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episode 117: Meet the German Entrepreneur of the Year - Co-founder of Flix, which now owns Greyhound #GSA22
Executive Summary Jochen Engert won the German Startup Award 2022 as German Entrepreneur of the Year. He is the co-founder of Munich-based Flix a unicorn recently valued at 3 bn US$ and the owner of Greyhound Lines. He shares in this interview his entrepreneurial journey, and his experience in winning 90% of the local long-distance bus market in less than a decade, without owning even one bus. We talk about the rough times during COVID when the service was shut down for 8 weeks, their expansion into different countries, acquisitions, and investments. He also shares some experience from his business angel investments. The Authority on German, Swiss and Austrian Startups | Linktree This interview is in media partnership with the German startup association (Bundesverband Deutscher Startups https://deutschestartups.org/). Their German Startup Awards #GSA22 honor each year outstanding female and male founders and investors in special categories. You can learn more about the winners in our interviews and on this website: https://germanstartupawards.de/rueckblick/rueckblick-2022 You can also have a look at our history, we also interviewed many winners of the German Startup Awards 2021 already. Our guest today is Jochen, the Supervisory Board Director (formerly CEO) and Co-Founder of Munich-based mobility unicorn startup Flix (formerly Flixbus). Jochen studied at the University of Ottawa, Canada, as well as at Stuttgart University and in Koblenz at WHU. He has also been a consultant at Boston Consulting Group for 5 years, prior to starting Flix. The trigger of Flix was the 2009 coalition government contract, where the ruling parties stated they wanted to de-regulate the bus service in Germany, for the first time permitting long-distance buses. Before the de-regulation there was a law in force forbidding long-distance bus connections, competing with train service. So they founded GoBus, later re-branded to FlixBus, then to Flix. Flix started as GoBus, later FlixBus (https://global.flixbus.com/). Today they operate FlixBus, FlixTrain, FlixCar, Kâmil Koç in Turkey, and Greyhound Lines in the US. They were valued at 3 bn US$, when they raised their last VC round (Series G published in June 2021). They raised in total more than 1,2 bn US$ from 17 investors, including General Atlantic, TCV, Silver Lake HV Capital, Permira, BlackRock, European Investment Bank, UVC Partners, Mercedes Benz Group, LMU Entrepreneurship Center, and Cherry Ventures (you can find an interview with Filip, the founding partner of Cherry Ventures here). Flixbus operates buses or, in many cases, just handles marketing, pricing, and customer service for a commission on their software platform, on behalf of bus operators. In 2018 — just 6 years after its founding — the company had a 90% market share of intercity bus travel in Germany. This was a result of mergers and acquisitions in the country. At the time and to this day, they don’t own a bus in Germany. They have a long success story of acquisitions: Their clientele is also interesting, as of February 2018, 60% of the company’s customers were female and 33% were between the ages of 18 and 25. Their last published funding was published in June 2021, raising 650 m US$ at a 3 bn US$ valuation.
Here is our blog post: https://medium.com/startuprad-io/meet-the-german-entrepreneur-of-the-year-co-founder-of-flix-which-now-owns-greyhound-gsa22-1c3681ebafac
Mentioned in this episode:
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