Season “How to Make 250K Per Year” · Episode 6
Start-ups: the fastest school
Learn · 1 November 2026
Start-ups are the fastest school I know. But the door of 2009 doesn't exist like that anymore.
Back then there was a gap. Start-ups had money, and money is fuel: if you were willing to put in a huge amount of time, you could simply take responsibility to try things out. The founders were just as inexperienced as everyone else. So were the investors; not everyone had Jeff Bezos as a backer, most were people with money who thought they knew how it works. The golden rule was: nine out of ten start-ups fail. That also means nobody really knew why one worked and the other didn't. Everyone talked about culture and people, and everyone was just testing and playing.
My gap was the combination of tech and marketing. I'd been programming since I was twelve and lived only in the digital world, and I did my Abitur at a school focused on technology and electrical engineering. Because I earned money on the side during school and university, I learned what marketing actually means, and “digital marketing” wasn't even a term back then. The start-ups only knew: we need someone who understands the tech and the marketing. In Europe there was nobody with years of experience in SEO or Google Ads. If you wanted to learn, you could do anything. That was the boost. After one year I was leading whole teams, the first in 2009 at 9flats, more than ten people.
Today it's different. Most start-ups I see look to me like copies of copies. As an employee you work there in structures and processes very similar to those of big companies. What has stayed: you develop personal skills faster and more easily in a start-up than in a corporation. I've been in a corporation too. There you know you're driving in the wrong direction, and you keep driving until someone with more power understands it too. In a start-up it's the other way round: if you notice the direction is wrong, you find everyone on your side, because everyone wants to go the right way as fast as possible. That it's not a healthy place to stay, not for the founders and not for the business, especially not with other people's money, I didn't know back then.
What I'd tell a 22-year-old today: Use the start-up the way the start-up uses you. It's a vehicle: you learn skills there faster and understand the business world faster than anywhere else, with the money the start-up burns for it. Today you even get paid well there; in 2009 that was different. Take the salary. I wouldn't want equity, I have to be that honest: it's not a movie, you never know if and when it gets sold. Virtual shares, no IPO, no sale, because the business simply makes money, and you're stuck in it, in one business, forever. That's the endless game again. At the ZenMate exit my shares went to zero. And I've seen how many ways there are to not pay, in the end, what was promised at the start. Not out of malice, they have to survive. But don't plan with the promise.
And why I don't make a start-up out of it anymore: A start-up isn't an asset you build alone. It takes a huge part of your time, and you're not free in your decisions. Not every founder is the same, but I've seen the pattern often: founders who have to do what someone else decided. If you've taken a lot of outside money, you no longer decide alone; the money matters more than anything else and in the end overrules what you want. Hence the investors, hence the politics. But I only need the money for one thing: to decide freely. A path that takes exactly that away from me can't be the path there. With a family, it's not the path to my 250K. And honestly: if you go to an investor and say “I want to build a €250,000 business”, you get nothing. It's too small to be worth it for him. That's exactly why it fits me.
The point of this episode isn't that start-ups are bad. I still love that world, the way I love sport when I watch it on TV. The point is that I've decided. It's not the game I want to play.