Joining Senovo

I’m excited to share that I have joined Senovo (www.senovo.vc) as a partner. It is a true privilege to have the opportunity to work together with the talented entrepreneurs in Europe and Germany as an investor while at the same time being an active entrepreneur myself by building a new VC firm.

The road ahead

The times for entrepreneurs with B2B SaaS companies have never been better: SaaS businesses are the most highly valued companies, the economics and technologies are well understood by startups, customers and investors — and yet just over 20% of software revenues are generated by SaaS companies.

So I find it quite curious when you read and hear that it’s still easier to get an E-commerce company funded in Germany than a B2B company with its great unit economics, long term customer relationships, stable cash flows and highly differentiated products.

In addition, the wide availability of IoT systems, advanced data storage technologies, and machine learning technology opens up even more opportunities for intelligent, data driven products.

A VC with startup culture at its core

At Senovo we aim to build a firm which is culturally compatible with software startups from today: Iteration speed and a flat, failure embracing culture.

The faster you iterate, whether that is your sales approach or your product development speed, the faster you learn. This is the main competitive advantage SaaS startups have over slower but bigger incumbents — especially if they have an on premise product strategy. So for a VC it is critical to be supportive of a culture of continuous learning by experimentation and the fast, agile and sometimes ad hoc processes this entails.

SaaS companies make more “mistakes” if you see failed experiments as such. We think that this is a necessary part of startup life: If you are not failing you’re not going fast enough — and we embrace this because the alternative are long winded, heavy handed decision processes which rarely bring good results in fast moving environments.

Our goal is to rather fail fast and be on our feet again quickly than to freeze up in never ending discussions and analysis. We have seen the opposite too often in entrepreneur — VC relationships and think that the fallout from these heavy handed approaches is actually far worse — emotionally and business wise.

Good things happen to those VCs who hustle for their portfolio

We are a highly complementary team with backgrounds in business, law and computer science. We have built our approach over the last 5 years in which we invested roughly 40m EUR in about 20 early stage startups. In our eyes venture capital is a product for entrepreneurs which allows them to tackle huge market opportunities and to create sustainable, valuable companies. We are here to support them on this journey and we brought our helmets and seatbelts because it’s going to be a hell of a ride.

I look forward to the exciting times ahead …and if you are building a SaaS startup: I would love to hear from you!

Onwards and upwards.

-Markus