Yesterday I hosted the Inspiration Stage at Bits & Pretzels in Munich, together with Lara Sophie Bothur.
Bits & Pretzels is the founder festival that takes over Munich every year during Oktoberfest: three days, 7,500 founders, investors and operators, and a main stage that this year looked like a list of the companies Europe is most proud of.
In a single day, on one stage, we had:
André Schürrle, 2014 World Cup winner and co-founder of the hydration brand DRYLL
Dara Khosrowshahi, CEO of Uber
Steven Bartlett, founder of FlightStory and host of The Diary of a CEO
Max Junestrand, co-founder and CEO of Legora
Jan Oberhauser, founder and CEO of n8n
And many others!
Here is how the day opened:
📹 I recorded every conversation and pulled out what is worth your time: who is speaking, what their company actually does, and the handful of ideas from each talk that you can take back to your own company.
Inside you will find:
André Schürrle: Why a World Champion Walked Away at 29
How Far We Really Are From Superintelligence
Black Forest Labs: How a Team of 10 Reached $100M ARR in a Year
n8n: How to Get AI Automation Trusted Inside the Enterprise
Isar Aerospace: Why They Built the Factory Before the Rocket Reached Orbit
Legora: How to Go From $0 to $200M ARR in 24 Months
Quantum Systems: The Term Sheet Mistake That Almost Killed an $8B Drone Company
Klaus Hommels: The Four Convictions Behind Skype, Klarna and Helsing
Helsing x General Catalyst: Why Europe Is Spending Its Defense Budget on the Wrong Systems
Dara Khosrowshahi: Why the CEO Is Always the Last to Know
Steven Bartlett: The 40-Hour Hiring Week Behind The Diary of a CEO
Let’s begin!
1. André Schürrle: Why a World Champion Walked Away at 29
Who he is
Won the 2014 World Cup with Germany, then retired in 2020 at 29, with no injury and no plan
Co-founded DRYLL in 2025 with entrepreneur David Rost: an electrolyte drink with no sugar and no caffeine, sold in cans and as powder
DRYLL just turned one and is already on the shelves of large German supermarkets
He was interviewed by Max Wittrock, co-founder of mymuesli and now of the non-alcoholic beer brand zeroLabs.
What he said
After retiring he spent about a year and a half in what he calls “the empty room”: he had left the footballer behind and had no idea yet what came next. He said no to every offer, and slowly started saying no to every difficult thing in his life too
The turning point was an ice hike in the Polish mountains: half naked, minus 22 degrees, winds over 100 km/h. Twenty minutes from the summit there was a warm hut, and every signal in his head said stop. He kept going, and that summit changed how he looks at limits
His lesson: meaning comes from the hard things, and above all from the things you fear
On the 3 a.m. doubts every founder knows: he believes you usually already know the right decision, and the anxiety disappears the moment you take it. The mistake is postponing it for weeks
DRYLL started from his own frustration: he was importing sugar-free electrolyte drinks from the US because nothing good existed in Germany
Growth is almost entirely community: runs, gym activations and sports events. In August alone the team ran around 130 events, across running, padel, football, volleyball and niche Olympic sports
2025 was meant to be an “awareness year” with no retail plan. The events created so much noise that supermarket buyers started calling them
Right now he is saying no to big distribution deals the team cannot manage properly, and the main job is hiring people who already know the beverage industry
The takeaway: a new category brand can buy awareness with community before it has a retail strategy, as long as it says no to the growth it cannot yet serve.
2. How Far We Really Are From Superintelligence
Who was on stage
Noah Hollmann, CTO of Prior Labs. Prior Labs builds foundation models for tabular data, the rows and columns of spreadsheets and databases that run most businesses. SAP completed its acquisition in July 2026 and committed more than €1 billion over four years to turn it into a frontier lab
Matthias Niessner, CEO of SpAItial and co-founder of Synthesia. SpAItial builds “world models”: AI that generates 3D environments that behave like the real world. It raised a $13M seed led by Earlybird
Tim Rocktäschel, co-founder of Recursive, which is building AI that improves itself, starting by automating AI research. It came out of stealth in May 2026 with $650M at a $4.65B valuation
The panel was moderated by Andre Retterath of Earlybird.
