Über Wachstumsphasen und Nahtoderfahrungen zum Exit

Das Berliner Unternehmen Signavio, 2021 für rund 1 Milliarde von SAP übernommen, ist einer der ganz großen deutschen Startup-Erfolgsgeschichten –  trotz scheinbar übermächtiger Wettbewerber wie Software AG, IBM und Celonis. Aber wie sieht so eine erfolgreiche Startup-Geschichte eigentlich von innen aus? Was waren die Stolpersteine, die den Anbieter einer Business Process Management-Software nah an den Abgrund führen? Wie funktioniert ein Unternehmensverkauf genau und was kommt danach?

Auf all diese Fragen gibt es nicht die eine Antwort, denn jede Unternehmensgeschichte ist anders. Signavio-Gründer Gero Decker liefert in seinem Buch “Signavio: Together As One”, das aktuell erschienen ist, seine Antworten auf alle diese Fragen. Das spannende Gründerbuch folgt dabei der Geschichte des Unternehmens – von den Anfängen an der Uni, über krasse Wachstumsphasen, aber auch Nahtoderfahrungen, bis hin zur Integration in die SAP. Hier ein Auszug aus Buch (99 Cent), das es auch als kostenloses Audiobook gibt.

“Gero, I know exactly who you are.” he said while pointing his finger straight at my face.

CeBIT was in full swing once again. Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, and Deutsche Telekom dominated the venue with their massive booths and extravagant displays. In the evenings, they spared no expense in throwing lavish parties for their clients, with live music, full buffets, and free-flowing drinks.

Signavio, by contrast, had a tiny booth, barely big enough for a single monitor and one chair. We didn’t host a party in the evening; we couldn’t even afford proper hotel rooms. Instead, we rode the train back to a friend’s apartment and crashed on air mattresses on his kitchen floor.

Our main competitor, Software AG, showcased its dominance with an impressive booth. As Germany’s second-largest software company, they drew significant attention, even from Chancellor Angela Merkel, who visited their demo showcase each year.

Angela Merkel didn’t stop by our booth. We were nobody. Software AG was the star.

However, fortune found us that evening when a former colleague snuck us into their booth party. It felt like enemy territory, but I had a mission: While we couldn’t beat them in the marketplace, at least we could drink them into bankruptcy tonight.

True to my mission, I stationed myself at the bar and ordered one cocktail after another.

There was a guy sitting next to me, doing the exact same thing like I was doing. He ordered one drink after the other and he didn’t talk to a single person.

I started talking to him. He seemed nice.

“Sorry, I didn’t introduce myself. My name is Gero. What is yours?” I said, about fifteen minutes into the conversation.

“Gero, I know exactly who you are.” he said while pointing his finger straight at my face and continued “I have been tracking you very closely.”

It turned out that he was a senior product executive at Software AG. He told me that they ran a quarterly product steering committee and that they were becoming increasingly paranoid. They had a list of companies that could potentially kill them one day and Signavio had risen to the top of their list over the last two quarters.

Interesting, I thought to myself. I always considered ourselves to be this tiny, insignificant startup from Berlin that the big guys would not even notice. We were making a million in revenues. Their revenue was around a billion euros, they were a thousand times bigger!

I was intrigued and wanted to know how they perceived us and why they put us on their map. He told me he had tried our product and hated it.

“Full of bugs and,” he paused, “a very limited feature set. I don’t understand why customers would choose your product over ours, because ours offers everything a customer could ever wish for.” He sighed and continued.

“No matter how much you hurt us, there is one thing that makes me very positive about our future. You only seem to have customers in Germany. So, if you just leave us the rest of the world, we can happily coexist.”

Note to myself: Expand internationally. What country should we go to next? That evening, I was too tired to think about it.

It was quite funny, really. Here was a senior executive from our biggest competitor, admitting we were enough of a concern to be on their radar and unwittingly giving us the exact growth strategy that would continue to worry them. All while they were picking up the tab for the drinks!

The next morning, we gathered at our booth, and I shared the story with the team. Up until that point, I had never really considered the geographical distribution of our customer base.

Gerrit responded immediately: “It’s no surprise that our customers are mostly German. This is where all our sellers are based. If we want customers in other countries, we need to go there and build local sales teams.”

Until that moment, I had never really considered it. Every Signavio employee worked out of a single office in Berlin. We began to discuss where to expand next.

