#342 Carsten Puschmann, Startup Investor & Host des Business Punk Podcasts: How to hack

·40 min·3 clips

Why does Germany save failing department stores while letting tech startups like Lilium go bankrupt?

1. New Work Chat host Gabriel interviews Carsten Puschmann, a startup investor and host of the Business Punk Podcast, on Germany's startup ecosystem and AI investment. 2. Carsten runs an early-stage startup portfolio alongside a family office strategy that combines later-stage US tech investments in AI, robotics, and defense tech with German early-stage startups. 3. The episode's core argument is that Germany has the talent and industrial base to lead in AI applications, but is held back by capital allocation habits and a collective mindset that places the country's best days in the past. 4. Carsten started his career as a teenager by founding a school newspaper that grew into Germany's largest, which shaped his identity as an entrepreneur and quick enthusiast for new ideas. 5. He describes Germany's startup situation as 'better than we see ourselves,' citing 700 AI startups in Munich and German engineers leading AI work at Google and ChatGPT. 6. His main diagnosis is a capital problem: 30 billion euros of venture capital exists in Germany, but family offices predominantly invest in real estate, art, and oldtimers rather than startups, which he is working to change as a bridge between these capital pools and innovation investment. 7. He criticizes the pattern of German state and private capital saving Galeria Kaufhof for a third time while allowing electric aviation startup Lilium to enter insolvency, calling it a visible symptom of risk aversion over innovation. 8. Carsten's evaluation method for founders starts by ignoring pitch decks; instead he observes how founders write to him, then meets them on video, then assesses whether he believes they can become relevant in their industry. 9. He describes a 'traffic light' system — green, yellow, or red — that he applies as a gut feeling, but only proceeds when that gut feeling is confirmed by analytics. 10. His credo is 'it's all about people': a very good founder can make an average business model big, but an average founder cannot make even the best business model succeed. 11. As a concrete example, he describes investing in Saint Cez, a B2B pantyhose startup, against all intuition, entirely because of the founder's quality — even though it had nothing to do with his AI and robotics focus. 12. V-Greens is his main portfolio showcase: four founders with scientific backgrounds met at Bits & Pretzels, showed Carsten a self-built vertical farm in a Witten garage growing strawberries with Amazon sensors, and have since attracted former ThyssenKrupp CEO Guido Kerkhoff, McKinsey partner Nico Mohr, and a 500 million euro execution fund for farm construction. 13. TUM AI Professor Knoll invested personally as an angel in V-Greens and called the AI development 'outstanding,' which Carsten interprets as validation that top German academic talent endorses the venture. 14. Carsten is currently building an AI Exposure Fund of 10-12 startups including XAI and OpenAI, with the thesis that these companies will match the combined market cap of the US 'big four' within one to two years. 15. He predicts that XAI (Elon Musk) and OpenAI (Sam Altman) will be the winner-takes-all outcome in LLMs globally, and explicitly rules out a viable German LLM at that level — but sees strong opportunity in European industrial LLM applications. 16. A Stanford professor told him that children no longer need to learn calculation because AI handles it — which Carsten uses as a marker of where AI education is heading, drawing a parallel to how the pocket calculator changed math instruction. 17. He describes AI already replacing the analytical work that previously took his digital agency five or six people weeks to complete, now done in three to four minutes. 18. The episode is conversational and informal, with Gabriel asking setup questions and Carsten driving with detailed anecdotes; the tone is optimistic but grounded in specific data points and investments. 19. German startup founders, family office investors, and anyone tracking European AI investment strategy would find the most direct value in this episode. 20. Listeners expecting deep technical AI analysis or detailed financial structuring of the investment vehicles would find the coverage more thematic than granular.

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