he sold his company for $1B to @SAP

Thanks to our friends at WorkOS for making this series possible — the fastest path to becoming enterprise ready. Your first 1M monthly active users are free:

Today we’re in Berlin with Dr. Gero Decker, the founder who turned a university open source project into Signavio — the business process company he bootstrapped for over six years with zero outside capital before selling it to SAP for close to $1 billion in 2021.

In this episode, we sit down with Gero for a rare look inside his journey: how he never set out to be an entrepreneur (he wanted a great job at McKinsey), why he sees a company as a “survival mechanism” for great technology, how he assembled a founding team of programmers plus one commercial mind, and what it took to raise a first round at a $70–75M pre-money valuation after years of pure revenue financing. He also walks us through the SAP negotiation in full — the “Turkish bazaar” back-and-forth from $700M to over $2B — and how the unit became one of the fastest-growing parts of SAP at around $2 billion in revenue today.

This is Episode 14 of our Startup Series: Where we get access to the best founders and companies shaping the startup world right now.
New episodes dropping regularly.

Links:

Guest:
Gero on LinkedIn:
His book:

Website:
Insta:

Chapters:

0:30 Intro
1:47 I Never Wanted to Be an Entrepreneur
2:27 How an Open Source Project Became a Company
4:00 Building the founding team + WorkOS Ad
8:07 What changed after raising money?
9:14 SAP office tour
15:09 The hard lessons of success
19:10 THE EXIT
21:18 Gero’s message to the world
21:51 Outro

🎵 Copyrighted music licensed from Lickd.
Right Here Right Now by Fatboy Slim,

🎵 Copyrighted music licensed from Lickd.
Starboy by The Weeknd, Daft Punk,

#startup #exit #vc #founder #Signavio #SAP #SanFrancisco #Founder #techstartup #bootstrapped

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