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Zalando IPO in 2014: Who decides the value of a forecast?
Photo: Arne Dedert / picture alliance / dpa
In the world of start-ups, there is one sentence that every young company can remember.
You come across it at trade fairs and panels, in press releases and emails, sometimes explicitly, mostly as permanent background noise.
It reads "Fake it until you make it", in German: act successfully, then you will too.
Founders around the world have internalized the phrase and it has taken many of them far.
He made simple scooters "revolutionary mobility solutions" and simple delivery services raised hundreds of millions of euros in capital - regardless of their shaky balance sheets.
In the start-up industry, this theater is not only tolerated, but sometimes even encouraged.
Those who do the best will be rewarded in the end: with large rounds of financing, expensive takeovers and a flood of free PR on social media.
One wishes for court reports
One can therefore understand why journalists who scratch this facade are sometimes seen as spoilsport in the industry. "We only talk to the media if we get something out of it" is a statement that everyone knows who has written about the start-up scene. But it is seldom as explicit as in the Young Digital Economy Advisory Board.
In a position paper, influential founders and investors wrote how they imagine articles about the IPOs of young companies.
In short: you want yard reports.
The federal government should enact "rules to avoid unilaterally defamatory articles" and oblige the press to report on all IPOs - no matter how small, no matter how unimportant.
"The press must be disciplined," the document says.
Anonymous bloggers would have to be forced to use real names.
And "horrific" license fees for the reprint of texts should be abolished.
Viktor Orbán and Donald Trump could not have phrased the passage better.
Rowing back is not enough
After the »Handelsblatt« reported on the eleven-page document, a kind of collective backward row began in the industry. Whoever has something to say in the start-up scene has now "fully committed to freedom of the press", apologies and confessions were hailed, and at least one member of the advisory board announced his immediate resignation. This is a first step - but it is not enough.
Anyone who excuses the document as a one-off slip, as the opinion of individuals who have "overshot the mark", as Amorelie founder Lea-Sophie Cramer says, understands a lot about crisis PR - but little about the realities of the start-up scene. To do this, it is sufficient to speak to young entrepreneurs on a regular basis. Those who do this get to know a form of staging, language, and interaction that sometimes has little to do with a healthy understanding of freedom of the press.
Many founders do not perceive the media as equal interlocutors, as control mechanisms in a free democracy, but as one of many amplifiers in a noisy world.
Talk to founders and reinforce their messages?
You are welcome.
See the product in action?
D rather not.
Critical questions?
We're not in the lion's den here!
Welcome to america
Where the game of hide and seek can lead is shown in the United States.
Marc Andreessen, investor and co-founder of the venture capitalist Andreessen Horowitz, has been skirmishing with critical journalists for years, blocking them in social networks or excluding them from panel discussions.
Most recently, the investor founded his own medium, »Future«, which has since published benevolent articles about the boss's favorite projects.
Do you imagine such free media?
Investor Christoph Gerlinger, who screwed up the press passage in the advisory board's position paper, apparently does not want to go that far.
In the meantime he has apologized for simply saying "extremely unhappy and awkward".
Wirecard was also once a start-up
That may be, but how large parts of the scene think, reveals a comparison that the investor formulated in a guest article for the “Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung” in 2017 - and is now taking up again. The delivery start-up Delivery Hero was torn up by the financial press as an "overrated air number" when it went public, writes Gerlinger, while the restaurant chain Vapiano was classified as "serious and solid". Vapiano is broke today, Delivery Hero is worth $ 30 billion. Just what does that prove?
First and foremost, how selective Gerlinger looks at the media.
Numerous journalists, including those at SPIEGEL, pointed out the high risks for the now insolvent company when Vapiano went public - and gave Delivery Hero space to explain its business model.
On the other hand, the evidence shows a strange understanding of journalistic work: Are reports and comments only permissible if they are reflected in a company's stock market price?
Who decides on the value of a forecast and on which reference date?
Wirecard was also once a start-up.
When the share was still up, journalists were laughed at with similarly dumb arguments - and legally prosecuted.
Who needs such an advisory board?
It is good that the Advisory Board for Young Digital Economy is now ashamed of its document.
But there is another fact that he should admit to himself: Obviously, hardly anyone is interested in his expertise.
The document with the title »IPOs of German Startups« is dated April 15, so it is around four months old.
Apparently nobody read it, apart from the colleagues at the Handelsblatt.
Not Peter Altmaier (CDU), who said he saw the text published on the website of his own ministry for the first time on Monday.
Not the start-up scene, which reacted slightly panicked to the news.
Not even co-author Lea-Sophie Cramer, who was absent at the meeting in which the document was approved - and apparently had not read the text that appeared under her name.
Who needs such an advisory board, who is this body useful to? According to the Federal Ministry of Economics, the Young Digital Economy Advisory Board enables a “direct and practical dialogue between the young German digital and start-up scene with politics”. A dialogue in which both parties apparently cover their ears and applaud each other until someone takes a closer look. There is no better way to explain “Fake it until you make it”.
