Point Nine Capital is led by its Managing Directors Pawel Chudzinski and Christoph Janz, with very active support from its Venture Partners Lukasz Gadowski and Kolja Hebenstreit.

We’re exclusively focused on early-stage investments in Internet companies. In particular we’re actively looking for investments in these areas:

• SaaS
• Marketplaces & Lead Generation
• eCommerce
• Mobile

When deciding whether to pursue an investment opportunity we look at a number of criteria. Important ones include the product, market size and market segment, potential of the business model, the quality of the startup team and the company’s early traction. We are attracted to original, innovative uses of web technology – but also to online business models that have been proven to work in other parts of the world. We have a strong bias for great products, signs of early traction and a clear route for monetization, but we don’t expect everything to be perfect. We’re called Point Nine Capital for a reason.

If you are the founder of a SaaS startup, you may want to read this blog post which our partner Christoph Janz recently wrote: What we look for in early-stage SaaS startups.

We’re looking for dedicated, passionate entrepreneurs who want to use the Internet to disrupt large markets. The best teams usually consist of a product genius, a rock-star developer and a sales & marketing guru, but don’t worry if your dream team isn’t complete yet. The most important things for us are dedication, business acumen and of course integrity. We love to work with experienced teams and serial entrepreneurs but we’re also happy to back young and relatively inexperienced founders if they make it up with their intelligence and their relentless drive. And by the way, we don’t care if your team is spread across the globe or if you have your most productive hours in the middle of the night. We often work like that too.

Our goal is to be the first institutional investor in a startup. The company may have raised a small amount of money from friends and family, launched a public beta version of the product and got some initial feedback and users but does not yet have enough traction to be considered by a larger, more traditional VC. We call this the “0.9 stage” of a company – that limbo stage when you’ve left angel investor paradise but aren’t ready for VC hell yet. In that stage – too big for private investors, too small for VCs – many startups find it hard to raise capital, and that’s when we’d like to get involved. However, we also consider investing at an even earlier stage if the concept and the team are exceptional.

Taken together, the team at Point Nine Capital has more than 40 years of experience with Internet startups under its belt. We’ve built or backed a number of highly successful companies including Brands4Friends, DealPilot, Mister Spex, Momox, Pageflakes, Spreadshirt, StudiVZ, Zendesk and many others. If you join our portfolio, we’ll put everything we have – expertise, know-how, contacts – at work for you because we have only one goal: Help you succeed.

That’s a good question, because just like we do a lot of due diligence before making an investment, you should do your due diligence on any investor who you’re considering to work with as well. After all, choosing your investors is one of the most critical decisions in the life of your startup. You’re more than welcome to talk to anyone who we’ve worked with in the past, and we’ll be happy to assist you with your reference checks.

If we have any common friends, ask them for an introduction. If not, just email us. The best proposals usually consist of 10-20 slides that answer the following questions:

• What’s the problem that you’re going to solve? There are probably exceptions but most successful companies solve a large problem. Amazon, for example, solved the problem that buying books offline sucks (tiny selection, high prices). If you’ve got a solution but there’s not a large problem that it solves, you may have a problem.
• How are you going to solve it? That’s the place to talk about your product or better yet, show it to us.
• What’s your business model or in other words, how are you going to make money?
• What’s your marketing strategy – how are you going to acquire thousands of businesses or millions of end users?
• How big is your market or market niche? You may not have reliable numbers but share your assumptions with us.
• Who are your competitors? List your most important competitors and tell us why you think you’re going to eat them for lunch.
• Who’s in your team and what have they done before?
• What’s the current status of the project and what are you planning to do with the funding?
• If you’ve launched already, please provide detailed KPIs. Most companies that we invest in have at least public beta already and we want to understand as well as possible how the take up of your product has been so far.

The size of our investment depends on the needs of the individual company. Typically we invest between €100,000 and €500,000 per startup.

Absolutely – especially if they bring in complementary value-add. We’ve co-invested with a variety of business angels as well as VC firms and we can also help you recruit additional investors for your round if you want to.

As Point Nine Capital’s Venture Partners, Lukasz and Kolja help us to find great startups and to evaluate investment opportunities. Importantly, they also support our portfolio companies with the vast amount of expertise gained from founding and backing a large number of successful Internet businesses.

Generally yes, because we usually seek their advice when we make investment decisions. However, we’re aware that founders of pre-launch startups sometimes prefer not to discuss their idea with Lukasz and Kolja because of Team Europe’s company building activities. Although it has never happened that Team Europe “stole” an idea we respect that concern. Therefore, if you want to discuss an investment proposal with us but you don’t want to share it with Lukasz and Kolja, please let us know before or when you send us your documents – we’ll be happy to honor that request strictly.

This FAQ list is still in progress. See, our own site is still at 0.9 stage as well. If you have any questions not answered here, please feel free to contact us.