Interviewer: Felix, there’s a specific kind of fatigue in the current venture ecosystem. We’ve moved from an era of growth-at-all-costs to a sudden, almost panicked obsession with “efficiency.” But you’ve been talking about something different—Substanz. When you look at the landscape today, how much of what we see is still just “Venture Theater”?
Felix Hüttenbach: It’s a significant portion, honestly. Venture Theater is what happens when the metrics become the mission. It’s the cycle of raising a bridge round to justify a previous valuation that was based on a narrative rather than a unit economic reality. For me, the theater ends when the operator realizes that a high valuation is actually a debt to the future. If you haven’t built the underlying plumbing—the operational rigor—you’re just a protagonist in someone else’s fund marketing deck. I’m interested in what happens when the lights go out and you’re left with the actual business. Do you have a product people pay for because it solves a structural pain, or do you have a subsidized experiment?
Interviewer: You often identify as an Operator-Investor. That’s a hyphenation many people claim, but few actually live. How does being an operator change the way you look at a cap table or a term sheet?
Felix Hüttenbach: It changes the “why” behind the capital. An investor looks at a spreadsheet and sees a path to a 10x exit. An operator looks at the same spreadsheet and sees the hiring plan, the technical debt, and the cultural friction that comes with scaling from 20 to 100 people. When I look at a deal, I’m not just looking for a financial instrument; I’m looking for echte Deals—real deals where the capital is a catalyst for existing momentum, not a life-support system for a failing hypothesis. If I’m investing, I’m thinking about the Monday morning stand-up meeting. I’m thinking about whether the founder has the stomach for the unglamorous work of fixing a broken sales funnel or if they’re just in it for the demo day applause.
Interviewer: Let’s talk about that “unglamorous work.” You’ve seen companies from the inside during periods of extreme friction. What is the one operational metric that founders consistently ignore in favor of vanity?
Felix Hüttenbach: It’s almost always the true cost of complexity. Founders love to add—add features, add markets, add headcount. But every addition creates exponential coordination overhead. I’ve seen companies double their engineering team and see their ship-rate drop by 30%. They don’t account for the “entropy tax.” As an Operator-Investor, I’m looking for founders who have the discipline to say “no.” Long-term Substanz is built on simplicity. It’s about doing three things at a world-class level rather than twelve things at a mediocre level.
Interviewer: Does that discipline make it harder to find founders? The current culture rewards the “visionary” who promises the moon.
Felix Hüttenbach: It makes it harder to find the popular founders, but easier to find the durable ones. The visionary who can’t read a P&L is a liability. I want the visionary who understands their CAC-to-LTV ratio as well as they understand their product roadmap. We’ve entered a period where Founder-First doesn’t mean coddling the founder; it means giving them the brutal truth about their runway and their product-market fit. Being Founder-First means being there for the hard pivots, not just the champagne rounds.
Interviewer: You’ve mentioned that “echte Deals” require a certain level of skin in the game that goes beyond the check. How do you maintain that without micromanaging?
Felix Hüttenbach: It’s a delicate balance. It’s about being a sparring partner. If I’m in the weeds of your daily operations, I’m failing as an investor. But if I don’t understand the weeds, I can’t give you strategic advice. I provide the framework, the “operator’s lens.” I help them see the corners they’re about to turn. But the founder has to drive the car. My role is to make sure the car has an engine and not just a very shiny hood.
Interviewer: When you say “engine,” what are the specific components you’re looking for? If we strip away the pitch deck, what are the primary indicators that a company has Substanz?
Felix Hüttenbach: It starts with the integrity of the data. In Venture Theater, data is used as a weapon of persuasion. In a high-substance company, data is a diagnostic tool. I look at cohort retention—real, unvarnished retention. Are people coming back because the product is indispensable, or because you’re running a perpetual discount? Then I look at the organizational velocity. How long does it take for a decision to go from a Slack message to a deployed feature? If that loop is lengthening while the headcount is growing, you have a structural rot. Long-term Substanz is about building a machine that can scale without breaking its own internal logic. It’s about having a “Common Operating Picture” where the intern and the CEO are looking at the same reality.
Interviewer: You’ve been quite vocal about the “Bridge Round” trap. It feels like the ultimate manifestation of the theater—postponing the inevitable. How do you advise founders who are staring at a flat or down round?
