Nico Wittenborn: Consumer Subscription Apps; Using Evolutionary Biology to Invest; Solo GP's | E1017

There's this term in evolutionary biology called the adjacent possible. And what it says is evolution happens usually as a combination of the existing phenomena and in a relatively deterministic way. So like transformers being developed somewhere within Google, somebody taking that, building that up, and creating OpenAI, then that actually becoming consumer subs application that charges 20 bucks a month, (laughs) with ChatGPT, those things altogether create the breakthrough. If you ask somebody on the street, they're like, "Overnight, AI was created, and it's living in this bot," certainly this was not the case. There were very specific steps leading to this outcome that is now perceived as happening overnight. And this can be technically like the example I just brought, but it could also be behaviorally or, um, socially, like Calm for meditation. Meditation was not as mainstream as it was when we invested, right? And so I- I try to identify these changes and then think about which companies could create a category around that.

Niko, I am so excited for this. It was 2015 when we last sat down together.

Yes.

I cannot believe it's been eight years. But thank you so much for joining me today.

Thanks for having me again.

Now, this will be one of the best shows we've done because we're just gonna shoot the shit. We're gonna start as usual. I want to know how did you get into venture first and just set the stage there.

Yeah. Um, so I started my journey in high school, not in investing, but in the first step towards, um, investing, which was I imported iPhones from the UK, unlocked them, refurbished them, resold them, which then really opened my eyes to entrepreneurship, one, and two, some of the money I made there (laughs) I invested in Apple stock-

(laughs)

... in 2008 and '09, which, um, I guess taught me two things. One, you can make money online. Two, if you believe in something and you put the money behind it, then that can work out for you. I didn't... You know, it was very little money, and I- I actually took it out pretty soon after for a vacation with a girlfriend-

(laughs)

... at the time. But it was still, it was still, you know, the learning was there. And so I... At the time that this was happening was at 2008, and when I started studying, I read about a group in Berlin called Team Europe.

Hmm.

They were a company builder, um, pretty similar to Rocket, smaller. They built Delivery Hero-

Mm-hmm.

... a couple of other outcomes, and they had a small seed fund on the side with €6 million, and that was managed by Pawel, who was later one of the founders of, um, Point Nine. And so I reached out to them, sent them a cold email, asked if I could do an internship. This is in 2010. And Pawel got back to me and, um, came to visit a town close to where I was studying in Germany, and I had a conversation with him. He liked what I did with the iPhones. I actually just had invested in a company called ƒ4kauf, and that was that model but on a bigger scale, venture-funded. I was just one person. Um, and so I think we hit it off, and he offered me an internship. I worked with him, um, for a couple of months and then continued working for them part-time as I finished my studies in 2011, 2012. And then when I graduated university, they decided to spin out this fund of Team Europe, and Christoph, who was an LP in the fund, joined as a co-founder, (laughs) and they started Point Nine. Um, and I was just, you know, the young kid that was around-