Julian Teicke's Recent LinkedIn Posts

My post from a few weeks ago about whether successful entrepreneurs need to be ruthless psychopaths had more than 100k impressions 🤯 so it definitely hit a nerve. If you want to hear more about this topic and continue the conversation join me at START Summit this week at my alma mater University of St.Gallen with Julius Bachmann and Jonas Muff.

“The ultimate aim is to create a new truly European company structure. We call it EU Inc” - Ursula von der Leyen at the World Economic Forum this January. The man behind this massive success for Europe is Andreas Klinger - founder of EU–INC. We are thrilled to welcome him on stage at our next Gründerszene x The Delta event on March 19th. If you want to hear the background story of what it took to get the president of European Commission to promote his idea, join this event: https://luma.com/pwlaatmo

“Europe is weak.” That’s what US leadership keeps saying. And honestly? When I look at how slowly Germany has digitalized its public administration, they’re not completely wrong. But now something changed. Germany’s new Bundesministerium für Digitales und Staatsmodernisierung just launched the Agentic AI Hub: a direct bridge between AI startups and government. The idea: autonomous AI systems that take over the complex manual processes that are drowning our administration. 700,000 German civil servants are retiring by 2030. We can’t hire our way out of this. We need to build our way out. The US tried the opposite. DOGE slashed more than 250,000 federal workers, claimed $214 billion in savings but federal spending actually went up. The lesson is: you can’t cut your way to a modern state. Germany’s approach is different: → Connect startups directly with municipal administration → Run real pilot projects (starting March 2026) → Build AI infrastructure on sovereign, European cloud → Make government the anchor customer for domestic AI This is not just good policy. It’s a massive market opportunity for every AI founder in Europe. I am proud to formally advise the Agentic AI Hub of the Bundesministerium für Digitales und Staatsmodernisierung. We are proving that you can innovate without breaking the system. On February 23rd, we’re hosting Thomas Jarzombek (Parliamentary State Secretary, BMDS) at our Gründerszene X The Delta Campus event with Johannes Reck to present the Agentic AI Hub. I believe this could be one of the most significant GovTech opportunities Germany has ever created. If you’re an AI founder you want to be in this room. Join the event here: https://luma.com/fwzirkm5

Every year I co-found 2-3 ventures as a founding investor. Amongst the ventures I co-founded in the past are hallo theo and handly and there are a lot more amazing companies in the pipeline already. The first step to get in touch with us if you are an ambitious early stage founder is to attend our The Delta Studio Open Day. The next one will be on Tuesday, 17 March and you can apply if you have huge ambitions and are looking for a more than just capital, but a true operational partner to help build or accelerate your venture. Apply here: https://luma.com/r9r1vsrn

One of my best friends and teacher Dawa Tarchin Phillips spent 8 years in a row in silent meditation as a buddhist monk. So I thought 7 days must be a piece of cake. Especially given my 1 hour a day meditation practice. Seven days without talking, without devices, without reading, without music, etc. After all, if you can’t even spend a few days only with yourself in silence, then how are you supposed to love yourself? And if you can’t love yourself, then how are you supposed to love others and ultimately life? Well, for me it mostly felt like torture. Destructive thoughts, irrational fears, painful and shameful past experiences on replay and my brain as this relentless idea machine (wrote 5 songs in my head and had about 10 business ideas, e.g., dark factories to create pixel-perfect clones of IT legacy systems on the newest tech stack - hit me up via DM if you want to build this with me;) But I also had glimpses into overflowing love, into the sweetness of forgiving, into the connection to source, into ultimate peace and silence, and into deeply buried frozen parts that started to melt layer by layer when I touched them. I ask myself why there is no mandatory daily meditation practice at schools and week-long silent meditation retreats from age 14. Such a foundation feels especially important in our current times of super fast paced technological advancements, because as Yuval Noah Harari puts it: "In the 21st century, the most important thing you can learn is to know yourself. Because if you don't know who you are, the algorithms will soon figure it out for you, and they will control you."

