What's your secret sauce for building a great team?
Hiring very selective in people with high expectations towards themselves in drive, diligence, humbleness and growth. Embracing rituals, daily work on communication culture and guarding a minimum behavior standard collectively through immediate feedback.
What do you wish you had known 10 years ago?
Building a small strong team at your own pace organically along feedback through revenue can easily outperform magnitudes of capital investment. For products with high complexity and uncertainty, strong trustful collaborative work environments can excel any hierarchical structure in agility and efficiency founded on psychological safety, self-awareness and common goals.
What personal habit or behavior has shaped you as a leader / entrepreneur?
Learning from others through reading books and connecting with people through personal questions - which inspired me, made my struggles relatable, showed new approaches, gave me a language to communicate my experiences and confidence that it can be done. Coaching as it helped me to reflect my challenges in this moment - while overcoming toxic beliefs, gaining new perspectives, shaping a healthy mindset.
What shift in perspective / mindset has allowed you to see things differently?
To understand the value of organic business and especially the value of doing sales as a service.
It shifted my perspective as an Engineer & Scientist of seeing sales as a „burden“ into experiencing it as contribution for the customer through connecting them into the market, helping them developing their business and trading energy in the form of money to create a sustainable ecosystem.
What quote or saying has stuck with you?
“Easy choices, hard life - hard choices, easy life” - as it helped me in times of difficult decisions such as changing paths, e.g. selling the company, to invest the extra courage and power to take a leap and indeed make life less complicated, generating more freedom (quote by Jerzy Gregorek)
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Here’s More, From Other Founders Around the World
What's a mistake that you're happy you've made?
When I was 16 (way before the internet) I founded a travel-partner agency to connect people from different backgrounds seeking travel companions. After a year, I had to close the agency due to a lack of customers and the confusion some callers had regarding the nature of the “service.” Despite this setback, I gained invaluable insights into sales, communication and people’s needs, solidifying my desire to run a business that helps people.
What motivated you to become an entrepreneur?
After graduating, I worked for an extremely well-paying automotive company. But I always had the feeling that there was more out there. So I quit and went into research with the aim of becoming a founder.
What should leaders understand about their own role and responsibility?
There are no overnight miracles, it's very hard work: both physically and emotionally. Requires resilience, grit, strategic approach and grind.
What’s an important guiding principle that informs the way you build and run your business?
One of our core values is experimentation. Rather than get stuck in arguing about what solution may best solve a problem or play to our ego, we focus on the smallest step we could possibly take to learn whether that’s true. It moves our minds away from thinking too big without sweating the small stuff and from getting stuck in discussions rather than actually doing something to understand the possible solutions better.