Say hi to Visionaries Club!
Today I’m excited to share that together with Sebastian Pollok, a great friend, entrepreneur and former LP / investor I am starting Visionaries Club to take some of our past combined experiences to the next level.
Our funds are backed only by a group of leading European digital entrepreneurs as well as family business entrepreneurs from our network because we believe leveraging our investors’ knowledge and access is the best support we can provide to entrepreneurs in their seed and early growth stage to help them take their companies to the next level.
I am very grateful to all the inspiring entrepreneurs, VCs and friends for believing in us and backing us — many of them with whom we have already worked closely over the last couple of years.
But before I go deeper, I would love to share what really drives and fascinates me about being a VC?
It is actually not managing a fund. It is not being a financial investor. It is not becoming rich fast. It is not for my ego and it is not running around in a Patagonia vest (eventhough I admit I have one). It is basically 3 things:
- The power of great people!
It is the privilege of working with the smartest, brightest and most inspiring people who you can possibly surround yourself with. Why? These people are the best ingredient for anything you do & build — no matter what it actually is.
Every VC and angel investor knows how much fun, thrill and satisfaction comes from working every day with hungry & inspiring founders on their ideas — it almost becomes a drug and addiction over time.
But for me this is just one side of the business. On the other side of things I admire every single entrepreneur in our investor (LP) base for what they have achieved in various different constellations und circumstances. Is it starting their own digital company out of nothing and taking it to € 1 bn revenues in only 4 years. Sometimes after failing and loosing almost everything but always standing up again to turn things around. Or entrepreneurs taking their family business to the next generation through many ups and downs, which I can imagine is not always an easy task to be born into.
And there is one even more important thing that unites all these entrepreneurs that back us: They are ambitious but remain humble and take their ego out of the equation, which I guess is not always self-evident if you succeed: But it is the most important ingredient to bring up the best team spirit in everyone!
I strongly believe, this authentic entrepreneurial hands-on experience from our LPs is the best support we can offer to founders we back in their seed and early growth stage to help them take their companies to the next level. An experience we could never replicate as partners or just “hire” into a fund. At the same time working with these people is what gets me up in the morning, what excites me and keeps me motivated every day. The rest will come automatically.
2. The opportunity of building great digital B2B disrupters out of Europe by bridging information asymmetries between the old and new!
I am a big believer that the next big wave of disruption in Europe will happen in the B2B space, with the potential to re-shape the backbone of our European economy. Reinventing the B2B IT stack is the here-and-now opportunity since there is no economic reason for any part of the value chain not to be digitized in the long run if there is potential to streamline and automate processes.
OK, we do not have a Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Alibaba, Tencent or Baidu, who have become major players in their ecosystems when it comes to bold investments into new technologies. BUT we have one asset in Europe that no other region on earth has to offer at such scale: Our industrial world market leaders, often still owned by family business entrepreneurs. Combined, this is a massive power and opportunity to enable the next wave of disruption in B2B. At the same time these players have no choice but to engage in new digital technologies to remain competitive.
So we have those great tech universities and clusters on the one hand side. We have all those family business world market leaders on the other side. Well, then…why don´t we match them?
Compared with typical listed corporates, family business entrepreneurs have an entrepreneurial DNA themselves, make fast decisions, are willing to take bigger risks and think long-term: All ingredients which make them a great sparring partner for B2B founders in their growth stage (…and by the way: Vice versa).
With our network-driven approach at Visionaries Club, we want to bridge the information asymmetry of “what´s possible” in the technology startup space and “what is actually needed” in the industrial space. By bringing those two worlds together in the seed and early growth stage we hope that Visionaries Club can contribute a little to fuel the next wave of disruption in B2B.
3. Being entrepreneurs ourselves — just in VC:
Disruption is what VCs invest in to produce extraordinary returns for their LPs.
But ironically it is also the force that VCs sometimes resist when it comes to their own approach. Even though we are not building a tech product we see us as entrepreneurs ourselves in a competitive and fast changing VC market, with the desire to build a great “product” for our founders, and to make sure we re-invent ourselves whenever this is necessary.
The “joy of building something” is also in the heart of our own DNA — my Partner Sebastian has been a founder throughout the last 6 years having built and exited AMORELIE alongside Lea-Sophie and I was lucky to build La Famiglia and be part of our AMAZE adventure. We are a pretty young team — but hopefully this is exactly what will take some bias away to help us “re-invent” things and have a strong connect to the founders we back.
As with every startup our current approach is our hypothesis to win but we are also aware that we still need to prove our product and always need to remain open for changes.
So what we are up to with Visionaries Club?
Sebastian and I have not only enjoyed working with many of our founders and entrepreneurial LPs, but also the many other great VC funds out there! It is impressive how the European VC ecosystem has matured in the last two years. Thus, with Visionaries Club we want to take a very complementary approach to our European Ecosystem and VC partners. We think “small is beautiful” given our network-driven approach to investing and our strategy is thus designed to complement instead of competing.
We have launched two separate micro funds:
1) A € 40 M (pre) seed stage fund leveraging our digital founder LP network for early and exclusive access to the most promising entrepreneurs across Europe. We will be able to lead and co-lead at this stage and support founders with our network in finding product-market fit.
2) A second, separate € 40 M early growth fund leveraging especially on our industrial LP network intended to double down on the most promising bets from our own as well as others’ VC portfolios at Series B and beyond as a smaller syndicate partner of other top tier funds leading the rounds — thereby complementing instead of competing.
Our funds are backed by a group of leading European digital entrepreneurs as well as family business entrepreneurs from our network, many of them market leaders in the industrial space. This puts us in a unique position to help B2B startups find product-market fit in the seed stage and help them scale in their growth stage.
Dear other VCs and Friends: We will work very hard to be a good partner for our entire ecosystem. And we look forward working with you!
Thank you La Famiglia!
The above mentioned fascination is also what really drove me to start La Famiglia about 3 years ago with a small group of friends as an entrepreneurial driven angel fund. With the help of our entrepreneurs, our co-investors and a whole bunch of other supporters who believed in our small fund (you know who you are) we were very fortunate to have been able to back 30 great companies in their very early stages — all of them still alive :).
We started as a “two-person show” (…and believe me: Beyond the fun developing our strategy and doing our first investments: It was also “fun” in the first year being CFO, Head of regulatory and tax-related filings, managing auditors, quarterly reports, BaFin & Bundesbank Reporting, Anti Money Laundering Reporting, Operations, Investor Relations, Legal and all the other admin that comes with a fund).
But what did really make La Famiglia fly?
Our team!
It is near impossible to single out what Judith, Dirk and Saket have contributed and how hard you worked to support building La Famiglia and our portfolio. We were not a big fund being able to pay huge salaries — but I always had the impression you were doing your jobs driven by the passion to hunt for the next big thing and being “co-entrepreneurs” helping to build La Famiglia. Not to forget our first Venture Associate Lars who has now successfully launched his own company Limehome and Viet who recently joined the team.
I am deeply thankful for your support and I am sure Judith and Jeannette will make up a great future leadership team to take our La Famiglia experience to the next fund generation!
I will of course remain on board as Founding Partner of our first La Famiglia fund and couldn´t be more proud and excited to continue working hard alongside our 30 portfolio companies.
Tanti Saluti
Rob
