I don’t know about you but I am fascinated by startups.
They have every element of a good adventure story: heroes, villians, a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, and disaster lurking at every step. Kind of like an Indiana Jones movie!
And while the United States is known as the startup capital of the world – particularly in areas like Silicon Valley, New York City, and even the DC area – entrepreneurs are starting tech companies all over the world in cities like Shanghai, China and Frankfurt, Germany.
My guest this week is Joern “Joe” Messinger, host of the Global Top 150 Podcast, Startuprad.io, which is known as The Authority on German Startups.
Joe’s podcast has an unusual Unique Selling Proposition – it’s a podcast about German startups produced in Germany by a German – entirely in English! As a result Joe and his show are enjoying a lot of success in countries around the world.
So please join us to meet Joe and find out what kind of startups are being born in a region known for rigorous process and engineering excellence. You might just find something you want to invest in – before your friends do!
Learn more about Joe and his podcast at: https://www.startuprad.io/
What follows is a computer-generated transcription of our entire conversation. Please excuse any typos!
Frank Felker 00:23
My guest today is Joe Menninger, host of startuprad.io and the authority on German startups. Joe Menninger, welcome to the program.
Joe Menninger 00:39
Hi, Frank. Thanks for having me. Good afternoon from Frankfurt.
Frank Felker 00:43
Thank you so much for joining us, Joe. I you know, I’m very excited to talk to you because I you know, I’m My name is German. I was actually Americanized at Ellis Island when my family my father’s family emigrated here. I was born in Germany. I have visited Germany, I presented to a group of printing company, Heidelberg, you may have heard of the printing press manufacturer of Heidelberg. I presented to them way back around the year 2000 in Dusseldorf. Anyway, I have a lot of connections to Germany, but I didn’t realize that Germany in general, and Frankfurt in particular, is like a hotbed for startup activity. So I’m interested to hear more about that. Why do you figure it is that that Frankfurt’s attracting so much entrepreneurial energy?
Joe Menninger 01:36
Whoa, that’s a good question. Well, that there are many manufacturers included, let’s say the location, and a lot of companies are coming here, from across the world for the very simple reason, it’s in the center of Germany, which is the biggest market in the European Union. So if you want to start your business in the European Union, it actually makes sense to come here. Frankfurt also has the busiest internet knot in the world, it’s called D, six D cx. And it has massive throughput at the numbers and Esther would screwed it up. So it’s, it’s the busiest one in the world.
So a lot of stuff that is going on in terms of cloud computing is really going on here. Plus, there is a very busy town, as well as the Rhine mind region. You may know that administratively speaking, the German towns are always very small, especially in terms of square miles square kilometers. So you actually have to look at the whole era rounded with some other smaller cities. And that is an area of, let’s say, five, five and a half million people. And last time they published a cross regional product. So the GDP broken down to the area. It was approximately the size of New Zealand.
Frank Felker 03:02
Oh, wow. So it’s small but mighty.
Joe Menninger 03:07
Yes, of course it is.
Frank Felker 03:09
Yeah. Now, isn’t it true also that the European Central Bank is headquartered there? Is that correct?
Joe Menninger 03:16
Yeah, there. There’s a lot of stuff going on here. So the most important central bank in Europe before there was the European Central Bank, Bundesbank. The German central bank is located here, you have the European Central Bank, you have also the I know that I don’t know the exact name but the oversize of the largest banks in the European Union, also done by the EU, by the European Central Bank is located here, as well as the oversight company for insurances and pension funds.
Plus, you do have a lot of other interesting stuff usually people don’t have on their radar, so to speak, when they talk about Frankfurt and the Rhineland area, because a little bit to the south, like when you’re not in Russia, speaking about 30 minutes by car is the city of Darmstadt, with an excellent Technical University. And there is European Space Operations Control Center. So So colloquially speaking, the Houston of the of the European Space.
Frank Felker 04:18
It’d be interesting to find Houston and Germany, wouldn’t it? It’s quite a combination. And with that I did at one point wanted to come to this, but this is a good time. You actually went to school in Texas for a period of time. Can you tell us a little bit about that experience?
