Great post from Matthias Hohensee from WirtschaftsWoche and thank you!
You absolutely have to get to know Petra, she knows everyone - recommended the former Handelsblatt US correspondent Rudi Kulzer to me when I went to Silicon Valley for WirtschaftsWoche in 1998. And he also made the introduction to Petra Vorsteher, who, together with her partner Ragnar Kruse, was helping the German start-up Intershop Communications to ramp up its US business (at the time, she brokered an important deal with Deutsche Telekom) for the Nasdaq IPO. And thus experienced the ups and downs of the dot.com crisis on the ground. In 2005, the two founded Smaato (Now part of Verve Group) and expanded it from Hamburg, New York, San Francisco and Singapore into one of the largest mobile advertising networks in the world within a decade. At the end of 2016, they sold a majority stake to the Spearhead Integrated Marketing Communications Group from China for 148 million dollars and stayed with the company for another three years. It was already clear to me at the time that the two would not retire after a successful exit. They both love entrepreneurship far too much for that - and Petra above all loves networking. Ragnar founded his first company at the age of 17. The next step was also clear. At Smaato, the two experienced the potential of AI and used it to combat fraud. In summer 2019, they founded the non profit AI.HAMBURG to promote AI in German companies (well before the advent of Chat GPT) and have been helping German AI start-ups get off the ground with their experience, capital and contacts ever since. This week, they were in California with ten AI startups from Germany to help them launch in the US and raise capital from US investors. Ragnar's lesson from 40 years of entrepreneurship: "I should have expanded into the USA much earlier." Simply because of the size of the market and the capital available here. The two are convinced that German start-ups have great opportunities in AI if they create real solutions and expand into the USA as quickly as possible to secure their existence at home in Germany. The two were honored by GABA NorCal (German American Business Association) on Friday with the Award of Excellence for their life's work and tireless dedication to help other entrepreneurs, joining the ranks of award winners such as SAP co-founder Hasso Plattner, Google discoverer Andy Bechtolsheim, Patricia Roller and Hartmut Esslinger from frog and LinkedIn co-founder Konstantin Guericke. The ambition of the power couple: To see a German AI startup to become the next SAP within the next six years.