What they said
All three pushed back on the claim that there is a 10% chance AI kills everyone by the end of the decade. Their view: real risks exist, such as cyberattacks and biosecurity, but an extraordinary claim needs evidence, and nobody has shown it
Hollmann’s definition of superintelligence: the moment a human can no longer add anything to the system. In narrow areas this is already here. His models already beat any human at predicting from tabular data
Rocktäschel expects AI to become a large part of the pipeline that builds frontier models within one to two years. Early versions are already running: labs use AI to generate their own training environments and to improve the agent “harness” wrapped around the model
Niessner argued language is a poor way to describe the physical world. Try describing left and right to someone sitting across from you. Machines talking to machines would never choose language
Rocktäschel took the opposite side on purpose: human progress over the last centuries came from the scientific method, and that runs on precise language. For robots in your kitchen, though, text alone won’t be enough
Nobody believes in one monolithic model. Expect a mix of specialized, cheaper, faster models, which is also safer
Rocktäschel’s strongest line: the field is stuck in “a multi-trillion dollar local optimum”. Everyone is scaling the same transformer architecture, while the human brain learns in a very different way
What limits progress today: for Niessner it is the willingness to take risky bets against something that already works, for Rocktäschel compute and energy, for Hollmann having the right ideas for experiments
The takeaway: the people building the frontier think the current architecture is not the last one, and a startup’s real edge is being willing to bet on what comes next.
3. Black Forest Labs: How a Team of Ten Reached $100M ARR in a Year
Who he is
Robin Rombach is co-founder and CEO of Black Forest Labs. During his PhD at LMU Munich he co-created latent diffusion, the method behind Stable Diffusion, which started the open image generation wave
He left Stability AI in 2024 to start BFL, which makes the Flux image models
BFL reached roughly $100M in annualized revenue within about a year of its first release, and raised a $300M Series B at a $3.25B valuation in December 2025
He was interviewed by Andre Retterath of Earlybird.
What he said
Stable Diffusion happened when three things arrived together: a new algorithm (latent diffusion), accessible compute and accessible data. Even on small compute, the early models showed that 8x or 30x more compute gave clear improvements
The launch strategy for Flux 1 was the growth engine: an open-weights model that was the best available at the time, plus better models sold only through a paid API. Developers adopt the open model, then pay for the best one
His advice for a team of ten to fourteen people: you have to find a way to get distribution, and open source is one way to do it
The founding team had worked together for years. One co-founder was his master’s thesis supervisor. In this field, a team that already knows how to work together is part of the product
BFL started in Freiburg and San Francisco at the same time. He dislikes the “Europe versus US” framing and thinks the best results come from combining both
BFL is moving from images to video, audio and “world action models”: models trained on visual data that can act as the brain of a robot and predict its actions
The next scaling step is closing the loop: robots run the model, interact with the world, and the results become training data
How many people can play at this level? “On the order of a hundred” worldwide, which is why they all know each other
On open versus closed he wants both: open weights for sovereignty, transparency and ecosystem, closed models for the business
The takeaway: a small team can compete with Big Tech by releasing something open that is good enough to spread on its own, and charging for the version that is better.
4. n8n: How to Get AI Automation Trusted Inside the Enterprise
Who he is
Jan Oberhauser is founder and CEO of n8n. Before that he spent more than a decade in visual effects
n8n is a Berlin platform where you build automated workflows and AI agents by connecting apps on a visual canvas
1.7 million monthly active builders, more than 1,400 enterprise customers and over a third of the Fortune 500
In May 2026 SAP made a strategic investment that doubled n8n’s valuation to $5.2B, and it will embed n8n in its AI agent builder
He was interviewed by Ben Fletcher of Accel.
What he said
The promise of “connect everything” is old. What changed is AI: before, you could automate maybe 20% of the work, because systems couldn’t understand an email or a document. Now almost all of it can be read and acted on
The winning recipe mixes three pieces: AI where the data is messy, fixed rules where the input and output are known (cheaper, faster and more reliable), and a human approval step for decisions that can’t be undone
Example: you can let an agent write an email, and be 100% sure it can’t send it without a person approving it first
Enterprises choose n8n for work where failure is not an option, such as security operations and customer support
A real case: Vodafone built 33 workflows for threat intelligence, avoided about £2.2M in costs and keeps saving around £300k a month
The path into the enterprise was bottom-up: a free, fair-code product that people bring into their company, plus a visual interface that makes every automation easy to inspect
How they land big deals: start with one painful use case, show impact fast, then expand department by department. Never try to transform the whole organization at once
As models get cheaper and more alike, he believes value moves to the layer where companies own and run their automations
How he stays focused as CEO: stay as close as possible to the tools. He runs Friday workshops and builds things himself, and that directly shapes the roadmap
The takeaway: in the enterprise, trust sells, and trust comes from letting the customer see and control exactly what the AI is allowed to do.
