A her­culean effort is required for a young com­pany to break into an estab­lished mar­ket with a new product/service/solution or to estab­lish a new mar­ket alto­gether (per­haps even tougher). Thus, the rewards for those extreme efforts must be immense, and the rewards are only immense for truly win­ning.

In our view, play­ing to win requires hav­ing a win­ning vision, tak­ing risks to real­ize that vision, and being hon­est enough to know when the path and/or vision needs to be modified.

First, hav­ing a win­ning vision means ensur­ing that the company’s goal is one that is com­pelling and lucra­tive enough to pur­sue with full com­mit­ment. Hav­ing a worth­while and inspir­ing “rai­son d’être” gives a com­pany count­less advan­tages: tal­ented employ­ees want­ing to join, investors see­ing what is pos­si­ble, and part­ners being moti­vated to work together on excel­lent terms, to name just a few essen­tial ones.

We have rarely seen big “wins” when founders sim­ply are engrossed in their tech­nol­ogy with­out an inspir­ing vision of how the tech­nol­ogy can cre­ate mas­sive pos­i­tive change in the world.

Sec­ondly, play­ing to win requires both founders and ven­ture investors mak­ing a true com­mit­ment to tak­ing the risks that are nec­es­sary to pro­vide a chance to win. Although this con­cept might sound obvi­ous, it is often dif­fi­cult in prac­tice, pre­dom­i­nantly because it often requires relin­quish­ing con­trol. For exam­ple, this can mean invest­ing more cap­i­tal than orig­i­nally planned when an oppor­tu­nity is spot­ted, mak­ing a trans­for­ma­tional addi­tion to the team, engag­ing in a part­ner­ship, or the acqui­si­tion of a com­ple­men­tary com­pany. And it cer­tainly means founders and ven­ture investors can­not sit back and wait for suc­cess to come to them and can­not be con­tented with minor con­fir­ma­tions that they are on the right path – they also have to find ways to sprint down that path.

Finally, while sprint­ing down this path, play­ing to win also requires per­se­ver­ance to carry on and being bru­tally self-hon­est about whether or not one is still on the right path. Ulti­mately it is bet­ter to suf­fer dis­ap­point­ing set­backs on the road to vic­tory than to expe­ri­ence pleas­ing “suc­cesses” on a road to nowhere. Com­pa­nies and investors need to con­tin­u­ally eval­u­ate if the nav­i­ga­tion sys­tem is point­ing toward a win­ning des­ti­na­tion, and must be deci­sive in piv­ot­ing (or pulling the plug) if the path is lead­ing to a less than desir­able result.

Over the last years, we have expe­ri­enced sig­nif­i­cant wins here in Thürin­gen, and we and our Investee-Part­ners will con­tinue to push our­selves extremely hard to cre­ate win­ning visions, to take risks when oppor­tu­nity avails itself, and to not mis­take progress of any kind for progress towards winning.

Now, let’s go out there and win together!

Your bm|t Team