The core message of this founder-story session was that the decisions that reshape a company are often lonely, hard to reverse, and deeply tied to the founder’s ability to face uncomfortable realities. The moderator framed the discussion around how responsibility changes once a startup grows: the bigger the team becomes, the more decisions fall on the founder’s desk. Florian Scherl, CEO of explaino, represented a founder who started as a teenager with an AI-driven movie-company vision and moved into B2B enterprise knowledge. Aiga Senftleben, co-founder and managing director of Billie, brought the perspective of an experienced founder building B2B payments with an already seasoned founding team.

Aiga’s first major example was the decision of where to found Billie as a fintech company. Because Billie operates in a regulated financial environment, choosing the regulator was not just an administrative choice but a strategic one. She explained that PayPal’s banking license in Luxembourg and German regulation through BaFin shaped her own perspective, and she acknowledged her bias from knowing BaFin already. While having a German license can serve as a trust symbol in the market, she also described BaFin as very strict and “gold plating almost everything,” making the decision one she is “not entirely sure” she would repeat in Germany. Florian then contrasted this with his own learning: he began by building AI video technology for consumers because he wanted to create “cool tech,” but later realized he had underestimated the importance of building from the market and customer point of view.

The conversation then moved from market and regulatory decisions to people decisions. Florian described team choices as the hardest decisions in a company, citing two co-founder breakups and the need to let go of founding team members. His pattern was to delay those decisions, only to realize afterward that resolving misalignment made the company move faster and recover energy. Aiga echoed the difficulty from a larger-company perspective, noting that Billie had 105 employees at the time and had previously had more. She emphasized that founders must not only take hard decisions but communicate them well, especially when workforce needs change, such as shifting from junior to more senior talent or reassessing teams in light of AI-driven development.

The final section focused on how to downsize without destroying trust. Aiga drew on her PayPal experience, where hiring and layoffs swung back and forth roughly every eighteen months, to stress the importance of zooming out from personal relationships and redesigning the organization clearly. At Billie, she personally spoke with almost everyone affected by layoffs, helped people find new roles in the ecosystem, and saw nearly all of them attend the Christmas party afterward, which she presented as evidence that the process had preserved respect. Florian closed with how he compensated for limited experience by building a mentor and advisory structure: investors, people who had scaled companies, and HR leaders from MDAX and DAX companies became a sounding board for decisions on pricing, go-to-market, and hiring.