Lawyer and "Billie" founder Aiga Senftleben on her FinTech startup and balancing starting a business during pregnancy

"Competition stimulates business"

When Aiga Senftleben founded a company together with Christian Grobe and Matthias Knecht in 2016, she was already pregnant.

"Starting a family is also starting a business. It's something you plan, but also something that kind of happens to you,"

says Aiga Senftleben about the timing of this double startup:

"I always say that I have two kids. Billie and Paul. Billie was always the more demanding child."??

Thanks to good communication, their parallel personal and business startups were easy to balance:?

"I talked to the child's father and my co-founders in advance. Of course, there's always something happening right and left, but it still makes a difference to think carefully about how you want it to be or how it might work."?

Above all, clear communication of expectations helped to effectively build the baby break into the startup phase:

"Expectations have to be discussed beforehand. There's also no point coming back after 6 weeks and then being unhappy because you think your child is unwell. On the other hand, maybe you shouldn't be on the founding team if you want to [go on maternity leave] for a year and a half," says the entrepreneur on the subject of parental leave. Apart from that, a baby can be planned for in advance, unlike burnout or illness.?

In any case, Aiga Senftleben's pregnancy hasn't hurt the company: in the meantime, Billie has established itself as a market-leading FinTech company in the start-up firmament, with over 100,000 business customers. A partnership with Klarna and a funding round of 100 million euros raised last fall are also among the milestones of the now five-year-old start-up.

"Buy Now, Pay Later in B2B is still totally in its infancy. We were the first to really specialize in this,"

says the founder, explaining the rapid rise of her start-up. Aiga Senftleben sees the fact that the competition is getting bigger and bigger primarily as a good sign:?

"The fact that there are many companies focusing on the topic is very positive. Competition stimulates business. And it shows that the market is big enough so that several players can survive."?

She also sees the ever-increasing sums being invested not only in her own company, but the field as a whole, as promising:?

"Funding rounds are always an extreme validation of your business. They don't do it out of niceness, they do it because they think it makes sense."??

As for Billie, the founder is particularly proud of the fact that the startup is actively shaping the global market: "B2B "Buy Now, Pay Later" is a new business model that actually comes from Germany. We are not a copycat company," the young entrepreneur clarifies.?

Despite her impressive CV, the lawyer arrived in the start-up world more or less by chance: Because she simply lacked role models in her environment, she did not even consider founding a company. The fact that she now sits on the management board of a self-founded company that is now estimated to be worth 640 million euros is not due to an explicit desire to found a company. It is the result of a path taken step by step:?

After completing her law degree, the founder initially worked in a law firm in the traditional way. It was only when she moved to Paypal that she came into contact with FinTech at all. After another detour in a start-up, this time German, she founded her own company with the words "Let's do something ourselves instead."

"What positively surprised me was that you can really make it work. I can still see us founders sitting at a dining table and now there are 150 people,"

says Aiga Senftleben of the long road she has traveled together with Billie:?

"It's like a hike. Only when you look around do you see how far you've come. That's a cool feeling in itself."

In short, Aiga Senftleben is not only living proof that baby and start-up are very much compatible. Her example also shows us that, step by step, you can get a lot further than you imagined in your wildest dreams.?

Curious now???

If you want to learn why Aiga Senftleben calls Billie "half a unicorn," how she innovates, and why she doesn't give tips but is happy to answer questions, listen in to the podcast....

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