Joe Menninger 04:32
Yeah, that was, that was pretty good. I was. I was already enrolled here in a university in Germany. Our we had several exchange programs. And I basically my program required to spend at least one semester either interning or studying abroad. And so I applied for both I got my internship space in Beijing, in a joint project of the Chinese and German Ministry of In the environment, that the university then called me and said, We are very sorry, your application got kind of sidetracked. Do you want to come for a whole year and make your degree? And I said, Yeah, I’m coming. So I went from Beijing, something like minus five degrees Celsius, don’t ask me for the Fahrenheit, went to Germany, spent there like two weeks and then went to Texas. And it was it was really warm, like, warm for everybody else. Except Texans. And it was 14 hours time difference. So I was, I was sleeping for almost only sleeping for a few days. And my roommates from college, they knock Hey, Joe, I used to live Hello.
Frank Felker 05:47
I can only imagine. College students are bad enough. But Texan college students are, as you were telling me, it’s taxing. taxing college students, I imagine could be especially brutal on the foreign exchange student coming in. Well, I don’t want to spend too much time on that.
Joe Menninger 06:06
I had a very, very decent roommate, very nice people that I’m still in touch with, although it’s a cliche, no, totally kind of went around that but still had a lot of very decent, very nice people. Actually, I invited some of them to my wedding and due to Corona couldn’t take place, my church wedding ceremony. So they have not been that mean, but
Frank Felker 06:33
Well, I know it is because I still have friends from my college days, which was a lot farther back in the past. But we also teased each other, you know, terribly. And I think that’s just part of a rite of passage for young men growing up. What I wanted to ask you next about is, well, let me let me backtrack a little bit. You were talking about the banks, Buddhist bank, European Central Bank, big insurance companies and that kind of thing. And as I looked through your podcast website, I noticed that there’s a lot of FinTech, financial technology startups, at least that you’re interviewing. Do you feel that it’s a fair statement that because of all the money and the big banks that are in Frankfort, that that’s generating a lot of interest or creating a lot of FinTech startups?
Joe Menninger 07:22
A Yes, it does. You get to see. So basically, I do a lot of FinTech interviews, because in the past for last 12 years, have been management consultant in capital markets. So I did a lot of asset management, New Wealth Management, investment, banking, trading and stuff like this. So basically, that’s what I’ve been doing in the past. So I’m very much skewed towards FinTech, of those fintechs I’m interviewing, not all of them are, of course from Frankfurt. Frankfurt is still in the top five FinTech hotspots in Germany, even though they lost a little bit of lost a little bit of positioning, last step, top position to other cities. Now there’s Berlin, Hamburg and Munich ahead of them simply in terms of the fintechs, headquartered there. And in FinTech, he usually don’t see people getting out of university like a soccer Berg. And already starting in the dorm of FinTech. So if you start a FinTech, if you’re a FinTech entrepreneur, it’s very likely that you at least studied finances at the university. You do vocational training at a bank like I did, or that you that you’ve been actually working, sometimes for a long time in a bank and insurance company, private equity funds, something like this. And then you think about what you could do and start a company.
Frank Felker 08:51
I noticed, and I appreciate what you’re saying, and I can understand that. But the exception to the rule, I noticed you had a young man on, I think that you interviewed in December, who said he was 20 years old, and had created this app that has to do with eliminating paper receipts. So he can you tell us a little bit about his company and and his story?
Joe Menninger 09:14
Yeah, you referring to the interview of E pap. And basically, he was freelancing, he was coding. And from e commerce, he got into invoicing and he realized that a lot of paper receipts are just generated for the bin. Because in Germany, there’s a duty How do you call it like a proceeding like an order from the Ministry of Finance, every time you do a transaction on your cashier, you have to print out a receipt, you have to hand the client a receipt. And basically what they are doing then is basically they want to convert it so you have your cell phone, you hold it to the cashier and then basically Bob It pops up, you have all the data on your cell phone. And you don’t need a paper-based paper based receipt. And the interesting thing is, usually you have online banking apps that can see, for example, you shopped something there at the grocery store, we don’t have Whole Foods, but something similar like tiva, stuff like this. And basically, what the online banking apps are seeing is that you shop there for, let’s say, 99 years. But what the app is seeing, we actually have the receipt in there, they can see all the individual items. So if you hadn’t, if you’re really diligent and get in diligent in getting all your receipts in this app, the financial analyzes, your transaction analyzes would be much, much better than the apps just looking at your, at your financial transactions on a current account.
Frank Felker 10:59
That’s interesting. And how is that startup doing for him? I didn’t, I’ll apologize. I didn’t watch the entire interview. But How long ago? Did he start? Has he gotten any traction, you know, clients revenue to gotten any funding yet? Where is he at with his journey?
