Having Klaus Hommels on board as an investor is an advertising campaign in itself – the man has become an international figurehead for startups. His early-stage investments in Skype, Facebook and Spotify have earned him a place as one of Europe’s leading angel investors. Today, he invests in promising internet startups through his own venture capital fund by the name Hommels Holding.

Hommels is known for his unconventional methods: Unforgotten, how he bugged Niklas Zennström with daily calls for about two months until he finally gave in and let him invest in Skype. He recognizes promising trends one and a half year before everyone else. With this foresight he also managed to secure shares in Facebook and Spotify before the general public eventually jumped on the bandwagon. Hommels chooses his investments wisely. He pays attention to potential market size, the customers’ willingness to pay and the personality of the founders. He usually invests a six-figure amount  and gets strategically involved. A special focus lies on founders, who have failed with an attempt to start a business before. He prefers entrepreneurs like Lars Hinrichs, who stranded with a PR-agency for startups before he started Xing, which now has a market cap of EUR 500m and is the main competitor of LinkedIn – all with the help of Hommels.

“Who has gone bust before, is going to be more careful with the money the next time” says Hommels. He has his own personal experiences with crises: After a successful corporate career – CFO of Bertelsmann, board member of AOL – he choose, of all years, the year 2000 to go into business for himself. Bad timing, because the New Economy had just gone bust. However, as the industry picked up speed again, he knew what he had to do.

Also noteworthy is what Hommels told VentureVillage on how he got into investing at the age of 15:

“It started when my grandma gave me $20,000 bucks – to buy stocks- and she said if you lose something, I cover it. If you gain something, you keep it. At that time, I was a very fast right wing with Puma shoes… Puma made an IPO. I said, OK, I know this, great shoes. So I bought with this $20,000 bucks, Puma, and I tripled the money. So I earned $60,000 at a time when I got $20 bucks pocket money a month.

I thought, this is so cool, this investing. I just telephone twice and I make more money than the next 100 years of pocket money.”