Icon: enlarge
Me:
Companions ascribe
self-
centeredness
to N26 founder
Valentin Stalf
.
His start-up is suffering as a result.
Photo: Wolfgang Kumm / dpa / picture alliance
"Psst. We have big news. No, delete that. Big news."
The deeper meaning of the Herzilein message to customers, placed on the website and everywhere else: the USA, supposed home of the digital avant-garde, is finally part of the N26 family.
It is July 2019, and N26 founders Valentin Stalf (34) and Maximilian Tayenthal (40) also want to adequately hype the start of the mega market with theirs: Now you are in the concert of the big ones.
A screen is effectively set up in the large area of the Berlin headquarters of the start-up bank.
It shows: a waiting list, a map on which new registrations pop up, and numbers that are supposed to prove success.
A few days later, the monitor is removed from the office.
"It was embarrassing," says an insider today.
"The demand was much lower than expected."
At least on the official side, you see it very differently with N26.
One is the "most successful European mobile bank" in the USA.
The attitude of simply ignoring the unpleasant has meanwhile become a system at N26.
manager magazin spoke to ex-executives and insiders, and almost all of them attest the founding couple - albeit with different emphasis - to learning resistance, self-adulation and megalomania.
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