Building Europe’s Investment Rails with Martin Kassing, Founder & CEO @ Upvest

Writing Unicorns is sponsored by Recap. Recap helps founders grow efficiently, with non-diluted funding that keeps you in control of your company. If your company is generating over £1m in revenue, you can skip months of fundraising and access a flexible, long-term credit line through Recap's platform. But Recap isn't just about access to capital, it's about capital clarity. Their AI agent brings all your financial dates together, gradually helping you understand performance, spot trends early, and make informed, confident decisions about your next mood. Whether you're funding growth, bridging profitability, or simply building a stronger financial foundation. Recap helps you stay one step ahead, without giving away a single share. Learn more at re-cap.com. Hello, welcome to another episode of Writing Unicorns. Today, we're delighted to have Martin from Upvest. So it's great to have you on Martin, and we can't wait to learn more about your journey to launching the business and how it's all going. Maybe you could start by introducing the business and what you did prior to launching the company. Yeah, thanks for the invite, first of all, great to be here in this podcast. Martin, the founder and actually also the CEO of Upvest. So we offer investment infrastructure to most digital banks and brokers and wealth managers in Europe. And they offer with our API, ETF, stocks, mutual funds, and other assets to the end users. And this next generation investment infrastructure enables them to have the best user experience in the first place. And secondly, also the lowest costs in the industry. I started the business now seven and a half years ago. It's my second venture, actually. My second fintech, but also the most successful so far. And, you know, before and I have worked in tech and actually in finance, that was quite natural for me to build another fintech over the last year or so. It's an amazing background. And Martin, you're a rock internet and did a stint in P as well. So tell us why it made sense for you to make the jump to being a founder and whether that was always the plan. You know, the fun thing is that sometimes I have to feel you don't really have a choice about that. I think if you're a successful entrepreneur, you really have to drive to succeed and to build something from the ground up, even if the likelihood is quite small. And I worked in private equity as you said, after my university or five years and had to deal with many very successful founders. And I got like super motivated to deal with them, to actually engage with them. And I always wanted to be on the other side. I didn't want to be just the investor because when you invest your typically crunch numbers, you do the power points and try to be quite smart. But actually, the hard work is really on the other side. So really getting a team behind you, rallying in one direction, building great products. And so on. And, you know, after I left the private equity fund, I started my first business. It was actually a simple mobile booking platform for hairdresses, where I realized, you know, the whole thing is not necessarily something I get excited about the next 10 years, but it was a good start with. And then I actually, the second business was in a payment space with Sobko and the third one is where it was obvious. But I think, you know, it's a mix of some of the things that you know. So I understood actually software businesses and also finance, but also the desire just to be very successful. So if you really look at a lot of founders in the space, I don't think that they started with this big vision from day one, I think they actually started with a drive to succeed. And then they did something very practical and then the whole thing actually evolved over time. And I always keep saying, you know, it starts with ambition, but I didn't know it gets to a mission later now. Yeah, I love that. And the drive to succeed. I mean, that's something we've practically studied on this podcast and everyone has different drivers. But have you ever been able to identify why you're say driven? It's a psychological question. It's hard. You know, it was always like that. It was even like in my childhood, I was always quite competitive in sports. No, I always wanted to win an basketball or to play it as a professionally basketball. And I don't know where it's really coming from, but I actually get bored when there is no challenge. So I keep saying that I don't really have a choice somehow. Because even if I would let's say, you know, retire and become, you know, advisor to office or just invest, I'm pretty sure I would probably end up at the same situation where I would be somehow stressed and try to push the boundaries. So I think it's just something you have inside you or not. And you know, my wife friends is the complete flip side. She's like super calm and relaxed and it's like perfect for our relationship. But for her, she also always asking me, do you actually like what you're doing? Like on a monthly and quarterly basis? And I'm like, yeah, I love it, I love it. But you seem to be so stressed and it never ends. I think, yeah, I still like that shit. So it's kind of probably my DNA and I cannot tell you where it's coming from, to be honest. Yeah. No, and with without vest, you talk about not having a choice. And is that because specifically without vest, maybe it's the same for other companies that you've started or maybe it's different. But was it the thing that made you not have a choice? Was that that the pull from the idea was so strong? Or just like the desire to start something was so strong? Because like something pulls you away. Something is the catalyst to make you leave the job and start the company. Yeah. I think it starts with the desire to be really appreciated and successful entrepreneur in the first place. So you have to just very romantic point of view that you started business. You go into