Florian Heinemann is a Founding Partner at Project A Ventures, where he is responsible for the areas of marketing, CRM, and business intelligence. Before co-founding Project A, he was Managing Director at Rocket Internet with the same areas of responsibility (2007-2012). During his time at Rocket, he was mainly involved at Zalando, Global Fashion Group, and Spark Networks (aka eDarling/Affinitas).Prior to Rocket, Florian was Co-Founder and Managing Director of JustBooks/AbeBooks being in charge of marketing and product (1999-2002, exit to Amazon in 2008). Then, he was co-heading the online marketing department of Jamba! and the online dating portal iLove (2003-2005, exit to Verisign). In 2006, he was Co-Founder of the online marketplace antibodies-online.com (exit to Broadoak).Moreover, he has been an investor/business angel in more than 80 startups including Trivago (seed investor), Zalando (founding investor), Audibene (seed investor), Home24 (founding investor), CityDeal/Groupon (founding investor), Betreut.de/Care (seed investor), ClassPass (early stage investor), Mimi Hearing (early stage investor), Bitbond (seed investor), Lillydoo (early stage investor), and the Code University (seed stage investor).Apart from his Project A-related board activities he sits on the board of Koerber AG and About You and the digital advisory boards of Henkel and Oetker.

Florian Heinemann, Project A Ventures | Making It Real Podcast with Jan Brinckmann | Episode #5

00:00 How Florian got into the Entrepreneurship domain

02:45 Florian’s role as a founder in the early internet days

05:05 Knowing your strengths and growing into an expert in your field

12:26 Should you join a startup with funding or start your own venture for best possible learnings?

18:46 Florian’s entrepreneurial path and his start at Rocket Internet

23:13 Rocket Internet’s first ventures and how they decided which new companies to launch

30:35 What Rocket Internet underestimated

34:50 Advantages of B2B business models over consumer businesses

37:18 The role of sales is mostly underestimated in B2B

38:36 Why Florian left Rocket Internet and started Project A Ventures

43:05 Was Florian scared of starting his own company?

46:25 Florian’s advice for founders who want to make it real

Download the one-pager for curated top learnings of this episode → https://makingitreal.io/5

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