Joe Menninger 11:18
That that’s the usual problem of startups in Germany, you know, American startups are very outgoing, they do a lot of public relations, they take a lot of money in their hands for marketing and stuff like this. startups, in general, that there are always exceptions to the rule. But in general, in Germany, especially in Frankfurt, and in other cities don’t do that as much. So they usually don’t disclose any revenue, they usually don’t disclose a lot of data, like funding and stuff like this, for example, there’s a database in international database called Crunchbase. It’s a US based database, where when you have a social media profile like Twitter, like LinkedIn, you can start and edit a lot of company profiles. And for something like 80 to 90% of the startups that I’ve interviewed, they don’t have even a profile on there. So basically, there’s nothing you can find about them in English, except for my interview. That’s the case with this app as well. But they didn’t disclose that a lot of stuff out there, of course, as most startups I’m talking to, are looking for investors. So if everybody’s anybody’s interested in screening startups, I do it as entertaining as possible. And you can of course, tune it to my podcast, I bring at least one interview guests a week with a with little exception of July and August. There’s not such a lot of interest in podcasting at this time of the year. So I only publish one interview every other week. Right now, I’m even publishing two interviews a week.
Frank Felker 13:00
Awesome. Now I wanted to then dig a little deeper into the podcast itself. You’re covering the German startup scene in English. Why English Joe?
Joe Menninger 13:12
Well, English is the language of the world and you have a much, much bigger potential audience to speak to that can hear you that is interested. I was I was first starting a German only podcast together with another co host. And we almost did the same thing. And it didn’t get a lot of traction. But then I realized if I do this in English, I do have to use p, because nobody else does it. And if I do it in English, there’s a much, much bigger potential audience for this. And so that’s why I’ve been sticking to this. Plus, I also covered like the German speaking startup scene. So basically, they’re sometimes Swiss based Austrian based startups in there. And in you believe it was December I even had the first startup from little lift and Stein. Oh, nice. My Yeah, my interview so I can now say I covered the German speaking startups. Plus, once a month, I get into similar recording a similar life event like you do together with my co host, who is a German guy living and working in New York City. And we discuss the German startup scene, like a recap looking back on the on the last month, and we call it this month in German startups. And so basically, when you tune in, you have like 20 minutes we do, we do a little bit funny stuff, a little bit banter, and, and then try as infotainment as possible and bring you the most important news from the startup scene. And we always try to highlight stuff like what was going on in the news. That much covered areas. For example, we have very frequently startup use, like the startup you are referring to. They’re from Hannover, Hannover, Germany. And usually there’s not a lot of, or no English coverage of those startups at all. That’s why we see the white spot. That’s what we see our USP. And that’s why we’re doing this.
Frank Felker 15:23
Well, and your English is excellent. As a quick aside, were you taught English as a school child? or How did you learn English?
Joe Menninger 15:32
Yes, basically, in Germany, I have to take it in school when I was still at school, you had to take it from fifth grade on. In Germany, when you want to go to university, you have to go at least 12 years, sometimes 13 years to school. Now, this is a little bit different. And it depends on your state, Germany has 16 states, it depends on your state if you have to go to high school for 12 or 13 years. And basically, that’s where it started. Now, the son of my cousin, he not only has to take English, but he also has to take subjects in English language, for example, history, he can choose to take history in English.
Frank Felker 16:12
And that’s very immersive. And that’s the way to learn. Now, your English is excellent. You’ve chosen to go English language with your podcast. And it appears as though the combination is really generating a lot of momentum and success for your podcast. Can you speak to that a little bit in terms? Or am I asking you to do something that’s outside of your comfort zone to talk about? How many listeners and so forth? I mean, I checked out your YouTube channel, you get a lot of views, you’re getting a lot of engagement. Can you speak to that for us?