5. Isar Aerospace: Why They Built the Factory Before the Rocket Reached Orbit
Who he is
Daniel Metzler co-founded Isar Aerospace in 2018 with two fellow students from TU Munich, where he led the student rocketry group
Isar builds Spectrum, the first fully privately financed European orbital rocket
In September 2026 Spectrum reached orbit on its second flight, from Andøya in Norway: the first orbital launch by a commercial company from continental Europe
In June 2026 Isar raised a €270M Series D, for roughly €870M in total funding
He was interviewed by Felix Haas, chairman of Bits & Pretzels.
What he said
The first flight lasted about 30 seconds. The press called it “German rocket blows up”. Inside the company it was a success: the main goal was to not destroy the launch pad, and they got a lot of data
A launch pad costs a nine-digit sum to replace, far more than the rocket. It works like a chemical plant that controls the rocket for the first ten hours of the countdown
The second flight took five attempts: a stuck valve, a fishing boat entering the restricted zone, two fluid system issues. Each time they chose to stand down, even when people criticized them for it
Before the first launch, a Red Bull performance coach and a former Navy SEAL trained the team to handle pressure with breath-holding. The team average went from under a minute to over three minutes in ten minutes of practice. His point: Europeans underestimate what they can do
The key decision: they started building a new factory three years ago, investing hundreds of millions before the rocket had reached orbit. A factory takes three years, and rocket companies have died after reaching orbit because they couldn’t scale production
Scale gap: the European space industry, excluding Isar, launches about five rockets a year. The US does about 185, around 160 of them by SpaceX
One launch is a press release. A customer who needs a thousand satellites in orbit needs a company that can manufacture many rockets
The head of the Canadian Space Force called them to build a spaceport in Canada. Because Isar is not bound by US export controls, 25 countries asked for a launch pad in the last year alone
The takeaway: if a milestone will unlock demand you can’t serve yet, start building the capacity before the milestone, because the lead time will kill you after.
6. Legora: How to Go From $0 to $200M ARR in 24 Months
Who he is
Max Junestrand is co-founder and CEO of Legora, an AI platform for lawyers, founded in Stockholm in 2023
Legora launched publicly in October 2024 and passed $100M ARR in April 2026 with over 1,000 customers. On stage he confirmed it has now crossed $200M
In March 2026 it raised a $550M Series D at a $5.55B valuation, led by Accel
He was interviewed by Ben Fletcher of Accel.
What he said
At launch the go-to-market team was Max and five other people, with no process. Revenue doubled every quarter, and at some point they had to turn the art into a repeatable machine
His first sales leader was a founder who had just sold his company for $50M and said “absolutely no way”. Max says “nagging is an underappreciated form of negotiation”. He kept asking until the founder joined
Legora has around 3,000 demo requests it hasn’t been able to answer yet. The hard part is hiring fast enough without breaking the culture
How they open countries: people from Germany, Italy and Spain move to Stockholm, take their market to a set revenue number, then go home to open the local office. The German team just opened in Munich
In 2023 the product was essentially “a compliant ChatGPT with nicer document parsing”. Today it runs 17 different models, and its own model router, which picks the best model for each task, is where much of the IP lives
Legora was the first in its market to charge by consumption. After its agent product launched, the top 1% of users used vastly more than the median, and a flat fee stopped making sense
He calls fine-tuning your own model a bad idea: you spend $200M to end up behind the labs, which improve every few months. Legora instead builds a context layer each customer owns and can plug into any model
When Anthropic launched Claude for legal work, legal software stocks fell and demand for Legora shares went up. His argument: it works for simple tasks, but a litigation case with 300,000 files is where generic tools break
“In legal, it’s not enough to be right. You need to be exhaustive.” Code can be tested. A legal mistake shows up when you are already in court
His rule for scaling: hire people smarter than you and let them tell you what to do
The takeaway: in a vertical, your moat is the model routing, the workflow and the last 30% of delivery, and you can let the big labs spend the money on the models.
7. Quantum Systems: The Term Sheet Mistake That Almost Killed an $8B Drone Company
Who he is
Florian Seibel served 15 years in the German armed forces as a military pilot and flight instructor, then co-founded Quantum Systems in 2015
Quantum Systems builds reconnaissance drones and, more and more, uncrewed systems for land and sea
In July 2026 it raised a $1.2B Series D at about an $8B valuation
He was interviewed by Felix Haas, who first invested backstage at Bits & Pretzels in 2017.