Felix Hüttenbach: The advice is usually: stop performing. The bridge round is often a vanity play to avoid the “stigma” of a down round. But a down round with a clean cap table and a realistic plan is far better than a bridge round laden with liquidation preferences that will wipe out the founders and employees anyway. That’s the “operator” in me speaking—I’d rather have a smaller piece of a healthy, growing company than a large piece of a zombie. Echte Deals are honest deals. They reflect the current value of the assets and the risks ahead. If you’re a founder, your job isn’t to protect the last round’s valuation; your job is to protect the company’s ability to exist in five years.
Interviewer: This seems to require a level of ego-death that is rare in tech. Most founders are conditioned to believe that their personal worth is tied to their post-money valuation.
Felix Hüttenbach: Exactly. And that’s the poison. We’ve spent a decade training founders to be “Chief Fundraising Officers.” When the music stops, they realize they’ve forgotten how to be Chief Operating Officers. They don’t know how to cut costs without killing morale. They don’t know how to renegotiate vendor contracts. They’re great at the “big vision” keynote but terrified of the spreadsheet where the burn is calculated. My goal as an Operator-Investor is to re-skill them. I want to help them find the pride in building a resilient, cash-flow-positive business. There is immense dignity in a company that doesn’t need its next round to survive.
Interviewer: Let’s talk about the term “Founder-First.” It’s become such a cliché. In your view, how does an investor actually practice being Founder-First when the news is bad?
Felix Hüttenbach: Being Founder-First is easiest when things are going up and to the right. It’s easy to be supportive during an exit. The real test is when a founder has to fire their co-founder, or when their lead product fails in the market. In those moments, I’m not looking for a “return on investment” in the short term; I’m looking to preserve the founder’s capacity to lead. Sometimes that means telling them to take a weekend off. Sometimes it means telling them they are being too soft on their executive team. It’s about radical candor. If I see a founder participating in Venture Theater—pretending everything is fine when it isn’t—I have to call it out. If I don’t, I’m not being “first” to the founder; I’m being a co-conspirator in their failure.
Interviewer: You mentioned “entropy tax” earlier. How do you spot that from the outside during due diligence?
Felix Hüttenbach: You look at the communication overhead. I ask founders: “How many people need to be in a room to change a button on the landing page?” If the answer is six people and three departments, the entropy tax is too high. I also look at their “Technical Debt vs. Feature Velocity” ratio. Companies with no Substanz keep building on top of a shaky foundation until the whole thing topples. An operator knows that sometimes you have to spend a quarter doing nothing but refactoring code. A “theater” investor will hate that because it doesn’t show “growth” on the slide deck. But that refactoring is exactly what allows for the next three years of growth.
Interviewer: It sounds like you’re describing a “Boring is Beautiful” philosophy. Is that fair?
Felix Hüttenbach: It’s not that it’s boring; it’s that it’s disciplined. Building a world-changing company is actually quite tedious most of the time. It’s a series of thousands of small, correct decisions. The theater wants the “Eureka!” moment and the “Move fast and break things” mantra. But if you’re building a fintech or a healthcare company, “breaking things” means losing people’s life savings or health data. That’s not a badge of honor; it’s incompetence. I want the “boring” stuff—reliable infrastructure, clear internal documentation, predictable sales cycles. That is the bedrock of Long-term Substanz. When you have those, you have the permission to be “visionary” on top of them.
Interviewer: How does this focus on “echte Deals” change your sourcing strategy? Are you looking in places other investors aren’t?
Felix Hüttenbach: I’m looking for founders who are slightly “un-slick.” I like the founders who aren’t on the “30 Under 30” lists but are instead deep in the forums of their specific industry, talking to customers. I’m looking for the second-time founder who failed their first time because they got caught up in the theater and is now obsessed with unit economics. I’m looking for the “quiet winners”—companies in Berlin, Munich, or even smaller hubs that have been bootstrapping because they didn’t want to deal with the VC circus. Those are the echte Deals. They have a chip on their shoulder and a focus on the customer that you don’t find in the hype-cycle hubs.
Interviewer: You have a very specific “Operator-Driven” approach to the Board level. How do you handle a board meeting differently than a traditional VC?
