In October 2024, Verdane, one of Europe's specialist growth investors, took a majority stake in Eversports. The price was confidential; the press reported the deal at more than fifty million euros.
In the summer of 2013, Hanno Lippitsch pitched me that company as an idea. It had the things I still look for today: a real problem the founders knew personally, a market that was obviously moving online, and a team that clearly would not stop. So I did the most useful thing I could do with conviction: I took the whole team into my office in Vienna, built the first prototype with them, and became one of four founding shareholders.
My chapter there was the first one. My shares went to my co-founders in 2014, long before any of this was worth anything. So no, this is not a story about a payout. It is a story about what you can see at the pitch stage, years before the metrics exist, and what that skill is actually worth.
What was visible in 2013
On paper there was nothing. No revenue, no users, no product. Booking a sports court in Vienna meant a phone call, a paper calendar, or showing up and hoping. What was visible, if you looked, was this: a fragmented offline market that every other industry had already watched move online, founders who knew the problem from their own lives, and a team that treated a whiteboard sketch like a company. That combination is rare. When you see it, the right response is not a polite coffee. It is to clear space in your office.
Everything the market now prices at fifty million euros was, in some compressed form, present in that pitch. Not the execution, which took the team eleven relentless years. The potential.
The judgment, not the outcome
One discipline matters here, and it is the same one I apply as an investor today: judge the decision, not the outcome. Backing Eversports in 2013 would have been a good decision even if the company had died, because the reasoning was sound. The outcome took eleven years to arrive, which is exactly why outcomes are useless as feedback while you are deciding. If you want to get better at seeing potential, write down why you said yes, then grade the reasoning, not the result.
The part that actually compounded
Here is the asset I kept from Eversports, and it turned out to be the one I use every day: the confirmation that I can see potential at the pitch stage. Not after the metrics, not after the round is competitive, but when it is one founder, one idea and a whiteboard. Eversports is my oldest receipt for that judgment. It is the same judgment I later applied as an angel reading three to five pitches a day, and the same judgment our fund runs on now: seeing founders before the market does.
And the team that stays is the company. The prototype I wrote was rewritten long ago, as it should be. What compounded for eleven years was a team, a workflow the market needed, and distribution built studio by studio. Seeing the potential opens the door. The team walks through it. That is where the fifty million euros actually came from.
The goal was never the tech. It's the growth.
The full arc, as it happened: the 2015 seed round · the 2018 Series A · the 2024 Verdane partnership