What he said
The first thing he did after the round: buy a helicopter. It’s for testing how to protect helicopters from drones, and how to launch drones from them
Quantum started in agriculture, but regulation killed the model: you weren’t allowed to fly a drone further than you could see it, which made covering large fields impossible
They bootstrapped at first, living on the year of salary the army pays when you leave. He says it built a DNA of spending only what you have
“The single biggest mistake”: taking money from a strategic investor. They got €5M at a €35M valuation and signed terms they didn’t understand, including veto rights that later let the investor block new investors. It almost killed the company
His advice: a strategic investor has a strategic interest, which is rarely to make you big. Read a book on venture terms before you sign
Before Ukraine they already knew how to manufacture at scale. When the war started, they could deliver while competitors were still learning to go from one to ten units
A drone course on similar systems used to take eight weeks. On theirs it takes one day
The company went from 200 to 2,000 people in three to four years. Only a solid core team of 200 kept it from falling apart
Europe is still buying tanks and fighter jets that cheap drones can take off the battlefield. His plan is to build a new European defense prime from the bottom up, with a subsidiary in every EU member state
Launch costs in Europe are $8,000 to $10,000 per kilogram, and SpaceX is heading toward $100. He floated a merger with Isar Aerospace, jokingly adding it just got more expensive
An IPO is on the roadmap, but not this year or next. The goal is a $100B defense company built out of Germany
The takeaway: read every term in your first term sheet as if the company’s survival depends on it, because a veto right you don’t understand can matter more than the valuation.
8. Klaus Hommels: The Four Convictions Behind Skype, Klarna and Helsing
Who he is
Klaus Hommels founded Lakestar in 2012 and is one of Europe’s best-known investors, with more than $6B under management
He was an early investor in Skype, Facebook, Spotify, Airbnb, Revolut, Klarna, Isar Aerospace and Helsing
He chaired the NATO Innovation Fund, and in July 2026 Lakestar closed Resilience I, a €262.2M fund for defense and dual-use companies
What he said
“VC is way less glamorous than everybody thinks.” You have to form a conviction about a ten-year trend, usually against consensus, and be patient
His four convictions: consumer internet (Skype, Spotify, Airbnb), then fintech over about 15 years (SumUp, Revolut, Klarna, Coinbase), then digital sovereignty, which turned into defense when the war started
Why sovereignty: by 24, a child spending three and a half hours a day on social media has spent about 12,000 hours there, which he counts as around seven working years
When he moved into defense there was no ecosystem. Because of ESG rules, funds weren’t allowed to invest, and startups couldn’t even open a bank account
So he spent seven years building the ecosystem: board roles, the venture capital association, then chairing the NATO Innovation Fund. In his two years there, defense investment in the ecosystem went from zero to about €5.5B
What Europe needs next: open up procurement (in Germany, 55% of suppliers are German-only and another 30% are German with foreign partners), coalitions with industrial groups like Schaeffler and the car industry, and consolidation, which he thinks most founders are too confident to plan for
What founders asked him for: patient capital for 10-15 years, and founders at the center. He is now doing two or three investments a year with his own capital
The takeaway: the biggest returns come from backing a ten-year conviction early, and sometimes from building the ecosystem that lets the category exist.
9. Helsing x GC: Why Europe Is Spending Its Defense Budget on the Wrong Systems
Who was on stage
Torsten Reil is co-founder and co-CEO of Helsing, Europe’s largest defense tech company, which builds AI software, drones and now an autonomous fighter jet. He previously founded NaturalMotion, sold to Zynga for $527M
Helsing raised a $1.8B Series E at an $18B valuation in July 2026
Jeannette zu Fürstenberg is President and Managing Director of General Catalyst, a $43B firm. She founded La Famiglia and sits on the boards of Helsing and Mistral
What they said
Helsing’s seed pitch deck predicted a full Russian invasion of Ukraine. They got it right, but the timing wrong: they expected in 2025
Russian forces now know how to fight with autonomous systems and are producing jet-powered attack drones at a rate of several thousand a month
The cost problem: a Shahed-type drone costs around $50,000, while a Patriot interceptor costs $2-4M, and sometimes you need several. Europe has no cheap way to defend against large numbers of long-range drones
In Ukraine tanks and artillery have almost disappeared from use, and drones have made the battlefield a no-go zone for humans. Yet Europe keeps buying tanks and artillery
Of Germany’s €500B defense package, Reil estimates a single-digit percentage goes into modern systems
On the F-35: the source code is controlled by the US, so if the US decides it won’t fly, it won’t fly
Helsing is building the CA-1 Europa autonomous fighter jet about an hour outside Munich. First flight is planned for next year
Their toughest moment was last summer, when they had to go from dozens of strike drones to thousands a month. Coming from software, supply chain resilience was the hardest lesson
A large part of the production team comes from German automotive, and Reil believes Europe’s ability to scale manufacturing is in many ways better than the US
Fürstenberg’s numbers: buying defense from outside Europe returns about 0.6 of each euro to the economy, building it in Europe returns about 1.5x
The most useful thing governments can do is become a customer and not be afraid to build champions. Grants and equity help much less
The takeaway: the defense budget is there, and the startups that win will be the ones that turn it into contracts for cheap, autonomous systems at scale.