certain direction. You really people around you and build a product. And then when you dig a bit deeper into your market, you realize how big the problem is. But you know, when we started office, we didn't know how big that problem honestly is. So it was what would be wrong to say, you know, we had this mission from they want and we had also this ambition from they want. So I always wanted to be somehow independent in the way how I operate and build something new and from scratch. And I just felt you know working in a nine to five job or in a company that's not necessarily possible. Yeah. So yeah, that's probably the reason why I started the second and third business. Yeah. And obviously before upvests, you had shop code, which was acquired by Klaner. So can you tell us a little bit about that journey and what was it like to get your first exit? Yeah, it was a completely different story because back in the days, when I worked at the private equity fund, I had a colleague who later then started shopgo as the CEO of the business. And he asked me to join and co-found the business the later. And for me, it was a great opportunity to just, you know, start the business in the first place and to learn a lot. And we started in in Germany as a one click checkout solution in the browser and then moved to California, ready to quickly half year later. And it was a wild roller coaster. Yeah. So I learned so many things. So first of all, the biggest learning there, our product market fit is so hard to really find real product market fit that actually clients use the product regularly that you have also somehow these margins and the decent market behind that. And we never really achieved that. It actually always has been more a B2B solution. That's why I was Klaner boarded at the end of the day. But we started as a B2C solution. And I think it was for me a dream that came true that I could, you know, move from Germany to California back then. And it was also, I think, the biggest learning that I could then utilize in starting up this later. So really focusing on the right product and right market. And it's so terribly hard. And I think every founder that starts at the first or second time, they know how it is actually. And Martin, what did the, I mean, you mentioned that as a key learning. But what are the, what are the other key learnings from being a repeat founder that you've been able to action with with upvast? You know, I have to feeling that the challenges are always kind of the same, but arenas get bigger. So still to the state, I think the most challenging topics are around people. To refining the right people, grow them, keep them engaged. And on the flip side, also separating from people is still emotionally quite dragging. So I still think that's for me, probably me personally, but also many founders quite quite a challenge. So really nailing the people game, finding the right people, and growing them. And it's probably a rest before success. And we're actually focused on this quite early on. There's still a couple of other learnings, of course. But yet, you know, what is more interesting for you and what kind of area I should dig in. Yeah. Tell us more about the hiring side. Because I think it changes through a company's journey. And a lot of our listeners will be early stage founders or thinking about starting something at some point and will wonder out what their best hiring strategy should be. And we've actually had different perspectives on the on the podcast. But you have the view you should hire for skills. People who've kind of proven they've they they will be able to execute on what you need them to do or that they've done that historically. Or just people with a great attitude who are going to roll up their sleeves, they're going to hustle. And particularly in those those early days, what do you focus on when your picking it high? So it's quite important that you hire people that you like. Because you have to sit with them in the same office for 16, 20 hours, probably even on weekends. And I think at the beginning, it's probably more important that you have kind of an overlap in behaviors and ambition. Because if you, for instance, then succeed and you are successful business and one person actually doesn't have the ambition to make this big. And you have a big ambition and you always have to drag that person to to to next levels. So I would actually say that the soft skills and behavior are quite pivotal for the success, especially for the first 10 employees because they need to somehow multiply you as a as a founder. And you should be quite explicit explicit about your own personally, what you want. So writing down some core values, having an open conversation with these people about some challenges in their life and so on, maybe going to festival. I mean, a lot of ways how you understand someone better. I would nonetheless say it helps if you have someone that is skilled, yeah, because you don't want to take too much time to do stuff, especially on an engineering side that you don't actually start learning code when you build a business. Or if you're in a son domain that helps, if they have seen it domain, because then it can help you finding product market fit faster. Yeah, and what have you found is the best way to attract that talent. Is it through A players attracting more A players or are there actual channels where you've been successful and just consistently finding great people? At the beginning, you don't have a brand, so you are the brand as a founder and you meet the different potential candidates at events. You speak with them, you try to engage them with them. So it's quite a salesy job I have to feeling. So you really have to speak to so many. And then you feel if you connect, but typically the people that you attract at the beginning are very different than the people that you attract friends right now. So right now, we have 220 employees with a brand. So it's much easier to attract top talent than it was at the early