Christian Stiebner
General Partner
Sessions (2)
Sessions featuring Christian Stiebner at Bits & Pretzels 2026 | Founders Festival in Munich
Golden Pretzel Award - Pre-Round I
The available transcript presents the Golden Pretzel Award pre-round as a deliberately redesigned pitch format: 11 handpicked startups are not only pitching to investors, but appearing alongside the investors who selected them. Host Flo Akinbiyi frames the session as a high-energy, audience-supported competition at Bits and Pretzels 2026, with six minutes for each startup-investor presentation and three minutes for concise jury questions. The jury is introduced as Anna Fedulov of Rotom Capital, focused on underrepresented founders; Inge von Holz of UnternehmerTUM, described as leading startups and investments; and Jan Reicherheit of 10x Founders, noted for building and selling Mendeley. The first company, Arch, is presented by Antler’s Christoph Klink together with founder Eli Waxman.
Picking Winners: A Discussion On Fund Selection
The core message of the discussion was that successful fund selection is built less on a single metric and more on deep, long-term LP-GP alignment: trust in the people, detailed understanding of the underlying portfolio, and a differentiated strategy that can plausibly earn venture-scale returns. The conversation opened by establishing the relationship between Vintage and BlueYard. Leyla explained that Vintage has backed BlueYard since Fund One in 2015, while Mike described BlueYard as a deep tech and frontier tech-focused pre-seed and seed fund currently closing its fourth fund, with Vintage among its earliest and closest LP partners. Leyla then outlined Vintage’s broader venture platform: $5 billion in AUM across early-stage fund-of-funds programs in the U.S., Europe, and Israel, growth co-investments, and secondary investing in both funds and companies. She emphasized that Vintage’s work with traditional enterprises—such as insurance, CPG, and automotive companies—is intended to connect large incumbents with the innovation economy and make Vintage more useful to managers and portfolio companies. When asked how Vintage assesses managers, she described a framework centered on people and team dynamics, track record and portfolio underwriting, and whether strategy and terms fit the manager’s stated positioning. In BlueYard’s case, she said confidence came partly from knowing the portfolio companies intimately, including traction or upcoming up-rounds not yet obvious in benchmark data. The discussion then shifted to Mike’s experience moving from founder and operator to GP. Although he had raised over $500 million as a CEO and founder and made more than 70 angel investments, he said raising a fund was meaningfully different because of the depth of LP diligence and the closeness of the relationships. BlueYard keeps a small LP base—around 20 LPs for a €200 million fund—which allows unusually close engagement. Mike contrasted passive LPs with sophisticated LPs who know the companies, founders, hiring milestones, purchase orders, and commercial traction, arguing that this proximity creates better direct investment and secondary opportunities. He cited an example where Vintage bought out another LP in a special situation and reportedly turned it into 2.5x within six months. Finally, the provided transcript covered co-investment structure. Mike explained that BlueYard has historically offered SPV opportunities when breakout companies needed more capital than the fund itself could provide, including an attempt to raise a $100 million SPV for a special company. Leyla said Vintage is relatively inflexible on co-investments because it prefers true direct opportunities from its growth fund, though it has more flexibility in later-stage secondary situations. Both speakers framed Vintage’s practical value as going beyond capital: Mike highlighted its ability to quickly source experts in narrow deep-tech areas such as bridge building or natural hydrogen. The transcript ends mid-thought at 15:12, before the remaining portion of the session is available.