10. Dara Khosrowshahi: Why the CEO Is Always the Last to Know
Who he is
Dara Khosrowshahi has been CEO of Uber since 2017, after running Expedia
In Q2 2026 Uber did 3.9 billion trips, up 18%, and $58B in gross bookings, up 24%, with 208 million monthly active users
In July 2026 Uber agreed to acquire Delivery Hero at an equity value of $14.8B, its largest deal ever, taking it to 99 countries
He was interviewed by Judith Dada, co-CEO of Langdock.
What he said
Uber’s autonomous rollout will reach 15 countries by the end of the year, he said, and they are testing in Munich with the Chinese self-driving company Momenta. He thinks streets will be fully autonomous in about 20 years
Uber has more than 10 million drivers and couriers. Because the business grows 20%+ a year, he expects to need more human drivers for years, even as robotaxis are added
The most expensive piece is infrastructure: Uber is investing billions of dollars to turn robotaxis from a cool experiment into an industry. He doesn’t want to repeat the EV mistake, where cars arrived before the chargers
Premium is Uber’s fastest-growing product, which is why he sees a place for German carmakers building a more refined autonomous experience
Delivery Hero brings global scale plus strong local brands. Uber has also committed another $2B in Germany over the next 10 years
Food was just the start. The goal is to deliver anything in 30 minutes, then 10-15 minutes with drones, and let any local shop offer the same through Uber Direct
His leadership lesson: the higher you go, the less you know what is really happening. Everything reaching the CEO has been through pre-meetings and corporate language, and “we screwed up” becomes “there are challenges in this market”
The edges of reality, the unpleasant and sharp bits, are where the advantage is. The only way he knows to get them back is to show his team he is human and has bad nights too
His advice to founders: never let go of the discomfort and the hunger. Getting comfortable, and filtering out the signals you don’t like, is the first step toward failure
The takeaway: as your company grows, design ways for bad news to reach you unfiltered, because it will stop arriving by default.
11. Steven Bartlett: The 40-Hour Hiring Week Behind The Diary of a CEO
Who he is
Steven Bartlett hosts The Diary of a CEO, one of the world’s biggest podcasts, with over 17 million YouTube subscribers
He co-founded the social media agency Social Chain, and now runs FlightStory, which has about 100 employees and around $47M in revenue, and was valued at about $425M in late 2025
He is the youngest investor ever on the BBC’s Dragons’ Den and has a portfolio of more than 100 companies
He was interviewed by June Sarpong and Karim Jalbout.
What he said
The book that shaped him is The Slight Edge by Jeff Olson (2005): everything in life compounds slowly and then fast, and the small things that are easy to do are also easy not to do
His team has a “1%” Slack channel for tiny improvements. One 10-second change to the podcast increased their subscriber growth rate by 300%
There is a “failure experimentation team” whose KPI is getting every department to run more experiments. He rewards trying, because results can’t be controlled
He uses Jeff Bezos’s split between reversible decisions (most of them) and irreversible ones. For reversible ones, the real cost is the months you waste deciding
“Paper walls”: rules everyone accepts that collapse when you push. An animator told him a video took seven days. Asked what it would take to do it in two, he said: a new laptop. They had been losing 70% of his time for four years
A principle he repeats, in his words: be “highly romantic about the why and incredibly unromantic about the how”. If an AI avatar serves his audience better, he would use it
The founder’s job is to point every team member’s energy in the same direction. As founder, every idea you share becomes an instruction, so he keeps a “Sunday shelf” of ideas he doesn’t release yet. The podcast sat on that shelf for months before 2020
He turned down a reported $100M deal to put the show exclusively on one platform. He thinks on a 50-year horizon, and within a few months they were earning more than the deal would have paid
The biggest lever: he spends 30 to 40 hours a week on hiring. Everything in the business comes out of someone’s head, so assembling the right people is the first domino
His advice on quitting: “never give up” is bad advice. You have to quit something before you can start something else, so learn to be a good quitter
The takeaway: the most leveraged hour a founder has is spent on hiring, and the rest compounds from there.
That was the day on the Inspiration Stage. Thank you to everyone who came, and to the Bits & Pretzels team for having me on the main stage.
Hope this was valuable!
Cheers,
Guillermo