days. So they're really, you had to promise a lot as well as a founder. Hey, this will be big. You will always successful. You will get rich whatever you do. Do so many different things. But it's ultimately, it's your responsibility if you start a business to find the right people and to convince them. And they honestly also come for you and they probably also leave because of you at a certain point of time. So you have to be excellent, I think, in convincing people. What's the limit on how how do you gauge how big to paint this picture when attracting talent like to make it not border on ridiculous? I actually think of those people that started business early on and joined early startups. They are all a bit crazy. So when I look back and look at my old decks and what I have promised there to investors and potential candidates, yeah, maybe I was a little bit, you know, overshooting too. But the thing is, you know, that people that also joined, they had the same DNA somehow. So it was not like a negative thing overall, you know, that there'd be actually just living in the fluffy and maybe unrealistic world somehow. So it was, it was kind of an unsported rule that, you know, we are super ambitious and maybe the whole thing might not be as big, but at least let's try, you know. And are you still involved in the hiring process? And if not, how many employees did you have once you started to kind of hand it over to someone else? I'm still involved in hiring. So the entire exec team actually hired myself. So we don't work with recruiters. That's one of the strategies I learned over the years to be the most successful. So you see me still on LinkedIn quite often approaching even engineers. And I try to help the business much as I can because I have a brand on LinkedIn and maybe also brand over all the FinTech industry. And there's a high conversion likelihood when I reach out to someone just to speak. So that's why I'm still doing this. And I think it still helps also a lot if I have a first chat, especially with talent that is exceptional. So I'm still pretty much involved in the whole thing. And we have now 220 employees. I probably have hired myself, I don't know, 50. Of course, we had also some turn over over the years, you know, our company exists in seven and a half, but something that I'm personally quite proud of and probably will also continue doing this, I hired the entire exec team myself. And most of them just by reaching out on LinkedIn. What's your favorite question to ask someone in an interview? Oh, that is a tough question. I mean, typically I asked them, how do they picture the future? Because then I get an understanding, you know, where it would like to be in the future. And then I can see if that fits with our strategy. I typically asked them, where are they really terrible at? That's always like a good insight for me. I don't know, it's more like a, you know, it's more like an interactive dialogue I have to feeling. And based on, you know, the feelings on some of the other answers, I need to get some good energy out of this. So typically when I have my first interview, if it's like half an hour, one hour and have a really positive feeling and get more energized, then this has been a good interview. Now, how do you get comfortable that an employee is going to be the right fit? Because you can't afford to be 100% sure, because you'd be too much of a perfectionist and you'd never hire anyone. But equally, the barn needs to be super high. And you need to be hiring people. You have a high degree of certainty. We'll work out. We'll perform. We'll be a cultural fair. How do you get comfortable with that after, you know, one interview, one meeting, two meetings? I don't. So that's why we have a certain process that other people, other stakeholders within the company also speak with those. We believe a lot in challenges. So that actually go through a certain real life challenge and have to answer this in front of many or sometimes even just a couple of people. I do reference as always. I try to be as tough as possible in the final challenges to convince myself. This is the person that also really fits in here very well. And I mean, that might be quite different to other companies, but the final challenges are really with six, seven people. They all have a hell yes vote. So if they all give a hell yes, then we hire a candidate. If there's one person in the room that says no, we don't hire a person, we don't hire that person. You have to make sure that everyone is behind. Because even if I'm super convinced about a person and a person starts, but nobody really likes that person. I think it's not not smart enough. There's no chance that this person will be successful. So it's quite important that you have to buy in from from the others in the team as well. And what does that look like from a funnel perspective? If you've got 10 candidates coming to your panel of seven interviews, how many would drop out? So the final challenge is typically 50, 50, so 50% actually get an offer and 50% don't. And typically for leadership role, because I'm doing most of the sourcing also myself. So I can filter quite a lot up front. I would say I speak with 10. So overall from 10, one gets an offer. And do you, I mean, it's interesting hearing, hearing you talk, because it seems like you enjoy the sales part of the job, the outbound on LinkedIn. I'm sure there's a lot of outbound to potential customers, or certainly was in the early days. How to what degree do you consider your job a glorified SDR? I'm a salesperson. My job is to to 75% sales. So getting clients excited, going into meetings, speaking with investors, getting them excited. There's still a lot of stuff that I have to translate the vision into some actionable stuff, which is kind of also sales after feeling, hiring is pretty pivotal. Even if you have one or ones, you know, someone has a bad day or a bad quarter. You still have to motivate them somehow. So I kind of have to feeling that my, my