Joe Menninger 16:41
Yes, of course. So basically, I started really from scratch. In 2014. In this German podcast, a interview partner who was not from Germany, requested to do an interview in English, I said, Okay, I lived and studied in the US, we can do this totally do this. And then basically, there was a point when startup radio started. Sometime in 2015, I started to do really regular content and run it as an own channel. And since 2018, we dissolved the end of 2017, we dissolve the construct, and ever since I’m basically running it by myself with a little assistance from Christian from New York, plus Pedro, who is the behind the scenes community manager, who is a very power networker, and who keeps me in touch with local startup scene when I’m busy working here. So 2019, I then started external hosting. So basically, if you have audio files, video files, you have to put them somewhere that people can download it. And I decided to go for an external hosting service. And the very first day, I got 22, download requests. And right now I’m hovering somewhere between five and a half and 6000 download requests a day. For last year, I was I was around 550,000 downloads requests for this quarter way I’m referring to download requests, because podcasting is very decentralized. I can tell from a hosting service that more than 100 to 120 apps, tools, different bots, browsers, desktop PCs, our software from desktop PCs are really accessing my podcast feet. But I cannot really say how much and when they have downloaded all that stuff. There’s some analytics companies out there. For example, I’m using one to track all my appearances in the iTunes and Spotify podcast charts, but they can only track like dozen or two dozen of those tools. That’s what is. Chris,
Frank Felker 18:57
you just posted something on LinkedIn, about somebody who would recognize you, if you would just go ahead and speak to it as far as and it seemed as though this had happened a long time ago. And you just now became aware of it.
Joe Menninger 19:10
Yeah, that that’s a little embarrassing. So we didn’t do our I didn’t do the press screening properly enough. There is a SSN, a big database called Crunchbase. Sometimes they also post news on the blog. And this time it was in in cooperation with the European based tech podcast called tech.eu. And I basically went through the all noteworthy tech podcasts in Germany, like in June of 2020. And now we talk in January 2021. And I just discovered that they recommended us as a very good podcast to listen to on a regular basis. And so that’s what we’ve been very happy also. As I said, we do track Our chart appearances on podcast charts in iTunes. Basically, it, it takes a lot of time and energy if you really want to do it yourself. That’s why we use an analytics company for that. And so far as of today, we’ve been in 49 countries and podcast charts, like including the US, Canada, but also Germany, Italy, France, the usual suspects UK, but also very interesting countries you never you’ll never think of as an audience for German startup podcasts like the Dominican Republic, like Sri Lanka, like Singapore, countries like Zimbabwe, South Africa and Brazil,
Frank Felker 20:43
we talk about that. What Why are those people? what’s special, or unusual? Or you mentioned your unique selling proposition earlier regarding your podcast? What’s the USP for a German startup? Why should an American audience or our Sri Lankan audience be particularly interested in that group?
21:05
Who,
Joe Menninger 21:06
in general speaking, a lot of what is going on in the startup scene is like global brands, for example, a club of Trent was a food delivery you may know, delivery hero, Berlin based Frankfurt listed startup, also like the food boxes, that Blue Apron invented, actually, the rocket internet clone HelloFresh actually took them over in terms of global delivery, global food delivery, they doing. So they there’s a lot of good execution, of course, plus, there’s a lot of really, really high tech solutions. For example, I was talking to Gungeon, Indian born entrepreneur who set up his company close to Frankfurt, and he is running a company that is sometimes referred to as the Google of pharma, because they are, basically have a database with a farm with data from medical research, published and unpublished. And basically, the story behind this was, he was working as consultant and his mentor, became sick with cancer. And he was just looking to find the right specialist for this very certain type of cancer, and he could not find it. So that’s what got him started. And then he, he was, he was providing a list of doctors, scientists research, and then he got into research data. And right now, as far as I know, he raised 35 million years for this company is looking for funding.
Frank Felker 22:45
That’s great. And I noted, checked your CV on LinkedIn. You had previously worked for Deloitte and BearingPoint, and McKenzie, and I noticed that your titles always seem to find the word startup in that title somewhere. Is that where you first became interested in the whole idea of startups or what are you what drives your passion? Joe?
Joe Menninger 23:11
I think I always like to be an entrepreneur. Yes, there’s a lot of startup in my CV, but also like a lot of financial services, asset management and stuff like this. But my mom loved to tell the story when I was four years old, and I was trying to sell the strawberries from our garden on the street. And I grew up in a very small town. So the only possible clients were the neighbors. And I was walking with them until the point where they just took some numbers from me and gave me a little bit of things.
Frank Felker 23:46
That’s great. Go ahead. You were born with your hands. Apparently,
Joe Menninger 23:52
I have. Yeah. I assume so I cannot prove it. When it was in China, I had the friend setting up a language school chain there. And then I started like, part time. In my spare time, in my very limited spare time, I was always working on some startup ideas, some some one or another type of what you could classify as a startup as a tech company as entrepreneurship. But it never worked out and right now. January 2021. I’m studying full time with startup rated. Oh,
Frank Felker 24:29
that’s great. Now you told us about the pharma startup, the Google of pharma. And we talked about the young man just barely out of his teenage years. Who has the receipt app. He passes out what it was called
24:44
ePap App
Frank Felker 24:45
ePap App
Joe Menninger 24:47
ePap AppSure.
