Venture Clienting at BSH Startup Kitchen with Mathias Weber

Mathias Weber heads the BSH Startup Kitchen, the venture clienting unit of BSH Home Appliances Group. He calls himself "the Tinder for corporates and startups." Fabian Dudek and Mathias have worked together for about eight years. In this episode they talk about how Mathias got into venture clienting through his master's thesis, and why you have to measure impact if an innovation team is going to survive. They also cover why scaling means doing the right projects rather than more of them, why innovation is a translation job, and where venture clienting will be in ten years. Show notes 00:01:14: The elevator pitch: matching corporates and startups that don't know each other yet 00:02:23: Mathias's path: studying entrepreneurship in Regensburg, a fashion startup at TechBase, and finding venture clienting while looking for ways to fund it 00:04:52: Writing his master's thesis at the BSH Startup Kitchen, one of the first dedicated venture client units 00:05:58: Measuring business impact, and why innovation teams are the first to be cut when they can't show it 00:09:52: Why service providers like 27pilots, Capgemini and GlassDollar can save a new unit 1–2 years 00:12:33: The venture client unit as the "Spinne im Netz", connecting legal, purchasing, the works council, business units and startups 00:13:50: How founders' opinion of innovation teams changed, from "waste of time" to champions 00:16:32: Scaling means doing the right projects, not more of them, plus how BSH filters requests (95% pull) 00:19:00: Venture clienting vs. VC: POCs at about €30K, and venture clienting as due diligence before investing 00:21:19: BSH's numbers: about 40% adoption rate and 20% scaling rate 00:21:45: Innovation as translation, between corporate and startup language and between business units 00:24:04: Mediation, emotions in projects, and separating the person from their role 00:27:28: BSH Voices, and celebrating early customers rather than just founders and investors 00:30:49: Why most founders should look for a way to bootstrap with revenue 00:34:30: Mathias's favourite POC: automating the collection of EU-regulation supplier data in purchasing 00:37:59: Venture clienting in ten years: AI, links with VC and M&A, and BSH's global ambassador network 00:40:57: Will venture clienting become a standard corporate function, maybe as "innovation purchasing"? 00:42:09: How AI and LLMs already support scouting, assessment, and BSH's own internal GPT 00:43:29: Venture clienting as a career springboard, and which industries could adopt it next 00:45:42: Why telecoms moved early, and why the method was defined in Germany 00:48:30: GlassDollar's report on 500,000 public startup–corporate relationships, and bringing working solutions to other countries and business units Mentioned: BSH Startup Kitchen, Bosch, Robert Bosch Venture Capital, 27pilots, Capgemini, hub:raum, Telefónica Wayra, TechBase Regensburg, BCG, GlassDollar