What is fascinating about working in a venture capital firm?
The essence of our job is to learn about new technologies and companies that not many other people know about. Every day I’m in contact with smart and inspiring entrepreneurs and can ask them everything I want to better understand their business. The pace is very fast. In the morning, you visit a construction site with a 3D concrete printer, and in the afternoon, you learn about the newest trends in virtual reality, that’s a pretty exciting workday. You’re always hunting for interesting startups.

What advice would you give young students about the best way to break into venture capital?
It’s a good thing to learn and try out different things while you study. I studied industrial engineering and later did a double degree at TU Munich and HEC Paris. In parallel to my theoretical studies, it has always been equally important to me to apply the learned thing in various real-world environments. Therefore I spent half a year at Daimler in Japan, worked at Bain & Company in Munich, and later joined Fraunhofer Venture – a job at the intersection between scientists and startups that fascinated me. This led to an internship at a later-stage venture capital fund before I joined Verve Ventures. While I had some theoretical knowledge about private equity and venture capital from finance lectures, doing it in real life is much more interesting.

What are the key skills you need to have to work in venture capital?
A natural curiosity and openness, I’d say. If you judge ideas too quickly and have preconceived opinions about everything, then you’re in the wrong place. What comes helpful as a skill is the ability to process complex information quickly in order to identify the key aspects of a venture. We’re dealing with technical founders that have years of expertise. This means that you have to get up to speed rapidly to have a meaningful conversation with them. Time management is another important skill. You need to drive different projects forward in parallel and have to execute on tight deadlines.

With the diversity of topics at hand, hardware, software, different business models, how do you manage not to drown in information?
We work with a software tool called “Dealboard” that our IT team built in-house. It helps to organize the tasks at hand and share information in the team efficiently. On top of this, you develop a good feeling about how much time you’ll need for a certain task. If it gets overwhelming, we ask our colleagues for help.

You started at Verve Ventures as an Analyst, were promoted to Investment Associate and are now Investment Manager. What does that mean and how is the investment team organized?
The good thing about our investment team is that if you want to shoulder some responsibility, you can do that early on. As a general rule, there is always a tandem of an Investment Manager and an Investment Analyst working with one startup. The analyst is responsible for the technical and business due diligence, and the IM for the transaction. Even if you’re a junior, you’re working on every step of the process from the first call with the startup until the notary meeting when the transaction is closed. There are a lot of different steps in the process that can lead to a decision not to pursue the opportunity anymore. We challenge each other a lot. It is good to look at a business from many different angles, and we’re a team with a lot of different backgrounds. While we screen thousands of startups, we finance only about 25 new ones every year. If one that you found makes it through, this gives you a lot of satisfaction. The difference between Analyst and Associate is that Associates assume more responsibilities and drive cases forward with less hand-holding from the Investment Managers.

You mentioned the hunt for the next interesting startup as one of the cool things about your job. Where are your hunting grounds? 
I like social events because it is a natural way for founders and investors to get a first impression of each other. Reaching out by mail or phone, in contrast, is less personal. To learn more about a certain space and the startups active in it, I do desk research, study market maps, or read online publications such as Startupticker or Gründerszene. Increasingly I can also rely on a personal network that I’ve built. The relaxed way in which people who work for different venture capital firms exchange ideas was a positive surprise. This is possible because often, the firms have a different focus regarding technology or stage. Many times I discover a startup I find interesting but it doesn’t correspond to our investment focus. By telling other investors about it, when it fits their profile, I do both the startup and the investor a favor.

All that sounds very nice, but isn’t venture capital a brutal business where millions are at stake? There must be some horrible aspects you need to tell us about. 
It feels a bit like all the young people now want to become venture capitalists. But there are very few jobs because venture capital is just a tiny little part of the financial industry. People shouldn’t forget that, and they shouldn’t believe the hype. There are misconceptions on the investors’ side, for example when they invest in a startup because they think they might miss out on a trend that is hyped at the moment. And there are founders who just send their pitch deck to every investor instead of thinking about whom to approach, and those that think that just having a great idea will already make them millionaires. Compared to the US, the European venture capital market is still pretty small, but this is changing rapidly. And while in the US, valuations seem to be quite exuberant, in Europe this isn’t generally the case. In terms of technological prowess, we’re not at a disadvantage compared to the US, thanks to world-class universities such as ETH Zurich or TU Munich.

It looks like both founders and investors need a good dose of enthusiasm to do what they do. But as you said, there can also be too much enthusiasm. How do the two camps compare, have you encountered the archetypical entrepreneur?
Entrepreneurs and investors are probably more alike than one might think. Both are curious and fascinated by technology, they speak the same language. It’s not surprising that many successful entrepreneurs become investors, and that there are also investors that join startups again. But there is no typical entrepreneur, they come in different types, some are extroverts, other introverts. Maybe the common denominator is a good dose of personality, willpower, and courage.

How would you build a startup portfolio yourself?
I’d choose companies in different stages for a balanced portfolio. I’d invest in some later-stage deals of companies that already perform very well, where the risk but also the potential return is more conservative, but also a few moonshots – very early-stage companies of which I’m convinced that they’ll make it.