From 2022 I built a group in the European wealth and asset management software market as its CEO. Ten acquisitions across Germany, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Slovakia and Georgia. Seven brands brought together onto one platform. By the end, 300 people in ten offices across five countries.
Teams in five countries did that work. My role was to set the direction, negotiate the acquisitions and own the integration.
In December 2023 Pollen Street Capital came in — a British investor specialising in financial services. What they bought was a platform under construction, not a finished result. The build continued afterwards.
Before any of it came a decision almost no one wanted to follow: not simply to buy companies, but to approach more than a hundred of them, most of them competitors, and offer to build something together that none of us could build alone. No one in that market had tried it before.
At my first company I gave away too many voting shares to investors. They then blocked every entrepreneurial decision in order to protect their dividend. The real mistake was not handing over the shares. It was failing to be direct with them afterwards. It cost ten years.
That is why I take minority stakes and leave founders in control. Not out of politeness. Out of experience.