3 prominent serial founders from Hamburg
For some personalities in the startup scene, the rule is: “If you've founded a company once, you'll want to do it again and again.” In this article, we present three such serial founders: Janna Ensthaler, Heiko Hubertz and Tarek Müller.
Janna Ensthaler
Hamburg-born Janna Ensthaler has been a household name at least since her appearances as an investor on “Die Höhle der Löwen”. She began her entrepreneurial career in 2009 with the founding of the gastronomical company Kaiserwetter, which developed into a caterer with up to 100 employees at times. Her biggest success came in 2010 with Glossybox, a subscription box for cosmetics. The major investor was Rocket Internet, Germany's most influential startup incubator at the time. In 2013, Ensthaler's next founding was EventInc, a platform for corporate events. In 2021, together with Dr. Manon Littek, she launched the Green Generation Fund, which invests primarily in greentech and foodtech startups.
Heiko Hubertz
Paying by phone - to put it simply, that was AASP's business idea. This was Heiko Hubertz's first startup in 1998. He then achieved global success with Bigpoint in 2002. At its peak, the Hamburg-based company's browser games had more than 300 million registered users. Bigpoint has been owned by a Chinese software company since 2016. Two years earlier, Hubertz had founded his next computer game startup, WHOW Games. In 2020, he turned to artificial intelligence together with his co-founder Elisabeth L'Orange and raised 13 million euros in a financing round in 2023 for his new startup Oxolo. However, it has meanwhile ceased operations with AI-generated videos.
Tarek Müller
Tarek Müller is a typical case of a serial founder who started his entrepreneurial career as a schoolboy. He founded his first company in 2003 at the age of 15, and in the years that followed, a number of companies emerged, all of which can be categorised as e-commerce, both shops and consulting agencies. His clients also included the Otto Group. The fashion brand Edited and the company ABOUT YOU emerged from this collaboration in 2014. ABOUT YOU developed into one of Germany's leading online fashion retailers and went public in 2021. The takeover by industry leader Zalando is planned for 2025. In 2019, Müller also founded the non-profit 105 Viertel gGmbH, which operates the Impact Hub Hamburg, among other things.
