2008. Marc Samwer had a Prediction.

The success of our first Unternehmertag in 2007 had given us courage. So my companions from the very beginning, Christine Schmitz-Riol and Daniel S. Wenzel, and I decided to make it a two-day event in 2008. I could never have done all this without them.

Looking at the old photos, I recognise quite a few familiar faces. Guido Westerwelle was there, and Reinhold Messner. Both of them should come to the Unternehmertag even more often.

And there was a young entrepreneur named Marc Samwer. Marc had previously built Jamba with his brother Oliver and sold it to VeriSign. The year before, he and his brothers had founded Rocket Internet.

At Unternehmertag, Marc spoke about the future of internet businesses. The VentureCapital Magazin, reporting from Tegernsee at the time, quoted him saying that success would come to internet start-ups that “revolutionise existing business models.”

‍Not a bad prediction. ‍

The same article mentions some of the start-ups we discussed at Tegernsee: NetMoms, HiClip, JobTV24 and Zanox. NetMoms went on to become one of Germany’s largest parenting platforms. Zanox became part of what is now Awin. And ReachLocal, the company Marc singled out as an example, later went public on Nasdaq and was eventually acquired by Gannett.
Others disappeared somewhere in the vast orbit of the internet. Such is start-up life.

But what fascinates me most about looking back at 2008 is what we did not yet know.
Our Unternehmertag took place in April.
Five months later, Lehman Brothers collapsed and the financial crisis shook the global economy. In August, the conflict between Russia and Georgia escalated into war, an early warning that Europe’s post-Cold War security order was far less stable than many of us believed.
At the same time, another revolution was accelerating: Facebook launched in German. The first Android phone arrived. And Barack Obama won the US election and demonstrated for the first time how digital networks can transform political campaigning.

Looking back, I am struck by how quickly something new can become something we take for granted.
In April 2008, we were still discussing whether internet companies would transform entire industries.
Today, we are asking what AI will do to those companies, those industries and perhaps the internet itself.

Maybe that is the most interesting question when looking back: How do you recognise that something big is beginning while you are still in the middle of it?
Marc Samwer certainly had a pretty good instinct in 2008.

And the photo of Guido Westerwelle, Reinhold Messner, Nico Lumma and me? Back then, I probably wouldn’t have called it a historical document. Today, I see it a little differently.

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