◢◤ STRATEGY
Three things I put capital 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 nervous.
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. Some of my best positions are in categories I had no business being in.
What matters more than either edge or category: chemistry. I don't do partner meetings. If we don't click over one call, neither of us should force the term sheet. If we do, we can move in a week.
◢◤ 02 PUBLIC MARKETS
Rules-based. Fisher, Graham, Taleb. Boring on purpose.
I run my own book through a system I call Nyx. It's a 60/40 barbell - 60% Safe Harbour (broad ETFs and blue-chip individual stocks that pay you to hold them) 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 architecture is designed around one idea: asymmetry beats hit-rate. Losses capped, upside open.
Every ticker lives in a tier - 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, an explicit edge-gate: 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 the hard -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 - 360 days, the platform maximum. 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, a mandatory five-line audit within 48 hours: trigger, edge-reflection, signal-reflection, process- vs-outcome, learning. If the audit doesn't exist, the position isn't closed - behaviorally. Every trading day the system 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 a private book, 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.
◢◤ 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. That includes the co-founding of a 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 came from the same instinct: these are experiences I'd pay for myself.
If I invest, the check size here is similar to angel-startups (€10k–€50k), but the return profile is different - no venture-scale exits, more like family-business economics with occasional outperformance. That's fine. I'm not trying to 10x this bucket. I'm trying to have things exist that I want to exist.
If you're building something in this space that isn't Instagram-driven, doesn't require a series A within eighteen months, and has real product-market fit with its own customers - write me. I'll probably visit.