Jonathan Wachsmuth

Growing up in Hamburg, I played pretty much every sport: football, tennis, ping pong, handball, (most of all) field hockey, and my latest love, padel. With no direct exposure to entrepreneurship, I figured the smartest way to learn about business was to study business, so I did at Maastricht University, with an unbelievable exchange semester in Hong Kong.

A business degree at many universities is built to motivate you into going for consulting, investment banking, or large corporate jobs. That was never what I wanted. I wanted to be in a place where people do not work hard to tell other people how hard they work, I wanted to be somewhere people work because they love building things and are genuinely passionate about what they're creating. A gap year split between Tacto in Munich and a stint in VC at Capnamic gave me a taste of the venture world, and I fell in love with it.

I'd always been interested in tech, and had spent my bachelor's tinkering with side projects and coding, so this time round I decided the best way to properly understand entrepreneurship was to get more technical myself. I did a Master's in Applied AI at Imperial College London, including a short research stint at The Institute of Cancer Research. Therefore I'm drawn to anything AI-native, where tech solutions are built to tackle a real problem.