling people you have to be diversified to be successful in VC, but most traditional funds barely look beyond their small niche.