Munich has Bits & Pretzels, Helsinki has Slush, Paris has VivaTech, Lisbon has Web Summit. Berlin has 🤔 Berlin needs a signature tech conference with global relevance. That is the idea I just entered on www.berlinaufdieeins.de - help me upvote the idea so that we make it a reality 🚀 BAD1

Do successful founders have to be relentless psychopaths? Last week on stage at START Summit in St. Gallen with Julius and Jonas, we debated this. Our answer was? No. But this is also true: A chip on the shoulder is often the kickstarter. Trauma gets you off the couch and pushes you through the impossible early days. But it’s dirty fuel. It works right up until it destroys the engine. Eventually, running on it will ruin your health and poison the company you built. There is a better way. An abundant source of energy that never runs out. It's like never having to stop at a gas station again. Clean fuel. Tapping into the current of the river of your life. Living your purpose. How do you make the switch? It starts with a baseline of meditation and introspection. Just getting to know yourself. But then you have to go where it hurts. You have to work with professionals to uncover the buried parts, integrate them, and heal through connection to a regulated nervous system. What about psychedelics? We talked about that, too. Psychedelics can show you a future state. They show you how it could feel. But they don’t show you the way. It’s like borrowing a friend's Airline status card. You get into the lounge. You experience the luxury. But you can't stay, and you can't come back. The status isn't yours. Psychedelics give you a glimpse. The actual, daily inner work is how you earn your own card. That's how you get to live in that state of clean fuel. I hope that the era of the traumatized, relentless founder will end. It’s time to do the work and build more healthy and succesful companies!

Berlin is one percentage point behind London in founder preference according to Startup Heatmap. One point. We’re not getting crushed. We’re losing by a rounding error. This city has 21 unicorns and the best talent density in Europe. We’re not broken. We’re just in our own way. Tomorrow we stop being in our own way. 200 of us will be sitting down with Berlin mayor Kai Wegner for the „Berlin auf die Eins“ kickoff. Daniel Khachab, Jan Oberhauser, Marius Meiners, Filip Felician Dames, Florian Heinemann, Dr. Gesa Miczaika and many more- founders and VCs who’ve built and invested here. We’re picking 5-10 things to fix in next 12 months. Not talking. Fixing. LFG 🚀 #BAD1

Happy to announce that Johannes Reck will be the next guest at our next Hero Founder Series Gründerszene x The Delta Campus on February 23rd. His company GetYourGuide just crossed $1bn in annual revenue and announced profitability. Milestones very, very few European tech companies ever reach. I’ve followed Johannes and GetYourGuide for a long time, and what stands out isn’t a single milestone, but the way the company was built. He built GetYourGuide through years of extreme capital constraints. He led the company through Covid, when travel basically stopped overnight. And today, he uses his position to engage with the big societal questions of our generation. The Hero Founder series exists for such stories. Not polished success narratives, but honest reflections on what it really takes to build something over many years. If you’re building a company, or thinking about it, you should sign up to this event. 👉 Registration link in the comments.

The good news keep coming re our BAD1 Kick-off on February 18th at The Delta Campus. We now also have a confirmed VC panel with: - Filip Felician Dames from Cherry Ventures - Dr. Gesa Miczaika from Auxxo Female Catalyst Fund - Florian Heinemann from Project A They will join the governing mayor of Berlin Kai Wegner, Daniel Khachab from Choco, Jan Oberhauser from n8n and Marius Meiners from Peec AI to dicuss why they chose Berlin, what they love about the city and how we make it thrive as a tech hub. We are giving away 10 spots on the guest list for the best ideas posted in the comments on how to make Berlin the #1 start-up hub in Europe. Bela Wiertz Bastian Meyer Linda Büscher Leonard Darsow Max Linden UNITE #BAD1

