« Germany's Odersun Raises $90M for Factory | Main | Norwegian Fund Invests in US-based Efficient Motor Team »
February 04, 2008
Interview: Oliver Jung Business Angel
In a QandA with the alarm:clock euro below, Oliver Jung talks about some of his successful investments, learning from failures, and his criteria for investment.
Oliver Jung is an entrepreneur turned full-time investor and business angel. He started to invest in startups after leaving Deutsche Börse, which had acquired in 2001 his 800-employee Internet and eCommerce consulting company. It had been generating €100M in annual sales at the time of the acquisition.
Since 2003, Jung has invested in more than 50 ventures. In a QandA with the alarm:clock euro below, Jung talks about some of his successful investments, learning from failures, and his criteria for investment.
His first investment was Xing, the now publicly-traded and acquisitive business social network. Jung was one of its initial investors.
Next was Getmobile, a later state investment at a valuation of €10M. His investment "generated 6 times money", Jung said, following a reverse IPO in 2005 in London.
Another early investment was StudiVZ, the youth oriented social networking site, which was acquired in 2007 for a rumored €86M.
Today, Jung said that he has a large number of investments where he is a co-investor and where "networking for the portfolio company" is his role, adding that it is a smaller number where he is actively involved. At any time he is working very closely and actively with five startups, he said.
Q. Most of your investment have been in Germany. Will that continue?
A. I like Poland – it's a good sized economy with 50 to 60 million population. Internet usage is growing. One investments we did there is epuls.pl. But in general I am very active and Germany and will be active in Germany in future.
Q. You have a lot of Internet investments. Is it not risky to have such a concentration of holdings?
A. I am not that into diversification or portfolio management theory. My investments range in size from €10K up to €1M. 50% of all my investments outside the Internet market have failed. So I learned the hard way only to invest where I know my space very well.
Q. What did you learn from the experience of failure - is it possible to turn a startup around?
A. If you have a great team and the idea ends up being a bad one - and the team can change the business scope - it is sometimes possible to turn a startup around. Paypal is such a story, they changed their business scope several times.
If the teams ends up not being great, it is not possible in my opinion. In many cases, I would prefer to
invest in a fresh startup than in a turn-around one, even if the valuation seems to be cheap.
Q. Other recent investments include brands4friends, apomio, adconion, flux.com and lokalisten, all of which we've covered in these pages. You also have a stake in Nanosolar. What is your criteria for an investment?
A. Four things: 1) Does the service solve a problem – make sense? 2) is it a great team ? 3) is there a business model ? 4) does the team know how to generate reach ?
Q. Any dealbreakers?
A. If the service doesn't make any sense to their potential customers.
--
Posted on February 4, 2008 09:05 AM | Posted to Being European | Permalink
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.thealarmclock.com/mt/mt-tb.cgi/6763
