Martin Giese (48), investor, negotiation coach and lecturer, will be taking the lead at the UnternehmerTUM incubator XPRENEURS as 2019 begins. He arrives on the heels of Dr. Martin Heibel (39), who, after getting XPRENEURS off to a very successful start, has left to pursue new entrepreneurial challenges.
As managing director, Giese will have the job of guiding startups from all around the world in growing their initial idea into a market-ready business model within just three months. He’ll be supported in this work by a high-performance team as well as the extensive UnternehmerTUM network, which is made up of companies, experts and investors.
Giese brings to the task a great deal of experience as a business angel, investor, independent negotiation coach and managing director, and can build on 20 years of active involvement in the startup community. He’s worked as a lecturer at the Center for Digital Technology and Management (CDTM) of Munich’s LMU and TU universities since the year 2000. There, he also found his first angel investment (Primo Expresso). Dr. Martin Heibel, who played a significant role in launching XPRENEURS in early 2017 and turning it into a leading incubation program for tech startups in Germany, will continue to provide assistance to Giese and the XPRENEURS team over the next months, before fully devoting his attention to his own new projects.
Martin Giese has been gathering entrepreneurial experience since the tender age of 14, when he first established a school magazine. He went on to study law at Hamburg University with study abroad semesters in Geneva (Switzerland) and Singapore. He also earned two master’s degrees from Harvard and MIT. Subsequently, he held executive positions in telecommunications companies for over 15 years, and in particular played a pivotal role in the success story of Germany’s largest cable television operator, Kabel Deutschland. Most recently he headed up the Vodafone Kabel Deutschland customer care segment with over 1,700 employees. Already over the past year, Martin Giese has been involved as a mentor and workshop leader for XPRENEURS.
Providing support at the earliest startup stage
The goal of XPRENEURS is to turn promising tech startups from the areas of smart city, mobility, industry 4.0, B2B software and hardware and medical technology into viable and scalable companies. The best proposals are chosen from a large pool of applications and, during the intensive three-month program, the promising new companies are given their own office space as well as access to potential customers and the UnternehmerTUM network. This comprehensive offer is rounded off by one-on-one coaching sessions, involvement in MakerSpace, the UnternehmerTUM high-tech workshop, along with seed capital funding for which the startups are not required to surrender ownership shares. Says Giese: “The success of the 80 startups that XPRENEURS has supported so far - including Twaice, Hawa Dawa and Inveox - speaks for itself: Our team and the extraordinary UnternehmerTUM network provide powerful assistance to founders in the early stage of their company, which creates a decisive added value. It’s very exciting for me to witness great ideas maturing through initial customer experiences - and taking off like lightning.”