Jakob Stein
Jakob is one of our partners based in Berlin. He is investing across the AI stack but especially passionate about enterprise AI, compute infra and more than anything, physical AI.
At a young age, I used to spend a lot of Sundays on the terrace of Berlin Airport. I stood there weekend after weekend, year after year, watching planes. I developed such an enthusiasm for it that I can now tell reliably from the ground which aircraft flies over my head and which models the 300 largest airlines have in their fleet. What others found on Instagram, I got out of my Flightradar24 gold subscription.
The rest of my upbringing and study years were a selection of many short chapters glued together. I lived in Argentina, the US, Singapore, Brazil and the UK all before I had my first job. Already during my bachelor's, I got hooked on entrepreneurship, and I was among the co-founders of today's largest student-run entrepreneurship conference in Germany and won national student pitch competitions, allowing me access to the Valley early on.
The Berlin team in the park
Straight out of university, I went for an internship at Creandum to understand venture. This gave me and my aviation passion access to Olli and Moritz from cargo.one. Start-up life became addictive, and I cancelled my offer with McKinsey three weeks before I was supposed to start, stayed at cargo.one and launched North America. In the first six months, we faced many headwinds, and we fell short of all expectations. After a year, we turned the market around, things started to go well, and at some point, I felt we had solved the task of getting North America from 0 to 1.
When Creandum offered me the chance to come back, I didn’t need to think twice. I realized over the last few years that I derive great fulfilment from helping others achieve their full potential. Venture at Creandum is a team sport – and I like it that way.
Ginger, Hanel, Lisa, and Jakob all the way up
Joining venture full-time at the dawn of the AI cycle allowed me to partner with amazing entrepreneurs solving vertical AI like Doinstruct and Plancraft. But also more technical challenges in physical AI with Sereact and stealth teams bringing the best out of this new technology for high-frequency trading and deeply technical data centre operations. This is where Europe's edge is sharpest: deep technical talent, industrial hidden-champions around the corner, and problems too hard for the web-agency playbook. The moment manufacturing, robotics, GPU clusters or AI on the edge is touched, I am already all-in!
Launch day for cargo.one US interrupted by a fire alarm
In a world where expertise is a few keystrokes away, the quest to get out there and build connections has been my main mantra. I flew to 11 countries over 25 times in CEE to meet founders in person before doing my first deal in the region. The latest advancements Sereact is doing are best felt by crashing on a mattress in their robolab once a year. DACH and CEE together are 250M people with unicorns in 23 cities – there's no shortage of travel hours, which suits my soft spot for office-first execution and meeting founders on the ground.
Who says VC is glamorous?
Besides that, one of my biggest hobbies is organizing trips to remote locations like Guyana, Tajikistan, Zambia, or Iraq. Once a year, I plan those trips for my closest friends without them knowing where we’re going. I organize everything from flights to visas to vaccination appointments. For me, the team spirit that grows with every struggle faced locally creates memories that we’ll carry with us throughout our lives.