The first time I met someone from First Momentum, I was sitting on the other side of the table. I was a founder of a media startup raising our Pre-Seed Round. We ended up going with another investor, but the impression that stuck with me made me join First Momentum later on: These energetic, super bright, and techie people felt more like a startup than the common VC fund I had met.
Until that point, my career had not been straightforward, something that in a conservative country like Germany was not always appreciated. Having graduated from LMU Munich with a degree in Middle Eastern Studies and Politics, speaking fluent Farsi, my dream had been to become a war journalist or join some state agency. However, becoming disillusioned about NGOs through internships and after witnessing the E-Commerce boom as a working student, I was drawn to the speed of the business world. Starting at a small consultancy, I was soon hiring tech people for a B2B delivery startup in Barcelona, and soon after - being infected by the entrepreneurship wave - started a small project: I set out to write and produce the first photo book on Interior Design in Iran. Crafting a physical product and selling it all over the world taught me many things and skills that I still leverage in my job today. But it also led to my journey as a founder myself, which established the deep empathy that helps me in my work with our portfolio companies today.
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I would love to see more scientists spin out their research. Despite having world-class public universities and research institutes, many researchers still don’t consider entrepreneurship one of their top career choices. They miss out on an opportunity to work on something that interests them personally, with an unrivaled amount of freedom, and build something that will live in the real world of millions of people.
