Munich Travel educates, and sometimes even develops a life theme. At least that’s how it was a few years ago for longtime journalist Christoph Keese. His employer Axel Springer had sent him to the valley of the digital gods for a few months as a “Visiting Fellow”, to Palo Alto in California’s Silicon Valley, to where, according to old legend, a potential unicorn is created in every second garage, i.e. a start-up with a billion valuation.
The educational traveler from Berlin brought with him an insatiable desire for the new, for innovation in and of itself, from the trip to the “Love, Peace & Happiness” of the 21st century. That made Keese write his third book on the subject and become the managing director of Springer’s jump innovation agency Hy GmbH. Germany, where “California Dreaming” was just a pop song with Mama Cass for a long time, has proven to be very receptive to exciting stories from the digital wonderland.
In his new volume, Keese, quite “Get Your Guide”, takes us on a journey through Germany and Europe, always in search of the definitive “life changer”. These are the heroes of his stage. We have to imagine people who, with their start-up companies, represent the right “game changers” for a better life, who are tirelessly on the move in the service of progress.
It’s about “Change!” like in 2008 with Barack Obama, about “Yes we can” in the new German economy. It’s less about the logic of capitalist exploitation, although one has heard of scratching venture capital strategists who urge young entrepreneurial talents to “exit”, i.e. to make very early retirement provisions by going public or selling them. But here, in Keese’s “Magical Mystery Tour”, what counts is not the compulsion of capital, but the power of the right idea, whose time has come and which solves the problems.
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As an advisor to the financial firm Lakestar, Keese is good at having his say without giving away insider secrets. And didn’t the 28-year-old Karl Marx already preach the ideal of “doing this today, that tomorrow, hunting in the morning, fishing in the afternoon, raising livestock in the evening, criticizing after eating as I feel like, without ever to become a hunter, a fisherman, a shepherd, or a critic”? Technology makes it possible, the book conveys. Until then, we still have to overcome our six basic human fears: poverty, criticism, illness, the loss of a loved one, old age and death.
Technology is what our will can oppose to the blind rampage of chance. Christopher Keese
In the midst of all the problem stories and apocalyptic crisis books that are currently circulating, this roadshow by the pioneers is extremely stirring, inspiring and motivating. One reads fascinated. Also because you can feel that the author believes in two things: in the good and in the fact that the good will prevail.
Christoph Keese is undeniably a “rational optimist,” according to the title of a book by conservative politician and climate change skeptic Matt Ridley, who is often quoted here. You can also see Keese as a “homo faber” for whom technology has still found an answer. From this point of view, using the right tools makes the strategies of renunciation and prohibition discussed on the left superfluous. You don’t want to be an ascetic, then you’d rather be Sisyphus. The key phrase, please frame: “Technology is what our will can oppose to the blind rampage of chance.”
This optimism seems to carry through to the last page, at least according to the first impression. And so, like in a live performance, we experience Elon Musk speaking to a small group, the Greentech guru of Grünheide, who, unlike the usual “car guys”, does not spend years researching needs that don’t exist after all, but instead than “Mister Tesla” would rather put a model plant in the Brandenburg sands, in the swampy areas of Shanghai or somewhere else in the hotspots of globalization.
“It’s all about building the best factory. Everything else will take care of itself afterwards,” the magician explained to the author. The native South African, who is also Canadian, stands for the idea of the “First Principle”, the thinking derived from the big to the small. Jean-Baptiste Say, an economist born in the 18th century, would have enjoyed it. According to his theorem, every supply creates its own demand. “Ultimately, it’s all a question of physics,” we learn from Musk, but Angela Merkel taught us that.
Christoph Keese: Life Changer – Future made in Germany.
penguin
Munich 2022
300 pages
24 euros
Translation: K. Dürr, U. Held, C. Stoll, K. Petersen
Infected with this nothing-is-impossible spirit, we float to role models like Ugur Sahin from Biontech and his ingenious mRNA corona vaccine, to the two guys from Sono Motors in Munich, who plaster their car bodies with solar cells, to Augsburg to the rocket engine from the 3D printer, to nuclear fusion projects based on the semi-metal boron or to Upper Bavaria for the vertical take-off Lilium electric aircraft.
