September 22, 2023
“As a founder, you have to be prepared to go through hell”, is the creed of probably Germany’s most prominent startup investor: hardly any entrepreneur is as present in the German media as Frank Thelen. He causes a lot of furore – but more with his controversial statements than with the founder and CEO of the investment company Freigeist.
Frank Thelen usually wears a uniform – sneakers and a black shirt – almost like one of his great idols, Steve Jobs, who always appeared in a black turtleneck. There’s a portrait of the iPhone maker hanging in Thelen’s office, and his rhetoric is also Anglo-Saxon: Thelen doesn’t believe in Siezen, he doesn’t skimp on Anglicisms. You won’t find a moment of deep reflection in Thelen: he strikes back quickly and relentlessly. “You really made a mistake!” he criticized the founders of the “No Limit” mental training app on “The Lions’ Den”. Despite the television cameras, he rarely appears controlled or deliberate, but communicates with every fiber of his body. In the TV show, which has been airing on German-language television since 2014 and is a copy of the American series “Shark Tank”, the founders have the opportunity to convince investors such as Thelen and Carsten Maschmeyer of their start-up and thus raise capital of risk. Through the program, Frank Thelen established himself as one of Germany’s technology experts.
The show is entering its 13th season, now without Thelen. When it left the fair in 2020, it had a total of 37 completed deals and a total investment of almost 6 million euros. True success stories have emerged from some businesses: spice manufacturer Ankerkraut, for example, achieved annual sales of 50 million euros in 2022 and was bought by Nestlé last year.
Thelen remains without a show. Since 2017, he has been the founder and CEO of Freigeist, an investment firm that supports development-stage technology start-ups. With a free spirit, Thelen and his team of 13 people want to provide young entrepreneurs with the necessary capital and know-how so that they can develop the “construction kit of the future” without obstacles. The focus is not just on the IT sector. But Thelen also invests in space travel, energy supply and cancer research. One of his riskiest discoveries is probably the start-up Lilium in Munich. This is working on the Lilium Jet, which is not scheduled to enter service as an air taxi until 2026 at the earliest. Lilium shares are listed on Nasdaq in New York. Freigeist has currently invested in more than 20 start-ups and, according to some reports, has already invested ten million in launching its technology funds. However, exact sales figures are not communicated to the outside world.
He is always interested in people invested in companies, Thelen himself says about himself. He has strong and innovative visionaries who, like him, see digitalization as an opportunity. His particular weakness applies to every nerd and foreigner in the world, he says, even if other investors see a big risk of bankruptcy; and like every beginning investor, he made a mistake: Crispy Wallet, a notebook box start-up, and organic soup maker Little Lunch were not very successful and ended up having to declare bankruptcy. During his time on “The Lions’ Den,” Thelen encountered criticism from other investors: “He wasn’t a team player,” said co-judge Jochen Schweizer.
Thelen is a ruthless personal marketer. His homepage is simply called “Frank”, he has a Thelen YouTube channel, a Thelen Instagram account and a Thelen podcast. And he wrote his 2018 autobiography, “Startup DNA: Falling In, Standing Out, Changing the World,” which was on bestseller lists for weeks.
He consciously uses his life story for self-marketing, whether people ask about it or not: Born in Bonn in 1975, the son of a salesman and a beautician, the digital world gave him more ecstasy than any school subject medium could. School wasn’t his thing—he dropped out of high school, barely got his high school diploma, and dropped out of computer science studies after one semester. “I certainly lack the necessary knowledge in many areas. “I was always just the kid from Bonn who somehow fought his way to the top,” says Thelen today. He describes himself as a workaholic: “I never followed elite classic track and that probably still motivates me today. I want to achieve more than others, I have a hard time switching off and I have a hard time losing.”
At the age of 18 he founded his first company, Twist AG, specializing in the development of Linux-based Internet routers. He invested 1 million euros in venture capital and wanted to take the company public, but then the dotcom bubble burst in 2001 and with it his big dream. Thelen had to file for personal bankruptcy and, at just 26 years old, had debts of over a million. The financial crisis was also followed by an existential crisis in which he battled depression for months. According to Thelen, the feeling of being a failure still consumes him to this day. But his critics cannot accuse him of one thing: that he gives up easily.
In 2004 he founded his second company: IP Labs became the market leader in the industry as an online photo album service, with more than 100 million customers. After selling to Fujifilm, Thelen developed the document app Wunderlist, which was later sold to Microsoft for several hundred million euros. Thelen: “Every start-up is a ‘crazy mission’. As a founder, you literally have to be willing to walk through hell or, in the words of Elon Musk, eat glass.”
There have often been negative headlines for Thelen in the past; He soon became a favorite tabloid topic. He was publicly upset by the lack of decision-making capacity of democratic oversight bodies: “Sometimes I wish Germany was simply China for four years,” he told Tagesspiegel. But he is no more interested in the fact that he often offends others than any natural cosmetics start-up from the “Lion’s Den”: “Of course you will have headwinds if you have a different view – but I can live with that ,” says Thelen.
Text: Helene Hohnewarter
Photos: Paul Meixner