People insisted, “Gero, there is only one place in the world where you can build a real software company and that is Silicon Valley. If you stay in Berlin, Signavio will never be more than a pet project.”

I traveled on a budget, as always. It took 30 hours before I finally landed in San Francisco. Exhausted and disoriented, I had no idea how to get from the Palo Alto train station to my final destination in Sunnyvale.

Our office, the Plug and Play Tech Center, was a fascinating place. More than 200 startups operated within its walls. The entrance showcased colorful logos and big signs celebrating former tenants, highlighting notable acquisitions or IPOs. Elon Musk and his first company, PayPal, had been based there before their acquisition by eBay. These stories were legendary, fueling the collective sense of ambition and possibility. Naturally, I liked to imagine that Elon Musk had sat in my cubicle at some point.

The sentiment in the Valley was infectious: anyone could make it. This was where the future was born.

I tried to soak it in as much as I could. I attended all the networking and pitching events in our building (and there were many of them). I went to meetups and presentations at Stanford. I went to hackathons to build the next cool travel app or crazy gadgets, like robots that would detect the location of your face and then spit out whisky shots in your direction. I relished the long discussions about what might become the next big thing in tech.

Money was flowing around like crazy. Every day, there was another funding round: hundreds of thousands for a promising idea next door, millions for a startup just gaining traction down the street. Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram for $1 billion dollars – despite the company having zero revenues and only 13 employees – that was the talk of the town. It was insane.

The Valley was a magnet for people from all over the world. If you had an idea too outlandish for your home country, Silicon Valley was the place to test it. Take Pavel from Slovakia, whom I met at a random event. He showed me his app, called m.dot, which let users build websites on their phones. He arrived in California in April, secured venture funding by June, and sold the company to GoDaddy for fifteen million dollars a year later. Bam, just like that. These stories were everywhere.

My mentor, who had sold his company to Borland, now lived in a stunning mansion on top of a mountain. His neighbor? Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple.

In the Valley, the sky truly seemed to be the limit. Everyone seemed to know someone who had turned a niche business idea into a multimillion-dollar success that reshaped the world.

The question wasn’t: Will it work? It was: What’s stopping you from making $100 million dollars in revenue this year? Granted, very few startups ever achieved that, but the question itself fueled big dreams and big bets.

In Germany, the approach to building things was much more cautious. Quality, careful planning, and long-term sustainability were the focus. But in Silicon Valley, you claimed you’d invented the next big thing, believed it, and then made it happen – or failed spectacularly along the way, like most did.

While I was inspired by the energy and boundless optimism, I couldn’t help but appreciate what we had at Signavio that many Valley companies didn’t – substance. We had real customers with real pain points, who paid real money for a product that actually solved their problems.

Then came a longer phone call with my girlfriend Karolina. That’s when she dropped the news – she was pregnant!

Oh, that was unexpected. Kids had not been on the agenda so far. The idea was that she would join me in Sunnyvale in a few months. I said “Wonderful, we are going to have a California baby!”

Karolina was slightly more stressed. She wasn’t feeling well, and the thought of having a baby far from home was not an option for her.

“No way,” she said firmly. “I give you six more weeks to sort out whatever you need, and then you come back to me.”

The time pressure hit me like a wave. I didn’t want to return to Berlin empty-handed. So, I turned my focus to building “Signavio, Inc.” with even greater urgency.

Signavio: Together As One

Dieser Beitrag ist ein Auszug aus dem Buch “Signavio: Together As One”. Vor wenigen Jahren ging das 2009 gegründete Unternehmen Signavio für rund 1 Milliarde an SAP. Gründer Gero Decker erzählt in seinem Buch nun die spannende Geschichte des Unternehmens – von den Anfängen an der Uni, über krasse Wachstumsphasen, aber auch Nahtoderfahrungen. In der Beschreibung heißt es: “This book is perfect for anyone interested in the details of technological innovation, scaling a company, and strategic mergers and acquisitions. It’s especially useful for current and future tech leaders, offering lessons on building a united team and achieving long-term growth in a competitive market.” Das Buch ist kürzlich als Kindle-E-Book und als Audiobook erschienen. 

Startup-Jobs: Auf der Suche nach einer neuen Herausforderung? In der unserer Jobbörse findet Ihr Stellenanzeigen von Startups und Unternehmen.