Verena Pausder is back in Berlin after a week on the road.
The edtech founder, investor and German Startup Association chief has been touring the country with her business podcast 'Fast and the Curious', which she co-hosts with fellow founder Lea-Sophie Kramer.
Sleeping every night aboard a tour bus and performing daily to a thousand people, Pausder says the trip has given her a taste of the “rockstar lifestyle” she’s long dreamed of.
“I absolutely loved it. It gave me the chance to be the actress I always wanted to be,” she tells me over lunch at Lucy’s Deli, a healthy salad spot in Berlin frequented by many investors and founders.
“We were so full of adrenaline and energy. That’s the only reason we survived this week, because we hardly slept, we hardly worked out. It was a total overload, the whole thing,” she says, proudly showing me a video of the audience creasing over a joke she cracked on stage. “It was validation that the concept really works.”
Over bowls of quinoa, sweet potatoes, edamame and tempeh, Pausder explains that energy and humour keep her going across her many projects, even when the world feels heavy.
“My teenage sons always tell me ‘Mummy, it’s not that deep,’ and as grown ups, we should have this sentence top of mind,” says Pausder.
Sometimes, she admits, things are that deep, highlighting the far right AfD’s recent surge in Germany’s most populous state of North Rhine Westphalia. But too often, she says, “We rage about stuff that really isn’t, and we should ask ourselves: shouldn’t we be doing other things?”
Entrepreneurial upbringing
Knowing what to ask Pausder first is something of a challenge, given she has done everything from founding a digital education non-profit to publishing a best-selling book and running a football team.
The entrepreneurial spirit is in her blood, Pausder tells me. Her ancestors founded the Delius Textiles business in Bielefeld in 1722, which is still thriving today. Her father, the ninth generation to oversee the family business, took over in the 1990s and transformed it into a high-tech company.
He also opened Bielefeld’s first sushi restaurant — an idea he came back with from a family holiday in New York where, as Pausder recalls, “sushi was everywhere.” (He regularly ate there and never got sick of it.)
Her mother had her own interior design business of 20 employees. “So I was surrounded by parents who were talking about business decisions and unpaid invoices all day,” she says. “That certainly did something to me.”
Though Pausder holds shares and a non-executive board seat at the family textile firm, she never wanted to run it herself.
“If I was needed, I’d be there tomorrow. It’s not that I say, ‘hands off, don’t call me,’” she explains. “But I always wanted to prove to myself — and probably also to my parents — that I could come up with my own ideas and found my own company. Taking over might have meant reliving my parents’ life, and that scared me.”
That heritage, however, came with pressure. “It was like: there are already enough problems, so just function. And obviously you don’t always function,” she says.
Yet she’s proud of having stuck to her own path. “I know others from family-business backgrounds who lose themselves in that pressure.”
Backing edtech
Pausder founded her first business at the age of 25, when she tried to launch a salad bar franchise — not unlike the one where we are having lunch, she says — but it “went down the drain” within a year.
Her breakthrough came in 2012 with the founding of Fox & Sheep, a studio creating apps, podcasts and shows for children. Within just a few years, the company became one of Europe’s most successful children’s app developers and was acquired in 2015 by toy and games manufacturer HABA.
“I always felt education was a field where you can change so much, but where so many business models aren’t yet developed because many people see it as being state-owned, too difficult, all the parents..” she says. “Fox&Sheep was my first go at trying to crack it.”
While no longer operational at the company, Pausder stays close to the management team, which includes her former head of IT and head of product. “I love it. We discuss things, I invest into their new ideas,” she says. “I’m proud it went this way because sometimes companies collapse after the founders leave or sell.”
Pausder also backs other startups, many of which are edtechs, as an angel investor. In total, she's backed 30 companies and is an LP in 15 VC firms.
When asked if she has concerns for how AI is going to change education, Pausder says she’s more excited by the possibility of more people getting access to learning. She points to solutions like Knowunity, an AI learning platform for secondary school children and one of her portfolio companies, which recently raised a €27m Series B round.
“Now, with AI, a student on his or her smartphone can get totally personalised help for exactly the problem they didn’t understand," she says.
“I’m much less concerned about apps giving away our data than the risk of kids not learning anymore to survive in the world of tomorrow.”
Leading the German Startup Association
As head of the German Startup Association, Pausder has helped shape tech regulation in the country, pushing through measures such as modernising ESOP rules, digitalising work contracts and enabling women to deduct more childcare costs from their taxes so they can work and build companies.
But there’s plenty left to do, she says.
In April this year, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) formed a coalition with the Social Democrats (SPD), making Friedrich Merz their chancellor. The parties included several proposals for the startup ecosystem in their coalition agreement, such as doubling the €12bn Win Initiative and streamlining the process of starting a business, but little has been executed so far.
“It’s written on paper, but I haven’t seen it really be put into action,” says Pausder.
The slow pace of politics is what keeps Pausder from entering it directly. She chose to take up the voluntary role at the Startup Association as a way to influence policy without becoming a politician herself.
Founders are so bold. Where are the bold politicians? I don’t get it that we still don't have this sense of urgency.
“Founders are so bold. Where are the bold politicians? I don’t get it that we still don't have this sense of urgency,” she says.
For Pausder, urgency means tackling issues head-on without the dilly-dallying: “We have to loosen up labor market regulation, otherwise it is too difficult for people to hire in Germany. We have to put more capital into startups, because otherwise they won't be large enough to compete, and then we will be overrun by the US and China as we have been in the past,” says Pausder.
“What are we waiting for? Where are the politicians that dare to say these sentences?”
Pausder also wishes politicians would celebrate startup successes more, to make entrepreneurship something “people want to see thrive” rather than to treat with suspicion. “If entrepreneurs get too successful, we don’t like it here,” she says.
The founders of Flix Bus, in her view, are perfect role models. “But I’ve never heard of them being invited to Schloss Bellevue or getting an award for entrepreneurship. Why not?”
Passion projects
Pausder tells me her parents always described her as intense, relentless: “she’s either fully in or out, they’d say” — and it shows.
In 2022, she and five other women took over FC Viktoria Berlin’s women’s team with the aim of reaching the Bundesliga within five years (a goal the team is on track to achieve, says Pausder).
The women had seen how Angel City FC in LA had been started by a majority female owned-group led by actress Natalie Portman, VC Kara Nortman and tech executive Julie Uhrman. “We said, we need to make that happen here,” says Pausder.
“It’s the most fun thing I've ever done, and at the same time, probably the hardest, because financing women's football in Germany is not easy with all the regulations we have.”
The difficulty is German clubs must keep majority ownership in the hands of members. “You can’t take a football team, give it money, shoot it to the top and sell it,” says Pausder, wildly gesticulating. “That’s why many people don’t invest as they know they won’t get returns.”
The club’s main sponsor Scalable Capital was a deliberate choice. It has a campaign to get more women investing, which chimed with Pausder’s vision of bringing more female football to the sports world, paying the players a salary and teaching them how to invest it.
I ask Pausder if there’s anything else she can see herself doing in her career, hoping she’ll say something totally out of the box.
“No, I’m actually living the life I want to live,” she says, while admitting she slightly regrets she didn’t excel enough in sports to be a professional athlete.
“People often ask me if I’ll ever slow down, or move out of Germany, but I always say, “No, I want to keep going like this until I’m 80.”
“I’m someone who wants to get the most out of life possible," she says, "and that always leads me to the fact that whatever you achieve, it’s never the end. It’s always just the beginning of the next thing.”
