Michael Brehm on launching startups and the key role of sales & marketing for success

Startup Notes

Michael Brehm is one of the biggest names in the German startup scene. As former Executive Director & Investor at social network startup VZnetzwerke (with its brands studiVZ, schülervz, meinVZ), he forever influenced the society in his home country in many ways in the 2000’s before industry giant Facebook even entered the local market. Having built and sold several companies (e.g. to Google and eBay) and taken another one public in his career, he is especially a renowned expert on sales & marketing. Among his notable ventures was e.g. Rebate Networks, which has rolled out couponing websites all across the world. Since 2014, Michael is a Partner at Redstone - a first of its kind venture capital firm with the approach of „VC-as-a-service“. Moreover, in the past years, he has been involved in supporting startups like Bonaverde as a member of the supervisory board and also working on launching new ventures. In this episode, we are doing a deep dive with Michael into startup marketing & sales. Among others, we are talking to him about how to implement a coherent startup culture (especially in relation to sales efforts), the development of studiVZ back in the days, the importance of paying detailed attention to your product & customers, the qualities that make a great CMO nowadays as well as useful marketing tools and how to combine them. He is also sharing insights about his new startup i2x that he kept in stealth mode for the past two years.