day to day job was quite salesy, you know, for someone like you, and there are lots of founders who probably answered that the same. How do you then motivate yourself for the deep work where, you know, there's actually just long project-based strategic work to do where you're not able to get that sort of dopamine or whatever you get from the thrill of a close. I had to learn how I'll be, how I'm a little more consistent in my approach, and what helps is that you are quite detailed in your calendar management. So I try to, for instance, always have some some fun times during a day, either can be sports or can be something that really enjoy. For instance, I don't know, doing sales or actually meeting certain exciting people or working on a nice strategy part, but it's quite important that you have not your full day blocked with one-on-ones and that you don't have too many switches in context. But overall, I think, for me, at least it has helped that I am quite explicit in what needs to be in a calendar on what kind of day and how I organize this. And I feel quite happy with this right now, how it is set up. And it's really a mix of my private life and the business. So there is no separation of my calendar between business and private life is all one thing. So I wake up at a certain point of time, and then I really think how the whole day already will actually happen. And even on the weekends, I know already what I'm doing. It sounds maybe a bit boring, but for some reason it gives me some confidence and even joy because then I know, okay, this is not a good meeting, but I know in two hours I have a good meeting or next day will be better than this day. So there's always some hope. And what's the good meetings of bad meetings? We found that there are more and more bad meetings as the company scales, because I feel like the early days of companies sound really exciting to you, where there are lots of kind of quick wins. But then there's more compliance, there are more people and personnel and all issues, which are probably bad meetings. How has that transition been? I actually think that the level of bad meetings has even decreased because we are so successful. I think the most important as a business is to be successful. Because it feels like most of the problems. You get better talent, you get good investors, you have good client interactions, you make money. So all of these things that can be exciting. So you still have these challenging one-on-ones and people topics, and you'll probably always have them. Even your private life sometimes you have these challenging conversations. So I still have to get my head around. It's like what I've started with at the beginning of this podcast. I also like somehow the pain. Even if I have to admit it's annoying, and even if it feels to somehow, at the outside, it's repetitive and the things that actually happen. I still have to say that I'm also admiring somehow the pain, also on the one-on-one side. So I don't complain about it anymore. I think at the beginning, as a founder, I was complaining about the stuff a lot. Hey, people are up to par, we have to be faster, we have to raise more capital, whatever. But at the end of the day, I can completely control this, you know, because I'm the master of my own destiny sort of sale. Is there anyone that you worked with maybe when you were in PE or somewhere elsewhere that really helped you like hone your skills, especially around sales? Is there anyone that you really crud it with kind of taking you under their wing and giving you a real skill set? Yeah, totally. I mean, the partners of the private equity fund, they trained me quite hard. I would say, so I had to present a lot to companies that want to require. I had to convince a lot of banks to give us no loans. We did like leverage buyouts back in the days. I also had to hire some people, but I think the good thing about private equity, I think it's one of the best schools, honestly, to start a business of being a good salesperson, because you're not just advising business, you also have to buy those business and you have to grow those businesses. So you cannot hide. And you have to pretty precise to convince the founder somewhere in Germany to sell the business to you as a private equity fund. And I mean, I was super young. I was like 24/25. Just imagine standing in front of one of these engineering companies in Germany and you try to convince the founder to sell the business to you. So it helped me help me a lot to read the room, I would say, and to be very structured and to really probably also break down everything into action. And private equity always have to break down everything into some numbers and to a paper and ultimately to take a decision to invest. So I personally think that private equity is an excellent school and the partners help me also a lot to grow there. AI is changing the game of business. Will you be on the winning team? I'm Jordan Wilson, the host of the Everyday AI podcast in your coach to help you learn the exes and o's of AI. Artificial intelligence isn't just a new player in the game, it's a new sport altogether. So if you don't quickly put AI into play, your competitors will run up the score. I've spent my whole life building winning teams from coaching basketball to working with big players like Nike and Jordan brand. My next move, helping you win with Everyday AI. Listen wherever you get your podcast or on everydayaipodcast.com. Let's tap into AI together and put points on the board. And if we rewind to the early days of upvests, pre-product market fit, pre-building a team that was, you know, handling a lot of the work you were doing, the sort of grump work, like what were the hardest points? Whether any hard points that you really had to dig deep to get through? When you start your company, you underestimate how difficult it is because you have to do pretty much everything from hiring people, finding a red product, getting the first investors excited. It takes much