Frank Thelen

• Internet founder since 1994 and VC since 2010 → thinks in decade-long cycles; unlikely to be moved by short-term market noise.
• Active public voice across books, newsletter, TV, and talk shows → high comfort with visibility; comfortable being the spokesman in any room.
• Founded ip.labs, doo, Scanbot, Freigeist, and TEQ Capital across different eras → high agency, wires himself to stay operationally involved rather than purely advisory.
• Hybrid role_type (founder + investor simultaneously) → expects to engage with both the strategic and hands-on layers of a conversation, not just the thesis level.
• Publicly tests products personally — hands-on with Tesla FSD and Waymo, amplifies Boston Dynamics Atlas — → forms views from first-hand experience, not analyst reports; responds well to demos over decks.
• Runs Innovation Pulse newsletter and posts on Bitcoin, robotics, AI, and European tech → signals he curates and publishes his own mental models; he'll notice if you're working from his published views.

Openers

• Open on ip.labs and Fujifilm — he co-founded a software company that got acquired by a Japanese imaging giant before most German founders understood what an exit looked like; it's the origin story of the whole trajectory.
• Reference doo winning Microsoft's Innovate 4 Society Award in 2012 — it's a specific, named moment that shows his early instinct for document and productivity infrastructure, long before that became a crowded space.
• Bring up his personal Waymo vs. Tesla FSD comparison — he publicly tested both and wrote about it; it's a sharp entry into how he evaluates exponential technology claims in practice, not in theory.

Discovery questions

1. You were seed investor in Lilium at a time when electric aviation in Europe had almost no institutional backing — what made you willing to carry that level of technical risk before the market validated it?
2. 10xDNA is built around exponential development curves — which of your current Freigeist portfolio companies do you think is most likely to hit that kind of inflection in the next five years, and why?
3. You ran board seats at KRAFTBLOCK, Xentral, and Lilium simultaneously alongside the fund — how do you decide when to stay on a board versus stepping back, and what does 360-degree support actually look like in practice?