Farewell and Thank You
Traditionally, growing a business means welcoming many new faces to the team — but sometimes it means to say goodbye as well. Today is one such day, as we are saying goodbye to Ben and Karl, who will be stepping back from their active role at First Momentum Ventures.
Saying goodbye is never easy, especially to great colleagues and friends you’ve spent the last years in a foxhole together with — this is why we would rather like to take this opportunity to say thank you instead.
Both Ben and Karl have been instrumental in getting First Momentum off the ground and to the point we are at today. They shaped the idea, vision, and structure of what is First Momentum from day 1 and have been invaluable in gathering an amazing team and group of founders, ambassadors, investors, and partners around this vision.
Without them, we wouldn’t have been able to reach and surpass several important milestones, including setting up and fundraising our first fund as venture capital outsiders. We’ve lost count by now to how many investors and founders we’ve been talking to over the years, but some memorable moments will stay with us for a long time.
Ben has been the driving force behind our ambassador network and many of the processes underlying our investing efforts. He has been pushing the team with his energetic, cheery, and “never give up, never surrender” attitude, especially when working through our investing funnel. He has been an important emotional anchor for the team (as well as the one that made team dinners something we won’t forget, especially his short ribs!), always having a positive outlook even when we were going through tougher times.
Karl, in turn, has been testing and probing the limits of the venture capital model, especially in regard to how data can be leveraged. Being the true techie of the team, he played a key role experimenting with new technical solutions to allow us to identify the most promising startups — you could literally hear the code flowing, thanks to the rhythmic sound of his mechanical keyboard. Karl has been playing the important role of a contrarian's voice in a lot of internal discussions, always questioning the status quo, aiming to achieve better. He was a key factor for challenging assumptions and ideas about “how stuff should work” and providing the team with motivational material — GaryVee, watch out!
Both are leaving their mark for years to come — at the minimum in terms of our portfolio, having helped us identify and support some amazing founders.
Thank you for all the work you contributed to making First Momentum a reality. And thank you for the time we’ve been able to spend together. This truly has been a unique ride and we’ll continue carrying the torch and will work hard to realize our common vision of supporting the next generation of technical founders from day 1 onwards on an eye-level basis — founder-to-founder and engineer-to-engineer — in working on building a greater future. Not just innovating, but really progressing today towards tomorrow.
We’ll soon be able to pull back the curtain on some of the things we’re currently working on — stay tuned!
- Simon, Sebastian, Janna, David, Andreas & the rest of the First Momentum community
