A Time to Reflect

5 Years! Startups are really, really hard. They can be a source of great pleasure and learning but as any founder or investor will tell you, they are a mess until they aren’t. Some succeed but the majority don’t. It truly is a marathon, unfortunately made up of many sprints, stumbles and falls. Further, we had a lot of hurdles thrown our way over the past five years. The Corona crisis, followed by Ukraine, then the interest rate issue followed by Israel. It’s been tough but those are no longer excuses and markets are clearly turning for the better, especially in enterprise SaaS.

Success in the startup game is often determined by surviving long enough. Last man standing wins. Nevertheless, a lot has to go right along the way to consider yourself successful. Receeve turned five this month and I’ve left some time to reflect on this fact before posting here. Ultimately, I decided that there were some key things I wanted to hone in on while celebrating this achievement for the company.

Investors:

Without our investors, there is no chance that we would have made it so far. Throughout the multiple financing rounds, we were able to win partners to support this wild adventure. I’d like to thank Seedcamp ( Carlos Eduardo Espinal MBE and Reshma Sohoni ), Mangrove Capital Partners ( Hans-Jürgen Schmitz & Mark Tluszcz ), Speedinvest ( Tom Filip Lesche & Oliver Holle ), Seaya ( Aristotelis Xenofontos & Beatriz Gonzalez ), 14W ( Alex Zubillaga ), and ABN AMRO Ventures ( Hugo Bongers & Marinus Oosterbeek ) for all the support so far. I’d also like to thank all of our angels for being first in recognising that there was “something” there and the right “spark”. Everyone has been helpful in their unique way but it was a group effort to make so many things happen. We will do our best to make you proud.

Customers:

Investment to kick off the business adventure and support our growth is of utmost importance. Yet, without customers, startups go nowhere. They are what justifies our existence. In the early days, companies such as Multitude took the biggest risk, working with a new startup. Along the way, others have supported us and helped us grow. This includes Grover , Solaris SE , Billie , Enpal , 荷兰銀行 , Norion Bank and LichtBlick SE to name a few from the early days. We will continue doing everything we can to keep delivering evermore value to all of you as well as to the new customers yet to come. You are the ones we aim to keep delighting.

Employees:

Five years into this ride, many have come and gone. It’s those who have relented and stuck it out that I give the most gratitude. Folks like Jose St. Bernard , Luis Rangel and David Díaz , who not only have been here almost from day one but who had worked with us in the past at other companies. There’s also those whom I am proud to mention, who joined us early in their careers. Folks like Maximilian Steuck , Jan Frommann and John May helped us a ton in the early days but have moved on to bigger and better things. I wish them all the best and nothing makes me prouder as a founder than to have employees go on to become founders themselves down the road. There’s also those who work quietly in the background but without them, the company wouldn’t work. Here I’d like to mention folks like Nadia Harris and Raluca Alexandra Stefan , who have taken things up many levels in their time at receeve. Finally, I am happy to have folks who recently came on board to support the next five years of growth. It’s with pleasure that we brought Daniel Colomer on board, whom we have also worked with in the past. You’ve done more in a short period of time with us making things right than I could have imagined. Glad to have you back. Nicolas Ethevenin , you’ve finally bridged the gap between product and the rest of the organisation. It was a struggle to get here but you’ve done wonders. Dr. Mirza Klimenta , with you we’re truly wrangling data and leveraging AI where it matters most. I greatly look forward to continuing levelling up with all of you. Unfortunately, this post would become too long if I mentioned everyone in the company. Thank you to everyone else at receeve whom I missed for putting in the long hours. You’ve all decided to level up, work closer as a team and make receeve the long term success our customers benefit from and our investors are proud to back.