After months of preparation, we finally hosted our Investor Summit 2025 in collaboration with my friend Felix Haas and his team at Bits & Pretzels in Munich earlier this week.

We had 1500 GPs, 300 LPs, and more than 50 speakers from firms like Accel, Allianz, Asante, Cinven, Creandum, EIF, Khosla, KFW, KKR, LGT, Lightspeed, MEAG, and many more, covering the full GP spectrum from solo GPs to early stage, late stage, and multi-stage firms but also LPs across family offices, pension funds, government funds, insurers, and more.

In addition, we hosted several events, including a GP/LP breakfast, an exclusive LP50 Oktoberfest dinner, and most importantly: our DDVC Community breakfast.

In today’s post, I’d like to share my key takeaways from the week. If you’d like to access the Investor Summit recordings, you can join our paid community and access them via The Lab soon (still cutting the videos right now..)

Joe Schorge, Founder and Managing Partner at Isomer Capital, offered a deep dive on how secondary vehicles can create liquidity - from company level secondaries to strip sales, fund vehicles, and GP or carry stakes. The numbers are clear: Secondary funds hit one record year after another and the instrument is on a path to become more mainstream.

Greg Schmitt, Head of Private Equity & Co-Investments at $360bn AUM giant MEAG, shared data on global allocation trends. He finds that Europe lacks significantly behind US and Asia when it comes to dollars invested per region, yet Europe outperforms other regions in short (3y) and longterm (10y) IRR. Lower entry valuations due to lack of local investor competition, yet higher exit valuations after internationalization - call it multiple arbitrage.

In a panel discussion between the German Minister of Economic Affairs and Energy Katherina Reiche, KFW CEO Stefan Wintels, Allianz CEO Oliver Bäte, and UnternehmerTUM CEO Helmut Schöneberger, we learned how governments, private market companies, and investment firms can work together to unlock growth capital across Europe. While there’s certainly an increasing amount of growth capital available in Europe, almost none of that comes from local sources but primarily from US and Asian investors. To ensure that value is captured where it evolves, we need more local growth funding.

Our panel discussion “Investing in AI: VC Subsidized Growth?” with Andrei from Accel, Alex from Lightspeed, Darian from Gradient, and Simon from Creandum, we discussed how today’s oftentimes very thin (or even negative) margins of AI application layer companies will improve over time. The panelists agreed that through new pricing models and improving efficiency of the underlying foundation models, AI companies will be able to achieve healthy margin profiles in the near future. Said differently, there’s a willingness to subsidize initial growth and weak margin profiles as investors see a clear path to sustainable economics in the future.

In the same panel discussion, the speakers agreed that fund size determines heavily where you can afford to invest across the AI stack. Darian from Gradient runs a $200m fund and thus focuses on more capital efficient AI applications only. Alex from Lightspeed in turn shared how his firm has invested a good chunk of their recent $7.5bn fund heavily into infrastructure and foundation models. We concluded that in order to lead rounds deeper down in the stack, it requires deep pockets. So smaller funds are more limited to the upper part of the stack while bigger multi-stage funds can invest across the stack.

In my keynote about “The State of Data Driven VC”, I shared key insights from the recent Data Driven VC Landscape 2025 and concluded that adoption is still very, very early. While there’s tons of noise in VCs claiming to use AI, the reality is that only a fraction of firms actually do so with meaningful impact. If you haven’t yet started your digitization journey: No worries, you’re not alone.

During our DDVC Community breakfast on Tuesday, we ran a fireside chat with Keshvi from Balderton and Georgiy from Overdrive AI about make or break for VC transformation journeys. Keshvi concluded that the biggest task for a product manager in VC is change management. It’s key to take your customers - the investors - on the journey from day one. Ask them about their biggest pain points and how they think about potential solutions, and make sure to share MVPs as early as possible to ensure you build something your users love.

In the same discussion, Georgiy shared that the best path depends a lot on fund size. Said differently, smaller funds have less resources to build, so they need to buy. Bigger funds can afford to grow an internal engineering team and build, so they have true optionality when it comes to make versus buy.

Affinity or Attio as CRM, Harmonic or Specter for data and signals, Vestberry for portfolio monitoring, Fundrbird or Carta for fund operations, and Zapier or n8n for automations.

In a panel discussion with Ties from Dawn Capital and Keshvi from Balderton, Ties shared that building a robust data infrastructure takes time in the beginning but pays off in the long term. His team of mostly Data Engineers has invested heavily into a scalable data platform which today enables them to develop applications on top of it faster.

Thank you so much to everyone who made it to Munich! It was amazing to meet so many of you in-person and I can’t wait to bring our DDVC community together again soon.

Stay driven,
Andre