Startup Notes

Daniel Stammler is Co-CEO & Co-Founder of Kolibri Games. Founded under the original name Fluffy Fairy Games by a group of IT and Business students in 2016, Kolibri Games is a vibrant mobile gaming studio based in Berlin. The team developed its first title Idle Miner Tycoon in just eight weeks, following the startup’s signature lean approach.


By now, their games Idle Miner Tycoon and Idle Factory Tycoon have cumulatively reached over 100 Million downloads. With a team of more than 100 dedicated engineers, artists, and game designers, the startup is raking in millions in recurring revenue and has been profitable since Day 1 - without having raised any VC funding.

Kolibri Games’ exceptional growth story has been recognized several times: LinkedIn added the company to the 2018 list of Top 25 startups in Germany; Red Herring placed Kolibri Games among the 2018 Top 100 Global and Deloitte awarded the company with a first place in the "Rising Stars" category of 2018’s Deloitte Technology Fast 50. 

In this episode, we speak with Daniel about how to create hits in the gaming industry. Among others, Daniel shares Kolibri’s philosophy of developing games closely tied to user feedback and why the startup has declined all offers by VCs so far.

In our 11th #FromScratch masterclass, Johannes Reck (Co-Founder & CEO of GetYourGuide) taught our audience how to grow and scale fast.

Johannes is one of Germany’s premier startup founders. As Co-Founder & CEO of GetYourGuide, he has built a truly global a tech unicorn out of Berlin over the past 10 years. Recently, the travel startup raised one of the largest financing rounds the tech scene in Europe has seen so far by collecting $484m in its Series E led by SoftBank. Based on a personal need, Johannes founded GetYourGuide by chance when he was still at university with the original intention to pursue a career in academia. Having evolved from an idea of a group of students into the leading booking platform for attractions and activities that serves millions of travelers anywhere in the world, Johannes credits especially to the team’s attitude for “infinite learning” at a high speed.

In this episode, moderator Christian Miele (Partner at e.ventures) and Johannes discuss the right timing for starting to grow quickly, share best practices on how to accelerate growth, analyze the roles of product and marketing, and define what kind of people a company needs to scale as fast as possible.

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Til Klein is Founder & CEO of Vantik - a Berlin-based PensionTech startup. Launched in 2017, it is the startup’s vision to provide a simple and secure private pension that is as flexible as life itself. Vantik aims to inspire millennials to start saving for their future.

Recently, the promising tech company that was founded by Til and Lara Hämmerle raised a seed round led by STS Ventures, Atlantic Labs, Seedcamp, and prominent business angels (like N26 Co-Founder Maximilian Tayenthal), bringing its total funding amount to over 2m€.

In this episode, we speak with Til about how to use early user feedback to build a great product. Among others, we cover how to design a product depending on your users’ motivation to use it, do customer interviews the right way, and translate feedback into features.

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In our 10th #FromScratch masterclass, Michael Brehm (Founder & CEO of i2x) taught our audience how to build a sales-driven organization.

Michael Brehm is one of the most influential people in the German startup scene. As former Executive Director and investor at social network startup studiVZ, he left his mark already in the early 2000s. Over the course of his career, Michael has built several companies, successfully sold some of them to Google and eBay, and taken one venture public. Michael is one of the cornerstones of the Business Angel scene in Germany, having invested in more than 50 startups and being the launchpad for a lot of entrepreneurs. He is also a Partner at VC firm Redstone, which has helped corporates to invest in over 200 tech startups. In 2017, Michael decided to found a new tech company himself: With i2x, he is leveraging his renowned expertise in sales and marketing, bringing real-time AI-powered speech analytics to companies for improving their sales calls.

In this episode, Michael and moderator Christian Miele (Partner at e.ventures) will elaborate on why sales is a numbers game and how you can build the right sales funnels in an organization. Michael will share best practices of building sales teams including setting up efficient structures and the right KPIs, creating incentive schemes, and how to train and motivate a sales team.

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“From Scratch” is an exclusive series of masterclasses produced by Startup Notes and McKinsey Digital in Berlin that brings together Europe’s top entrepreneurs, investors, and innovators to give exclusive lectures on digitalization.

In our 9th #FromScratch masterclass, Tamaz Georgadze (Co-Founder & CEO of Raisin) taught our audience how to build a sustainable high-performance culture.

Backed with more than 170 million EUR by prominent VCs like Index Ventures and corporates like PayPal, the FinTech startup is the leading European marketplace for investments and deposits. More than 10 billion EUR have been deployed by Raisin’s customers throughout Europe since the startup was founded in Berlin in 2013.

In this episode, Tamaz and moderator Jan Miczaika (Partner at HV Holtzbrinck Ventures) - who kindly jumped in for our usual host Christian Miele (e.ventures) on short notice - discuss how to build a sustainable high-performance culture in a startup. The two elaborate on how first employees shape a company’s DNA, how to create high-performing teams and increase internal efficiency, as well as the importance and ways to measure your company culture.

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“From Scratch” is an exclusive series of masterclasses produced by Startup Notes and McKinsey Digital in Berlin that brings together Europe’s top entrepreneurs, investors, and innovators to give exclusive lectures on digitalization.