However, we are also located in a restaurant on Rosenthaler Platz in Berlin near the first coworking space “St. Oberholz” around and briefly count how many start-up stories we have read about since the founding of this latte macchiato start-up paradise.
And the enthusiasm documented by the author on this occasion for delivery services that are buzzing around everywhere at Rosenthaler Platz does not necessarily have to be understood either. After all, all the “gorillas” are economically “pygmy chimpanzees”, most of whom will be gone in a few years despite the cheap gig economy and you will then wonder why in God’s name bike messenger organizations are mistaken for “technology companies”. became.
The “Lifechangers” are not about fast-lane food anyway, but about really healthy, good nutrition, and this topic is clearly very important to Christoph Keese. Nowhere does the author’s will to change come across as personally and emphatically as in his plea for meat substitutes and the start-ups active here. The fate of the animals in the stables has left a lasting impression on him and his children, and plant-based burgers are said to taste even better than beef ones.
In 2016 he received the German Business Book Prize.
(Photo: imago/Sven Simon)
The verve of this well-written book, which also dares excursions into politics and day-to-day philosophy, will please anyone who is more closely involved with start-ups, research and change culture. These are also the core elements of this country’s reform agenda, which have sometimes been forgotten because of the war.
The Tour d’horizon lacks a blueprint for how we can bring together all the great young people from the universities, the researchers, the state and the entrepreneurs in such a way that, in the end, thanks to American venture capital, the cream doesn’t end up back in Silicon Valley or skimmed off in Seattle.
Lessons learned from the Web 2.0 euphoria
After all, in 2021 an impressively increased risk capital of 17.4 billion euros circulated in Germany. Years ago, Keese could not have imagined that. But we didn’t think mini-interest rates and a permanent investment crisis were possible either. Finally, a question mark has to be placed behind his statement, which is to be welcomed both normatively and morally, that creativity thrives best in a free economy, while one-party dictatorships regularly stifle innovations. Yes, we all want that, but the many patents “made in China” speak a different language.
One has just come to terms with the fact that Keese’s belief in life-changing innovations and in saving the planet is almost infinite when he does a pirouette on page 204.
After a conversation with a friend who reminded him of the huge optimism he showed in 2004 regarding the unifying power of Web 2.0, Keese suddenly found, after a long period of reflection, that he was probably taken in by the “pro-innovation bias”, i.e. accidentally wearing rose-colored glasses touched down while looking at the world. Unfortunately, this is not followed by a consideration of whether the “Web 3.0” currently being discussed could be a decentralized “life changer” against the dominance of Big Tech.
As a lesson from his Web 2.0 over-euphoria, Keese now recommends “the habitual exercise of a critical look over the shoulder”. If you introduce a new technology, he explains, it is equally likely that sooner or later it will be used for all imaginable purposes and “not just develop in the direction of the desired progress”. There are also side effects. And there are innovations that have a negative impact on society, while some simply don’t deliver on their dollar and cent promises.
Somewhat self-deprecatingly, one wonders whether the “pro-innovation bias” might also apply to Keese’s bold prediction that manual driving will “belong to the forgotten cultural techniques” in the future, after all, hardly anyone knows how to cut kale or Potato dumplings prepared because both are available pre-cooked everywhere and taste better than you think anyway. He has to explain that to someone in Lower Saxony or Upper Bavaria.
But before we start thinking, let’s turn the page and read a message: “We can do it. A new era of technical breakthroughs has begun.” That is the formula of this book: “Obama plus Merkel plus high-tech”. We learn that, despite everything, times should be good for “life changers”.
More: Handelsblatt Disrupt: Tech reporter Holzki: “Germany has the chance to have its own start-up DNA”