Not only was I born and raised in Berlin. I have a long heritage in this city. My great grandfather was the first pastor in the Hohenzollernkirche. My grandfather started as a bus driver after the war and worked himself up to manage all buses for the Berliner Verkehrsbetriebe (BVG). The narratives of Berlin as a "failed state" hurt - the narratives of Berlin having lost its mojo hurt. There is so much potential in this city. To unleash this potential is so important for the sovereignty of Europe! So it was an insane moment for me yesterday to kick off the campaign "Berlin auf die Eins" (BAD1) with the mayor of our city Kai Wegner and amazing Berlin founders like Jan Oberhauser from n8n, Daniel Khachab from Choco, and Marius Meiners from Peec AI and VC's like Filip Felician Dames, Florian Heinemann and Dr. Gesa Miczaika. Our plan is to now collect YOUR ideas on how to make Berlin the #1 start-up hub in Europe. This is how you can support: 1. Join the movement on www.berlinaufdieeins.de 2. Get some #BAD1 merch 3. Take a selfie with the merch (extra challenge: take selfie in your favorite Späti;) 4. Post selfie on Linkedin and tell us why you are building in Berlin, what you love about Berlin and what needs to change 5. Put your ideas on the website and upvote the best ideas We will turn your ideas into a positioning paper and will brief all political parties with our very concrete 5-10 requests before the next Berlin election. LFG 🚀 Thanks for all of your support and thanks to JUNI and dentsu for launching this initiative with us!

Excited to announce my first venture after wefox: Agent F. This is why we started it: Germany’s most valuable company is an ERP company: SAP. ERP is about to be disrupted by AI more radically than almost any other category. Traditional ERP stands for massive upfront costs, long implementation cycles, company-wide change programs, years of consulting and rigid standards forced onto customers. That model is coming to an end. AI flips the logic. The future is not forcing companies into predefined processes. The future is an AI native ERP that learns a company’s processes and recreates them for scale without massive upfront costs and multi-year roll-outs. You get an immediate customised implementation and pay only for what you actually need. This is why I decided to join forces with Felix Schläger as a founding investor in Agent F. And I’m very happy to share another strong signal: Former SAP CTO Dr.-Ing. Jürgen M. has joined Agent F as our technical advisor. He knows this space and the real limitations of existing ERP systems better than almost anyone. If the most valuable German company is an ERP company, there is no reason why an AI-native company that truly rethinks ERP couldn’t one day become the next one.

We want to make Berlin the #1 tech hub in Europe 🚀 Not to beat other hubs, but to support one of the most important tasks of our generation: European Sovereignity 🇪🇺 We believe Berlin at it's very best is required for that. Read the Handelsblatt article here: https://lnkd.in/dV9HzAiq BAD1

It might be a bit provocative. But it's exactly the ambition we need right now to get things going and roll up our sleeves 🚀 Gründerszene published a piece on our “Berlin auf die Eins” (BAD1) initiative. It captures the "why" behind what we're doing. This isn't just about local pride - it’s about Europe’s position in the global tech race. We are caught between US hypercapitalism and China's surveillance tech, Europe desperately needs a "third way" built on our own values. But political wishlists won't get us there. We need talent, capital, and speed. And Berlin is the ultimate lever to make that happen. We’re done just talking about "potential." We're talking about real substance: • 10–12% of Berlin's GDP comes from our startup ecosystem already. • 150,000+ jobs created. • We are Germany's #1 start up hub. With #BAD1 we are stepping up as a community. No more long demand papers - we want to identify the biggest bottlenecks for the next 12–24 months and actually build the solutions ourselves. Join the movement: www.berlinaufdieeins.de

Marc Andreessen recently said in an interview that he has zero levels of introspection. This attitude explains why the tech industry is in the state it’s in: When the people building our future publicly brag about refusing to look inward, we are all in serious trouble. If you lack self-awareness, your insecurities, your blind spots, and your unhealed wounds don’t just disappear. They get coded into your algorithms and baked into your business models and then become the operating system for all of us. We are not just scaling tech. We are scaling trauma across billions of people. Social Media Platforms were initially built to "connect" us, but were rapidly optimized for outrage, comparison, and addiction. It’s the digital manifestation of an unhealed need for validation. Hyperscalers operate with ruthless competitive practices and a relentless, growth-at-all-costs mentality. It’s the corporate mirror of the fear of scarcity. With AI we seem to be going down this exact same avenue right now, but at massive speed. We are actively training models that will filter reality and make decisions for humanity - funded and guided by many of the same leaders who refuse to examine their inner self. If we don’t course-correct, AI won't be a tool for liberation. It will just be the ultimate, automated projection of its creators' blind spots. When leaders operate strictly from a place of unexamined ego or pain, the technology they build doesn't actually advance society. It holds society hostage to their unresolved issues. We don't just need better engineers or more visionary founders right now. We need leaders who are willing to do the hard, quiet work of looking in the mirror.

