Jasper Masemann knows the ‘nitty-gritty’ of the startup world from various perspectives. Since 2015, he is Principal at one of Germany’s most iconic venture capital firms – Holtzbrinck Ventures. Like many founders and VCs before him, Jasper first worked as a consultant for several years, learning the ropes of the ‘classical’ business world at the Boston Consulting Group, before becoming an entrepreneur himself. In 2011, he founded greatcontent.com, a leading text production platform facilitating copywriting in 18 languages for thousands of renown clients worldwide. After four years as CEO of his own company, he switched sides and joined Holtzbrinck Ventures where he helps founders to achieve their companies’ growth potential – something that he had already been doing ‘on the side’ in the past as a business angel and supporter of the ‘Entrepreneurs’ Organization’ in Berlin.
As one of the most successful European venture capital firms, with more than 735m€ under management, Holtzbrinck Ventures has been supporting exceptional founders in building market-leading internet companies for over 16 years. The VC firm is widely known for having identified and invested in some of Germany’s most successful online startups like Zalando, Delivery Hero and FlixBus early on.
Two of Holtzbrinck Ventures’ latest investments include Zeitgold and Lingokids. Especially Zeitgold is a startup that Jasper highlights for its way of doing things and growing successfully. It helps SME’s to save valuable time by taking care of some of their administrative tasks like accounting and payroll management. Lingokids is an EdTech startup developing language learning services for early childhood. It is also backed by well-known US Venture Capital firm ‘500 Startups’ and has created some buzz lately through, among others, a new distribution agreement with educational publisher Oxford University Press, the largest university press in the world.
In this episode, Jasper talks about his work as a VC, shares great tips for founders that are seeking funding, explains why Zeitgold as one of Holtzbrinck’s latest investments is an exciting role model for other startups and tells where he sees the current development of the European startup scene heading towards to.