Frank Felker 24:50
Do you have another story for us of I find it interesting by the way that the German startups play this as we would say very close to the vest. Holding your cards very close to your chest. Because, you know promotion is a necessary element of business success, certainly. But with Did you have anybody you’ve interviewed who is a startup based in Germany, who did share something, maybe along the lines of that pharma startup, relative to traction they’ve gained clients, they’ve signed, you know, transactions, they’ve turned some sort of success of somebody who appeared on your show, and then went on to, to really do well.
Joe Menninger 25:36
Well, before I was, I was running the English startup podcast, I was running a German only startup podcast, there’s even a video in German. I could send you the link, if you like to, for everybody who speaks German, when I’m talking in 2015, to one of the cofounders of 20 and 26, a challenger bank that basically provides a bank account just on your cell phone app, which is now valued above 1 billion euros, just for example.
26:10
Wow.
Joe Menninger 26:12
Yeah. And frequently, startups are sharing some of their data. For example, you can ask them, their average customer, how do they look like But usually, they get getting very close lipped. If you talk about funding if you talk about revenue numbers and stuff like this. But Funny thing is, there’s a public registry in Germany like a commercial register, hundreds Figgis that, that is basically a place where you have to turn in your annual accounts, your balance sheet, within a certain frame of time. So basically, at one point in time, like two years in the future, you could go back and look at the data of the startups right now. But as every entrepreneur can tell, in two years, a lot can change.
Frank Felker 27:00
So I have a question for you. Of course, Americans are known for being very braggadocious. And you know, as they would say, in Texas, all hat no cattle, you know, talk talk talk. And, you know, to to a fault, there’s a recent startup, Nicola, Nicola, the would-be competitor to Tesla, where this guy was talking Talk, talk talk. And it turned out almost everything he was saying was a lie. And as a result, he’s lost contracts, partnerships with General Motors and Republic waste services. And, you know, anyway, I’m not proposing a try to support the idea that people should talk about their businesses more. At the same time, though, without that it’s difficult for prospective investors to find out who they might be interested in getting involved with, what At what point just in your experience, both working for the big companies and interviewing startups, at what point will a startup sort of pull back the kimono a little bit and let you see their client list? let you see their financial statements? See their I can’t even think of what it’s called the cap chart. capitalization, How close do you have to get before they’re going to share anything with you, Joe?
Joe Menninger 28:22
Basically, we’re startups, especially in my show, they have a very certain incentive when it comes to my show. Usually, it’s they know a lot of investors are listening. So they know what 20 minutes good interview day kit, it can get a potential investor interested. And that’s the point where they open up a little bit more, usually in terms of funding when they have different products out. And they want to raise money in series a to scale this on a European or even global level. That’s the point when they pull a little bit back the curtain and the cap table and the client list would be something most startups would only share with a potential investor in a due diligence when you signed like an NDA or stuff like that.
Frank Felker 29:08
Okay, that’s kind of what I was driving as one would they share it with an investor or a potential investor? That’s great. Well, we’re just about out of time. I always like to ask my guests whether or not there’s a question I have not asked you that I should have, or something that’s come to mind that you’d like to share with my audience before we go.
Joe Menninger 29:29
Oh, yeah, just punch in startup. Right that Oh, you’ll find all options to subscribe to my podcast.
Frank Felker 29:38
Well, that was my next question was how to how to contact you. But is there anything in particular that you’d like to share? My audience is primarily United States based relative to what they might learn that they’d be surprised about, let’s say, learning more about German startups.
Joe Menninger 29:59
Yes, that If you look at international press, especially coverage of English-speaking press on German startups, you’ll notice a lot of like e commerce business to customer, b2c businesses. But when you listen to my podcast, admittedly I do have a focus of on b2b podcasts, but you will realize how many startups are out there. You’ve never noticed. And when you follow my podcast for some time, you will realize that you barely scratched the surface of the German startup scene if you follow it only by international publications, because those international publications they have to sell. So they stick to well known names, like the bigger or biggest startup companies out there.
Frank Felker 30:43
Joe Menninger, thank you so much for joining us today.
30:47
Thank you. It was my pleasure.