Felix Hüttenbach: Traditional board meetings are often theater in themselves. The management prepares a deck for two weeks, spends three hours presenting it, everyone nods, and then they leave. It’s a waste of time. My preferred board meetings are 20% looking back and 80% looking forward at specific blockers. I don’t want a “status update”; I can read that in an email. I want to talk about why the VP of Sales isn’t hitting their numbers. I want to talk about the competitor who just raised $100M and how we’re going to outmaneuver them without spending a dime. I want to talk about the “Long-term Substanz” of the culture. Are we burning out our best people? That’s an operator’s board meeting. It’s an working session, not a performance.
Interviewer: Does this “Long-term Substanz” approach require a different type of LP (Limited Partner) for your investments?
Felix Hüttenbach: Absolutely. If an LP is looking for a quick flip or a “mark-up” within six months so they can show their board a high IRR on paper, they won’t like my style. I want LPs who understand that building something of value takes time. They have to be comfortable with the fact that I might tell a company not to raise their next round yet because they aren’t ready. They have to value the “Operator-Investor” model because they know it leads to fewer total losses. In the theater, you have a lot of “stars” that flame out. In my world, we’re trying to build “suns”—stable, long-term sources of energy and value.
Interviewer: We’ve talked a lot about what you avoid. Let’s talk about what you gravitate toward. Is there a specific technological shift that you think demands this high-substance approach right now?
Felix Hüttenbach: Vertical AI is a big one. Not the “wrapper” companies that just use an API to do something generic, but companies that are integrating AI into deep, specialized workflows. To win there, you can’t just have good tech; you have to understand the nuances of the industry—the “operator” knowledge. You have to know how a lawyer actually thinks, or how a factory floor actually runs. That’s where echte Deals are happening. You’re solving a problem so specific and so painful that the customer doesn’t care about your valuation; they care that you’re making their life 10x easier. That is the ultimate Substanz.
Interviewer: To bring it back to the “Founder-First” theme—how do you help a founder transition from a “Theater” mindset to a “Substanz” mindset? Can people actually change, or do you have to find them already “converted”?
Felix Hüttenbach: People can change, but it usually takes a “near-death” experience for the company. When the bank account is dwindling and the “narrative” isn’t working anymore, that’s when the ego drops. I call it the “Coming to Jesus” moment for operators. I help them by stripping away the noise. We sit down and we ask: “If we had to run this business with five people and no more funding, what would we do?” It’s a focusing exercise. It’s painful, it’s raw, but it’s where the real company is born. My job as an Operator-Investor is to be the person who stays in the room when that conversation is happening, while the “theater” investors are already looking for the exit.
Interviewer: Does this mindset ever feel lonely? You’re essentially calling out the “emperor has no clothes” in an industry built on clothes.
Felix Hüttenbach: It can be. But the results speak for themselves. When the bubble bursts—and it always does—the people who focused on Long-term Substanz are the ones still standing. There is a great deal of satisfaction in being right for the right reasons. I’m not interested in being the loudest voice in the room; I’m interested in being the one with the most durable portfolio.
Interviewer: Felix, if you look at the next five years, what is the “Venture Theater” trend you think will be the most embarrassing in retrospect?
Felix Hüttenbach: I think we will look back at the “Growth at any CAC” era with total disbelief. The idea that we were essentially “buying” revenue with VC dollars to show growth to the next VC—it’s a literal Ponzi scheme of metrics. It will be the “subprime mortgage” of our industry. And when we look back, the heroes won’t be the ones who raised the most; they will be the ones who used capital as a tool, not a crutch. They will be the ones who focused on echte Deals and built something that actually worked.
Interviewer: Last question for this session—if a founder is reading this and realizes they’ve been performing “Venture Theater,” what is the very first thing they should do tomorrow morning?
Felix Hüttenbach: They should fire their ego. They should walk into their office—or jump on their first Zoom—and admit to their team exactly where the business stands. No “spin,” no “visionary” fluff. Just: “Here is our burn, here is our real retention, and here is what we need to do to build Long-term Substanz.” It’s the most terrifying thing a founder can do, but it’s the only way to save the company. The moment you stop performing is the moment you start building.
Interviewer: That’s a powerful place to stop. We’ve managed to dissect the theater; in our next conversation, I want to dive even deeper into the specific operational frameworks you use to build that Substanz.
Felix Hüttenbach: Looking forward to it. Let’s get to work.
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