“Neukölln is the new Mitte - at least for founders” - Handelsblatt While I don’t think that is quite the case I do believe that with The Delta over the last 12 months we have built the number 1 hub for pre-idea founders and small teams getting ready to scale in Berlin. And that is what Neukölln has always been known for: It’s the worker’s district of Berlin. This is where the best builders now come to build their new ventures and when they raise significant capital to scale they move to shiny Mitte next to the shiny VC offices. If you want to become part of our community apply here: https://lnkd.in/datKQadf

Marc-Alexander Christ has quietly built one of the most impressive payment companies in the world: SumUp. With more than 4 million merchants and a valuation of €8bn, he has already built a generational company and still has huge plans. I can‘t wait to welcome him on campus for our fifth edition of Gründerszene x The Delta on March 19th and have him share the brutal truth of building a company to such scale and what he learned along the way. He will follow amazing founders like Robert Gentz, Niklas Östberg, Lawrence Leuschner and Johannes Reck who have all joined us on stage already to inspire the next generation of founders. Get your spot here: https://luma.com/pwlaatmo

Wow! What an evening! Thank you Johannes Reck for joining our fourth edition of Gründerszene x The Delta and thank you for sharing your learnings. The most touching moment for me was when you mentioned tha the most challenging time for you as the CEO of GetYourGuide when sales plummeted to 0 during Covid was also the most valuable and made you more human. I think you have summed up perfectly why the entrepreneurial journey is the most exciting journey you can embark on (maybe second to becoming a parent;). It pushes exactly the buttons that need to be pushed to become more human and thus a better leader ❤️ You have inspired hundreds of aspiring founders yesterday.

„I only invest in ruthless psychopaths“. That is what Harry Stebbings recently said to Gründerszene. And he is not alone. The entire venture capital world is built on exploiting childhood trauma. The problem with that approach is that when ruthless psychopaths scale their ventures they also scale their own pain - across millions of people. Childhood trauma is often the kickstarter for entrepreneurs. The wound is a strong driver. But I sincerely believe that the path of integration, healing and presence does not eliminate the drive of entrepreneurs, but actually allows them to build bigger things in a more sustainable and impactful way. I believe that the perfomance from presence is greater than the performance from wound. And I encourage all VCs to promote healing across their portfolio - like we do at The Delta - and not be scared that this will destroy your returns. Your children will thank you for contributing to a better world ❤️

What an amazing move by OpenAI to hire 🦄 Peter Steinberger from OpenClaw. What a sad day for Europe. This news crashes into a slowly growing momentum of European Tech and gives us a real reality check. There was absolutely no European alternative for Peter that offered anything that comes even remotely close to the set-up he gets in Silicon Valley. The availability of capital, the speed of deal making, the agility in decision making, the density of talent and the power of the network is unparalleled. Europe needs more bold entrepreneurs taking huge, risky and lightning fast bets - it‘s mainly a cultural issue. Capital and structures will follow. BAD1

I raised more than $1bn and I regret it. I had one simple rule: I took the largest round ever in my sector at that stage and doubled it to set my target. Series A: Largest round to date $15m. I raised $30m. Series B: Largest round to date $120m. I raised $240m. Series C: Largest round to date $300m. I raised $650m. While this method proved the point that you can achieve whatever you want if you put your mind on it, it taught me the painful lesson that setting the right goal is the true art and not the ruthless execution towards the wrong goal. This is one of the many leadership lessons I learned and shared with my friend Feliks Eyser on his podcast Founder Mode (in German only). Link in comments.