longer than you think until you have something that's solid and that you can scale with. And at the beginning we had co-founder issues, I think pretty classical. You typically hire people that you think are very skilled, but not maybe the perfect fit for behavior. So I learned it the hard way that should be the other way around. Really finding something that is a great product for certain clients in a great market, it's quite hard because markets are quite competitive. If you have to start from scratch, you typically, when you engage with clients, if it's B2C or B2B, it takes many iterations until they say, "Now I want this." And for us, it took actually many, many years also with different products and different markets that we target it. It took us actually three years to find what we're doing right now. So there was not an easy time and because you lived in permanent uncertainty and you always had to promise your employees it's getting better. It's getting better and you always had to be the strong one, so to say for your employees, you had to convince investors. So it takes quite some persistence and also strength. And then, you know, at a certain point of time you suddenly find this very strong product market fit in a way that all these clients, they rush and they push you to produce the product as fast as possible. And that's an amazing feeling then. And then the whole thing gets a little bit easier because you don't have this uncertainty and it's more about how quickly can you build that product, how quickly can you scale, how capital efficient can you raise capital and so on. But that's much, much easier than the early days I have to feeling. And I mean, also privately, I had so many girlfriends or others leave because I was such a disaster in the early days of finding product market fit. You know, it's such an unstable, unstable life somehow. I don't admire any founder to go through this. And I meet a lot of founders and I also invest in some business here in Berlin and also outside of Berlin. And the one thing that actually comes to me is I was like, is it really that hard? And does it have to be that hard? And I always keep telling them, yes, it is that hard and it also will take longer. But there will be the point where you will find the product market fit, the good team and the capital, at least in most cases, for those that actually survive for many years, that is also worth it. You mentioned the multiple products, multiple markets before you found what you're doing now. What were the pre pivot ideas? How different were they? So the idea was back in the days to use the blockchain to make investing more accessible, more affordable. So we thought we'd put real-world assets on the blockchain, like for real estate, and distribute them via blockchain network and do the whole custody and the whole fee management. And it actually also worked. We had like 10 clients. We had a client called Explorer. They used our infrastructure to distribute real estate tokens. We had even like a million AR. But then we realized that the blockchain was more like a back then a feature. It was far more complicated to use the blockchain to scale. And then we realized, do we really need the blockchain? Or should we rather use the cloud and build like a core banking system from scratch, which cost us then 100 million to invest and also two years of development? But it was the right move. Because it was such a huge market and the early conversations with clients were pretty clear that they needed this. So we actually thought that blockchain is more powerful in the early days, but still the mission was the same. Really using infrastructure to make investing more accessible and more affordable. And you touched on it a little bit earlier, but you suddenly started to feel pooled into the market from those conversations with clients. Was there like a big win moment where you suddenly got that logo client that sort of really validated you guys? And did you actually get to enjoy that moment? Because I imagine it was probably quite a front deck when you realize, oh, we've got to build all these things and we've got deadlines and everything. So yeah, what was the sort of big inflection point and did you get to enjoy it? There were a couple of inflection points. So first of all raising the series B without having a live product back in the days with the best summer ventures or certainly highlights that are really believed in in our vision. And we had of course a strong pipeline of clients or we also signed some of them already. That gave us quite some confidence to even grow faster and better into the market. Our second client was Revolut, quite a big name, I would say, and exciting. If your second client is one of the, back then it was also like a big FinTech, but now it's one of the biggest FinTechs in the world. So we could really build a really great product for one of the most ambitious clients out there. And it helped us also build the right product and to get the right feedback. At the beginning, when you do B2B, it's all about getting the right feedback from the right clients. Yeah, and then the whole thing actually grew. So we have one raising, we have one and 26 banks. So right now, it's really like a repeatable sales motion for FinTechs, but all traditional banks and wealth managers. I really enjoyed also the series C end of last year. So really raising a hundred million in a ready-to-shot amount of time that also gave me quite some excitement. And you just touched on, you know, Revolut, you know, it was big, but it's now massive, and it's sort of really held up as opposed to child for FinTech and Europe. When you were thinking about sort of customers, were you thinking about, you know, high growth sort of new era FinTechs, or were you also thinking about the old institutional finance world? And did you have to have a different sales approach when talking to these kind of different customer profiles? Yeah, the thing is when you build infrastructure, the most