Die Samwer-Anomalie

Max Chafkin für Inc. Magazine:

In a country with one of the lowest rates of entrepreneurship in the world—Germans are so risk averse that most still don’t use credit cards—Samwer is an anomaly: a swashbuckling Internet mogul with an estimated net worth of $1 billion. He is both the most important German entrepreneur and the most reviled.

So wird Deutschland im Rest der Welt wahrgenommen.

Über die Arbeitsweise von Rocket Internet:

A few days after I meet with Samwer, I visit Rocket’s headquarters, a six-story office building on the old East German side of the Brandenburg Gate that houses 200 of the company’s 500 employees. I listen as managing director Alexander Kudlich explains how he and Samwer decide which start-ups to imitate. The market must be big—$1 billion or more—and there must be a proven business model that has worked in another region. Rocket looks for „burger and beer opportunities,“ universal products and services that are not specific to a given culture or region. „Once we see those things come together, then we map the business model against countries and see where there are white spots,“ Kudlich says. „Then we do it.“

Rocket Internet ist stolz darauf, die Risiken zu minimieren. Insofern sind die Samwers weniger Anomalie und mehr die konsequente Kulmination der deutschen Riskioaversion. (Auch die bei Rocket aktiven Gründer sind keine Unternehmer, sondern Angestellte. Das ist ebenfalls sehr deutsch.)