◢◤ STRATEGY
Three things I put my money into.
Nothing in common except conviction.
If you're here to figure out whether we should talk about one of these - the answer is in the slot below.
◢◤ 01 STARTUPS
Small checks, big convictions, no thesis.
I write €10k-€50k first-money-in at pre-seed. No board seat. WhatsApp instead of governance overhead. What I'm actually betting on is the founder - someone who won't be talked out of what they're doing, who has already shipped something weird once, whose LinkedIn makes people slightly confused.
There's no sector filter. There are natural home turfs where I have information edge - cybersecurity, compliance, legal-tech, and increasingly fintech. If your company is in one of those, I'll probably move faster and understand more. If it isn't, that doesn't disqualify you.
What matters more than either edge or category: chemistry. If we don't click over one call, neither of us should force to proceed. If we do, we can move in a week.
◢◤ 02 PUBLIC MARKETS
Rules-based. Fisher, Graham, Taleb. Boring on purpose.
I've vibe-coded a trading assistant I call Nyx. It helps me to enforce rules for investing. A 60/40 barbell - 60% Safe Harbour (broad ETFs and blue-chip individual stocks) and 40% Disruptive (small-to-mid-cap positions with asymmetric payoff structures). Three layers: broad ETF floor, individual tickers, permanent 10% cash reserve for opportunities. The rules are designed around the idea that asymmetry beats hit-rate. Losses capped, upside open.
Everything is sorted into tiers - Safe Harbour, Disruptive-1 (mega-trend, established, above €50bn cap), Disruptive-2 (standard disruptive, €2–50bn), or Disruptive-3 (speculative, pre-revenue, mining, biotech). Each tier has its own position cap (from 7% down to 1.5%) and its own cluster cap that prevents stacking too many bets on the same theme. Before every buy, I do an explicit edge-gate audit: what does the market price in, what's my variant perception, what type of edge do I claim - information, analysis, behavior, or time-horizon. If none of the four apply and the spread category is "rationally discounted," it's an automatic pass.
Position sizing is capped at 1% portfolio risk per trade (1.5% for Safe Harbour and D-1). Given a -40% stop-loss from weighted entry, this yields effective position caps between 2.5% and 7%. Stop-orders are entered in Trade Republic within 24 hours of the buy. No trailing stops. No averaging down. When something doubles, I trim automatically - 50% off D-2 and D-3, 25% off D-1, Safe Harbour just gets a valuation note. When something goes another +100% from there, another trim. The rest rides free. Time-stop kicks in after 24 months without a milestone.
After every sale, Nyx forces me to answer a mandatory five-line audit within 48 hours: trigger, edge-reflection, signal-reflection, process-vs-outcome, learning. If I don't complete the audit, Nyx sends reminders until the position is closed. Every trading day Nyx generates a briefing at 07:00, a weekly report on Sundays, and a monthly discipline-check via cron. The whole thing runs on Perplexity Computer + Trade Republic + Parqet.
This is my private account, not a fund. I mention it here because the discipline shows up in how I evaluate startups too. If you talk to me about your capital structure, you'll notice I have opinions.
IT'S MOSTLY MATH.
◢◤ 03 REAL EXPERIENCES
Culinary, nature, hospitality — my hobby, so occasionally also my job.
I invest in things I want to exist in the world and want to spend time in. I Co-founded a Whiskey-distillery in Lower Saxony making bourbon-style whiskey (VKDC), a farm-stay in the Elbe meadows (Rüdehof), a gin-and-korn brand for hunters (Rüdemann). All three are experiences I'd pay for myself as a customer.
If you are looking for funding for a similar project, my check size here is similar to my angel-tickets (€10k–€50k). I don't look for exits, but profit distributions and fun. I'm trying to have things exist that should exist in an increasingly artifical world where we scroll reels in between two claude prompts, trying to impress people we actually hate.
SOMETIMES A BOTTLE OF GIN IS JUST A BOTTLE OF GIN.