Resources
Stefan Schenk
Stefan Schenk, CCO and Co-Founder Peter Park (B2C MobilityHub), studied at DTU and Collège des Ingénieurs and started working for Mercedes after his MBA. While an inspiring work with lots of travel, he soon realized he wasn’t looking for purely security after all, and founded a company supported by a Bavarian state grant.
Peter Park
Peter Park uses automatic license plate recognition to automate and monetize off-street parking management and payment. They integrate with public service APIs to issue fines if drivers do not pay.
Today they’re processing 60-70bn € of parking transactions, with 170+ people.
In the beginning they collaborated with a parking space operator in Erlangen, until Covid happened. Their investor left, they had to stop paying themselves a salary and put their single employee on Kurzarbeit. With a 2-month lifeline, they got into a German family office. This private entrepreneur invested up to 20M in them, vital support. They’re pitch deck was “full of shit” – fake it till you make it, however two pilot customers helped them show that there’s a market. The live presentation (the team!) is most important, the charts accuracy don’t matter as much. In later funding, evidence from an external player (another company with a similar business model in another market) helped them raise more.
After 1.5 years, they moved into their first office, a step up from the small room at Munich-Werksviertel granted by the Bavarian fund.
Their backgrounds: CEO Max from legal (relevant for dealing with authorities but also data protection), CCO (preventing churn), COO Patrick (setting up sites, business automation), CTO Christoph (tech, product, uptime). This has always been like this, but used to be more blurred.
Non-payment rate is usually up right after new installs, but goes down to avg. 0.5% after 4 weeks. The state API is 5€ per call to sue violators.
Today they’re profitable, however they need more funds to grow more agressivley and they’re risk profile has become to large for the family office. A new investor invested roughly 100M for a majority share (in June), a classic US-American private equity (80%). This “sales” process took roughly 7 months, with 2 months for an external company just coming in, analyzing the business, and creating a massive excel file.
Why Found?
The majority of startups don’t make it. But – what you can learn by founding 10x’s anything you can do in corporate, because you have to do everything by yourself.
You only know the value if you paid the price.
No matter how successful the venture is, the journey will be rewarding. It’s about the friends you make along the way, and personal growth.
Learnings
The only true engine is people. Build with your friends, or build friends.
What you will end up building will most likely not be the first idea. There will be bad times, someone will have a child and not be able to commit full-time, you will loose people. The venture has to be built on trust and relationships, you will likely spend more time with your cofounders than your family. Team events are important and part of the story. For them, it was good that they were very different people, and Stefan recommends doing it with people you know, but not friends — because of the risk of ruining friendships. Do it with people who have a desire to build, are mission-driven, not just money or fame.
Questions
How did you procure your first investor?
- A friend at an LMU accelerator built a parking meter app. While it didn’t work out, this is how he got into the industry, met a manager from a German car company, and ran a digitalization program for him.
- They saw how inefficient operations were in Germany and realized their potential (in the beginning they wanted to digitalize existing players).
Who are your customers?
- Everyone who owns parking property and wants to monetize it: malls, supermarkets, etc.
- Also system houses that traditionally handled parking management
- Still, the “customer” is the parking driver
What’s your competitive edge?
- Barriers break constantly, cameras don’t. If a barrier is broken, cars can enter and exit for free, and this usually happens 2x/year and takes 7 days to repair
- Instead they install the system for free and take a revenue share — working with the customers, instead of against them (earning money when the system works, not when the barrier breaks)
What were he crises along the journey?
- Covid, because no-one could be reached anymore (MS Teams wasn’t common), they were lucky if offices could open their website, sales were difficult
- When the first investor went bad
- CTO Co-founder left overnight (personal thing), had to hire an expensive freelancer to basically hack their own system
- They wouldn’t have made it with two - there was always something going on with someone, but because it was a team effort, they could cover for each other
How do you find customers?
- In the beginning, working students were told to research parking lots on Google Maps, build call lists, and call them up
- Today, a structured CRM is worked through by different teams: Cold calling, setting up meetings, driving to validated customers
How do you deal with the mental load?
- There were times when Stefan couldn’t make plans with friends on the weekends, because his weekdays were already too packed – even though he’s usually social
- When something was going on in one’s life, the team was suffering together
- It would’ve been nice to have a mentor — someone you’re not personally connected to, but knows what’s going on, and can help you reflect
- Listen to feedback from friends and family (e.g. if they don’t see you anymore, but used to)
- For him, Peter Park was and is an anchor, a feeling of being needed, keeping him going
- Watch out for burnout, they avoid working on weekends. Didn’t work well in the beginning, but now they watch out for each other
Advice for his younger self?
- Take it more relaxed - ambition is good, but sometimes you need to look at things from a distance to process them better
- Still, do it. At this age, there’s not a lot to loose (kids, etc). The longer you wait, the harder it gets.
- People who go into risk to found are usually the people who will still find a job if it doesn’t work out. Also because people working in / founding startups have seen a lot
- What used to be the world of McKinsey today is the world of startups — people who get shit done.
How has the people you’re looking for changed?
- At the beginning, an army of working students: cheap and ambitious
- Today they just need top-notch coders, hiring from BMW etc, because they’re just so much faster than juniors. However, they also need more juniors to keep up the supply of good engineers.
- Specialist/generalist depends on the role