Klaus Hommels

Keynote Klaus Hommels

Klaus Hommels’ core message is that venture capital can matter in defense only when it is practiced as long-horizon conviction-building rather than short-term, consensus-driven dealmaking. He frames defense as “very dear” to him and VC as “crucial” in that context, then explains that Felix asked him to reassess arguments he had made at Bits & Pretzels in 2019. At that earlier appearance, his topic was “Cold War 2.0 and the role of tech,” and he says the assumptions he made then are still “pretty accurate.” In the provided transcript, he sets up two aims: first, to explain how he believes VC should be done, and second, to translate that approach into the role of defense. He argues that VC is “way less glamorous” than outsiders think because it requires building a ten-year conviction around a trend or technology. He illustrates this with a sequence of personal investment theses. His first conviction was the access business: when he was young, he says he could invest only his “body” and “soul,” so he joined AOL and Freenet to help build access. Ten years later, he describes that as a sizable business. He then moved to B2C verticals, investing his own money before he had a fund, and mentions companies such as Skyping, Kings, Fortifers, and Airbnbs as models he believed were defendable over a decade. He reinforces the patience point with the line that there are no “overnight wonders.” Hommels then describes a fintech conviction, naming SumUp, Revolut, Klarna, and Coinbase as companies connected to that fifteen-year journey. Around “$22,000 thousand $10.10 ish” in the transcript, he says he became very worried about sovereignty: specifically, how people lead their lives when search and social media access had been lost to large platforms that dictate what people read and see. He gives the example of children consuming social media for three and a half hours a day, accumulating roughly twelve thousand hours by age twenty-four, which he equates to 7.1 working years that were once spent on sports, languages, and family time. The final part of the provided transcript shows his sovereignty thesis turning into a defense thesis as war arrived. He says the defense ecosystem was more complex because “nothing was existent,” although rising budgets offered an indication. He describes investors as “handcuffed” by ESG, with funds unable to invest in defense or weapons, few VCs willing to invest, and early defense companies sometimes unable even to open bank accounts. His conclusion in the available excerpt is that making an impact required building the ecosystem; he says he invested seven years in doing so and decided after Bits & Pretzels 2019 to join the MSC as a board member.