‘Innovate, don’t stagnate‘ – An Interview with Jan Valentin

In your experience, what are the most common mistakes businesses make when looking to expand?

The most common fault is to not build the right team, and then fail with expansion. When you expand vertically, you may also easily lose focus, and get involved in, say, business streams that you are not good at. On the other hand, when you go international, all sorts of things can go wrong. No two markets are exactly the same, and you better have local knowledge on board to understand the intricacies of differences.

What lessons do you think businesses and entrepreneurs can learn from the pandemic?

Obviously, learnings differ by market and sector. Nonetheless here are a few that affect a lot of start-ups these days:

  • Keeping cash tight is king and may become more important than before the pandemic. Companies with excessive but unprofitable growth were hurt the most once revenues declined from one day to the next. Get the basics right but don’t stop investing into the future entirely.
  • Technology will be ever more the key to successful business conduct – invest in a strong UX, data and machine-learning play and automatise processes on all levels (company and product). Innovate, don’t stagnate. Reassure your in-vestors that they have invested in the right business with an innovative/solid approach. Funding rounds are possible – but be aware of the snake investors looking for bargain deals.
  • Take good care of the staff you want to keep – and be swift, clear and trans-parent with those you cannot keep. Don’t drag out firing rounds that hurt mo-rale.

Tell us about your experience in the travel industry and how it prepared you for the next step in your career.

Coming from journalism school, I somewhat stumbled into the travel industry through an internship at Süddeutsche Zeitung. I stayed there in the privileged position of writing travel stories from far away countries, then pivoted to the online world, supporting the launch of weg.de. From there, I worked in PR, marketing and general management of travel companies.

I guess the breadth of experiences, with a creative edge to them, helps me in many ways today. In our business, you have to learn fast about different businesses and their models, you have to be able to write, edit and criticise concepts and decks etc. You also need to be a relationship builder. The math side of things is probably the one that I was least educated for when starting to invest. But in the end, you need to keep learning all along, every day.

In your line of work, how essential is knowledge of trading and financial markets?

It certainly helps. Markets are connected and, largely, correlated. And both “systems” are very volatile. Also, when we fundraise ourselves, we somewhat compete with public markets. The fund investment business that we are in comes with a few downsides to our investors, such as long holding times and lack of transparency on the daily business, if you compare it with, for example, investing in public stock. Therefore, you have to explain the advantages to your own investors – higher potential return combined with risk diversification and so on. Early-stage investing, though, is not a pure numbers game. It has to do a lot more with team, timing etc. than later-stage investing. In a way, public markets are easier to grasp.

When it comes to your industry, are creativity and out-of-the-box thinking sought after skills?

Yes, any day, every day. At least this is my view of it. You can make money in investment just “knowing Excel really well”, but you become more useful to start-ups when you support their innovation. Real innovation is almost always outside some box. Furthermore, almost any entrepreneur will, at some point, sit in their own box. A good investor can help shed light in corners of that box from the outside.

How would you encourage young people to pursue this career?

Do different things whilst and after you study, be curious to always learn new things; do this every day. This is the biggest benefit of the job. Don’t do it for the money. You can make a lot of money in this business, but it comes at a fairly high risk and high opportunity cost. You need to love this job to do it. Nothing will come for free.

How can higher education institutions prepare students aspiring for a career in your line of work?

In general, entrepreneurship is something schools should gear more students towards. My personal opinion is that capitalism, as it stands, is on a downward slope. Society is built on a few owners of capital and many working as employees for these owners does not lead to optimal outcomes. Hence, ideally, everyone becomes a shareholder in the companies they engage with in one way or another. Universities should teach students to not trade the risk of entrepreneurship with the security and the comfort of employment in a corporate job that may not exist further down the line. Besides that, creative, math and accounting etc. skills are good to obtain in order to do this business well.

An Interview with Jan Valentin by Fabiana Forni, PR Manager.

 

Pioneer is a biannual magazine, dedicated to and created by BSBI students, providing them with a platform to express themselves through blogs, letters and personal stories. The magazine features interviews with business leaders, information about Germany, professional advice and lifestyle tips


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