I have raised more than a €1.5bn in my career so far, yet this fundraise means the most to me. With The Delta we are building something truly mission-driven and close to my heart: The launchpad for the next wave of generational companies. Louis Buys, Alexandra Buys and the whole team at The Delta believe in the transformational power of entrepreneurship on a societal level and believe that founders doing inner work will not only build more sustainable, but also bigger. We believe the performance from presence is larger than the performance from wound. We have chosen a group of some of the best and mission aligned entrepreneurs we know as investors. I am especially excited to announce that Thomas Hübl, PhD is amongst the investors to support us on our mission to develop a new approach to entrepreneurship! At the core we will focus on choosing the right founders pre-idea, match them with a super experienced serial entrepreneur as a founding investor and support them with everything they need to succeed on their entrepreneurial journey: mentorship from someone who has been there and done that, services and space from The Delta to get a kickstart, a three year inner growth program and some capital. Soon we will announce the first ventures we already founded with this new model (still in stealth). Stay tuned!

There is nothing more „Berlin“ than Berghain and Spätis… So I went to my local Späti in Charlottenburg to take a selfie in my new fresh BAD1 merch. And here is my idea to get Berlin to #1: The kAI card (not sure if mayor Kai Wegner will like the name ;): Five Berlin unicorn founders define criteria. The best talent and developers in the world apply for the kAI card and get instant feedback. With the kAI card they get an IMMEDIATE residence permit and they get welcome housing in Berlin. The best talent doesn‘t need to think twice and can just move here tomorrow. In the age of AI and today‘s war for the best talent we need to be the fastest, the most welcoming and the most ambitious. Imagine the amount of amazing talent we could get to relocate from the US and other places! We need to become the most builder friendly city in the world! Share your idea for BAD1 on www.berlinaufdieeins.de 🚀

In 2025, Berlin’s entire startup ecosystem raised €2.7 billion in VC funding. STATION F in Paris raised €1.5 billion. One single building in Paris raised more than half as much as our entire city last year. 🤯 Station F has turned into a massive powerhouse and has done an amazing job: - It houses 1,000+ startups and 600+ investors under one roof. - Its startups created over 47,000 jobs. - Paris startup valuations have grown 5.3x since 2017, recently helping Paris overtake London in key European ecosystem rankings. Berlin has the talent, the unicorns, and the grit. But right now, we are too fragmented. We have amazing micro-hubs scattered across the city, but we lack a massive, undeniable center of gravity. If we actually want to put Berlin auf die Eins and become Europe's #1 tech hub, we need our own mega-campus. We need Station D. 🇩🇪 - One front door: When a top-tier US fund flies in for 48 hours, they need one obvious place to go with 600+ investors already on-site. - High-impact collisions: Geographic fragmentation kills serendipity. We need our brightest minds from TU Berlin bumping into generative AI operators in the same cafeteria. Consolidating our ecosystem into a 30,000+ sqm unified campus is the ultimate friction-remover. I just submitted the idea to build Station D to the www.berlinaufdieeins.de board #BAD1 If you agree that Berlin needs the physical infrastructure to match our ambition, please click the link in the comments and drop an upvote! ⬆️ Let's build Station D. Who's in?

People say that one of the main differences between Europe and Silicon Valley is that the most succesful entrepreneurs are super accessible to young founders, while in Europe they hide in the ivory towers. You walk into the Airbnb headquarters and bump into Brian Chesky, unicorn CEOs judge hackathons. Giving back is part of the success formula of the Valley. We have been organising our Gründerszene x The Delta for exactly this reason: Make the most successful European founders accessible to the next generation. Whether it was Robert Gentz, Niklas Östberg, Lawrence Leuschner, Johannes Reck or yesterday Marc-Alexander Christ from SumUp: After their fireside they spend hours to talk to young founders! The willingness to give back is there! Let’s create more place to inspire the next wave of entrepreneurs! BAD1 #gruenderszenexthedelta Moritz Seyffarth