important thing is to survive. And you don't have the time, or you cannot actually live with the sales and integration cycles of many years. So we knew we have to start the whole journey with FinTechs, and we had the conscious decision back in the days to start with larger FinTechs that, you know, are well-capitalized, have users, have a clear need for investment products, and took the strategic decision to not go for long-tailed clients. So smaller FinTechs that just, you know, explore the market, we didn't want to take the product market fit risk for these clients. We actually want to make sure if we integrate, even if it takes a bit longer for larger FinTechs, there is a high likelihood that there will be some adoption. Because you need the adoption also to raise a more capital and to build like a really powerful platform that is reliable and scalable. And, you know, these FinTechs that we have won, so actually the largest FinTechs in Europe, they helped us also to reach now a certain scale, and this scale is now, we call enterprise ready. So larger banks, larger wealth managers, private banks, they are now also partially working with us and engaging with us because they say, okay, it's not just, you know, for FinTechs, it's also helping us to have better user experiences, lower costs, and helps help us to scale internationally. Did you ever have investors sort of questioning whether, whether it might build it themselves or startups working with other startups can be risky because they're both, they're both trying to, you know, keep the house upright and so it is hard to get attention. What was some of the pushbacks that maybe you heard and then ultimately proved wrong? So I wouldn't say that revenue is a startup anymore. They have certainly like a software DNA, and a startup DNA, but they are so sizable in terms of users, in terms of revenue profits and so on. So of course, they also have their compliance and risk teams, like larger banks. I mean, they're still much faster in decision making and really in producing products, but overall, they're pretty sizable technology company, you could even say. And interesting time was actually 2022. We raised the series B, the complete FinTech market collapsed back then. Maybe you can remember the time when nobody wanted to invest in FinTechs, US investors were pretty much giving really, really negative news into the market that the whole thing is collapsing, FinTech is dead, and it turned out differently. So over the last two years, the big players, the prime FinTechs are far more successful than they thought back in the days. So we had conversations even with our board. Should we really just do revenue? Should we really do, you know, end 26 some other names because they're too risky. And I mean, for us, it was clear that it would be very successful for many reasons because they're really still to this day nailed to distribution game. They have lower costs, but back then there was even there were some discussions about going to the enterprise market a bit too early. And it's good that we actually focus first on FinTechs, and really, I would say dominate this market in Europe right now and really delight these clients, because they have helped us to grow to certain levels that are now, you know, reasonable even for, for, you know, traditional enterprise banks and so on. That was certainly a good, good learning. So sometimes you have to really stick to your vision even across many years and cycles and across your fingers that it pays off. And you've mentioned fundraising, but you raised around 200 million dollars at this point. You also mentioned that this latest round was actually quite quick, but I wonder, can you share any of the more challenging moments or the surprise moments that you weren't perhaps expecting? Yeah, in the early years, it was not easy to raise capital. The seed round was easy, of course, because it's only based on the PowerPoint presentation and the team, but then then you have to build the product and you have to show some numbers. So it took us quite some iterations together with finding a product market fit to get the capital. And there were so many moments where we were close to being dead. So did you find, so for Series A, did you find you needed the kind of millionaire or a metric or were you able to raise well before that? Yeah, we had actually the million ARR, but we had it in the product market that was not really attractive, like the whole blockchain kind of story. So ultimately didn't help us that much, but it helped that we had some revenues and we had a vision to go to the bigger market, even back then in the Series A. And some of the investors really helped us to think bigger. So early, but back in the days, the shared their vision with us and gave us the confidence going into the bigger market, even if it takes another year or two years to build, it's still so meaningful and so needed in the overall market. But at the beginning, the fundraising, the very first race, if you are telling the team, and the good pitch is actually typically quite easy after feeling, but then the follow-up race, the seed, the pre-Series A, the Series A extension, all these kind of things, they get a little bit more challenging because then you really have to make sure that the whole thing is real and you actually can really grow to hundreds of millions of revenue. And then it became easy once for Series B, did you have revenues, what was that process like? I wouldn't say it's easy, it's still, it's easier for sure because you can create a deck that is not just purely based on vision, but also on some numbers, on client references, on a good team. So you have quite some substance, maybe not as much substance as most of the investors would like to see at that stage. It's still, there's still a lot of vision in it, but ultimately it could help, it would help a lot. And we always had a different approach in fundraising and many companies. So for us, it's a continuous process. We knew