If you want to learn something about your own country, it helps to talk to young people. Better still: with young people who have just come to Germany from abroad. What doesn’t hurt either: if these people are women, especially when it comes to a business that lacks women, invest in start-ups.
Clear the stage for Madeline Lawrence. Half American, half Italian, grew up in Barcelona, studied in the Netherlands, 24 years old. “Young and naive,” she writes about herself on her Twitter profile. And: “Make rich men even richer.” This is not meant very seriously. Not quite.
Lawrence is a venture capitalist and heads the Dutch venture capital company Peak in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. At the beginning of July she opened the office in Berlin, it was the company’s first outside of Amsterdam. Stockholm has just been added. All the money in the Peak Fund, 66 million euros, comes from other company founders. Before starting at Peak and giving money to young companies in Amsterdam, Lawrence had already co-founded her own venture capital fund, called ASIF Ventures, which invests in student start-ups. So she knows what she’s talking about.
After her first few weeks in Germany, she learned a lot. About the country, about the people, about the start-up and investor scene and about the state of digitization. First surprise: “I didn’t realize before how bad the internet was here.” She has often made video calls to German founders from Amsterdam and they repeatedly apologized for their poor WiFi. But now she notices it in herself. “When I dial into a conference with the others in Amsterdam, I’m the only one who looks completely pixelated.” It doesn’t help setting up successful digital start-ups or investing in them if the fast internet is already lacking.
Another finding, this time positive: In Germany (and not only in Berlin, because there are also an enormous number of young companies outside of the capital) there are a lot of founders (especially founders) who are already starting their second company and this time are paying attention to it that their business is making a positive difference in the world. “I’m not entirely sure that this focus on the impact is a bit advanced, but I generally think it’s good to make that part of the strategy,” says Lawrence.
She also experienced something in Berlin that she already knows from Amsterdam: there is a lack of women and people from other cultures among founders as well as investors. “It’s no secret that there is a lack of diversity,” says Lawrence. “Venture capitalists are still an old boys network.” She sees that the investors have recently hired several young women, but the higher the management level, the fewer women. There are almost no female partners in the companies. At industry get-togethers, she often sits between a group of 40-, 50- or 60-year-old men and grins to herself when she opens her rose gold-colored laptop.
With 50 percent women, Peak is one of the most diverse venture capitalists, says Lawrence. “It’s not a coincidence. But we didn’t make it explicit that we would definitely hire women. We just always took the best people and half of them were women.” At some point, diversity became a sure-fire success because diverse employers attract more diverse employees, she says. Diversity has proven to be an economic advantage, also with regard to different age groups and backgrounds. “As a young person, for example, I have the advantage that I recognize other trends because I notice that my friends are all only talking about this one thing.”
In Berlin, that’s her job now: Finding trends. And the right start-ups. Or let them find you. Because that’s another insight: “There’s more money in the market than ever before.” Venture capital financing reached a new high in 2021. “It has never been so easy as a founder to raise capital. A lot,” she says. “If an investor wants to be the one who gives money, he has to hurry and be willing to pay.” Lawrence had expected that it would be like that in Berlin – “but it is something else to be in the middle of it now”. She advises founders to carefully examine the sponsors and not to take the first person who comes up, but rather the one who suits them – also when it comes to the partners. “Statistically speaking, a relationship with a venture capitalist lasts longer than marriage.”