best of the adventures already years ahead of time. So we spoke with them actually three years before we raised the Series B and we could convince them by regular update meetings that we have reached certain milestones, we got the license, we signed certain clients, they had a good comparison to the US market where there was a provider that was quite successful there. And then when we started the fundraising, they actually flew over to Berlin and we could sign the terms you'd like instantly that evening, even now. So I think it's important when you, when you have to raise a lot of capital infrastructure, you always have to raise a lot, unfortunately, not right now anymore, but we had to in the last seven years, it's important that you have like a continuous dialogue with your investors and that you are quite honest and you define certain milestones along the way. So once you raise, you don't have to start from scratch, you pretty much just get them in, do like a management pitch, create a deck, a data room, and then typically it takes one to two weeks until you have a term sheet, unless you don't have the substance. Yeah, and is your long-term plan to IPO? And if you were to IPO, where do you think you might do that? I think it'll longer be pretty cool if people can invest in in in our investor, if you're in non-public, public stocks. We have to see what what's best for the business. So I would love to do an IPO and let's see what we do with it. I mean, there's the whole discussion should you do it in London and Frankfurt in New York. I think it's too early to debate about this right now for us, still long way there. It might be also helpful or makes even more sense at a certain point of time to partner with other businesses in the industry. We don't know. I think it's still too far away to think about this. Well, we'll watch the space. So Martin, I think we're there to move on to our final two questions. So one question we ask all of our guests is if they've seen an earlier stage company that they think is a future unicorn. Yeah, if you could name a business that's you think got a lot of potential, who would they be? I think it'll be obvious to be honest, we're not unique on yet, but I'm pretty convinced that we will be the next one to two years. Okay. Any others? Do you do any angel investing? I do invest in some businesses. So invest in Terra one. It's a business where they do the energy storage Germany with batteries and also the trading part with it. I think it takes more time for them to be a unicorn though. I invested in flanks, which is an API for wealth managers to get all the data out of the securities accounts, but also I think too far away. It's not that easy anymore to spot the next unicorn I have to feeling. So I can only share with you that I'm quite convinced that at first we'll probably go on that territory sooner. I fair enough. And if you were to have dinner with any three people, who would they be? My three best friends 100%. So you know I have a kid I have a wife and I'm an entrepreneur so I'm quite busy. The best time I typically have when I can meet my best friends and you know we have a good night out. Do you get to do it often or is it a rare event nowadays? It's very rare honestly. Really having a good night out is happening once per quarter and I tried to be - I tried to actually create special moments. So in Q1 I organized my birthday party, my 40th birthday with my best friend and we did like a party in Berlin where 700 people actually came and we were dancing and raving like through the night. That was pretty special for me. And you know in Q2 I'm organizing a bachelor's party in Slovenia for one of my best friends. So I'm also really looking forward to that. But you know I actually really appreciate spending time with them because I meet every day, I meet exciting business people, entrepreneurs, investors. So the spare time I rather would like to spend more with my closer circle. Yeah I've had loads of good things about Slovenia. I've actually never been. I had to review the Slovenia. Yeah it's great. Yeah I was there recently. I was there about three months ago in Ljubljana. Oh that's so weird. I had a hunch that you had for some reason. But yeah I've heard lots of good things. Yeah it's amazing. That's awesome. I'm kind of I'm in the same boat at the moment. Like all my friends are having kids. I've got eight months old. So we've all we're all in the same period of our life. Like net can't get anyone together. So I've booked all my friends in for like the 22nd of November. And it's like you have to put like a year in advance always now to get everyone together. But we're going to do something big. So yeah. You just have to book it. You know book it and then ask later. Yeah. Yeah. And you have like these conversations that never happen. So my experience is there. It's just booked something really exciting. Even if you spend the money then they will come. Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Well Martin thank you so much. It's been really great to meet you and learn more about the upvast journey and your your own experience of going through from you know interning rock it into that and doing P and then launching your first couple of companies and now building the next unicorn. It's very very exciting. And there's lots of tangible insights and knowledge that is going to be great for people listening to take away. So thank you so much for doing it. Yeah. Thank you for for letting me share my my thoughts and insights. That's been great. Thanks. Thanks Martin. That's it for this week. Thanks very much for listening. To stay up to date with the latest episodes please follow or subscribe on your favorite podcast platform. We also have a newsletter called Reading Unicorns which is another great way to get every episode direct to your inbox. Please tell your friends about it and engage with us on social media and we'll see you on the next episode. 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