“I had each week one person telling me that’s not possible”

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Ritah Ayebare Nyakato

27.03.2019
Christian Rebernik

Christian Rebernik has worked as CTO at Parship, Zanox and most recently at the thriving challenger bank N26. Now he started his own company in the digital health field. We talked with him at the Start Summit about the unfair advantages of newcomers in established industry, the art of failure and the Berlin start-up ecosystem.

Mr. Rebernik, you worked in the finance industry, before that in Parship and other companies. Your venture is now active in the field of digital health. Was health a long-time dream that you wanted to pursue at some point in time?

Christian Rebernik: To be honest NO. It was not a long-time dream. Actually, before I started Vivy, I tried to create a voice assistant system called SIX Voices. The idea was that we should not take notes any more in meetings but have an assistant that helps us to take the notes. It automatically creates tasks, makes follow-ups and calendar entries. We wanted to finally make the meeting room and the meetings more personal because people are too focused on taking notes and not engaged in the meeting. The idea, unfortunately, failed because we didn’t get funding. The second reason was technology. We thought that the time is right to do that, however, the technology was not ready as we thought - speech recognition and speaker recognition technology are still premature. Maybe it’s still is in my perspective.

At N26, which recently made the headlines with a $300 million financing round, you had a good position as CTO, why did you leave?

One of the reasons why I left N26 to start my own company was because since a long time I wanted to start something myself from scratch. That is why I started Vivy. I thought that health is something that I personally care about. This is one of the industries that isn’t yet disrupted and technology can bring a lot of benefits too in that field.

Did you start Vivy alone or did you have support from somebody who was in the industry?

I had a lot of support. The former health minister of Germany helped me to understand the ecosystem, and Birgit König the CEO of Alliance insurance company helped me to understand the market itself. We worked with together with Allianz from the beginning otherwise, this wouldn’t have been possible. We also talked to many other people from the industry from doctors to health experts and to real people who are just patients to understand what they perceive as problems. We also talked to other insurance companies to understand how the system works. In the beginning, it was really a lot of learning.

What challenges did that bring for you starting a company in a field you had not specialized in previously?

If you ask me my recommendation about fields in general, I would recommend to not focus so much on the field or industry. An industry can be learned and the great thing about learning about an industry is that, if you really dive into it, you will have a fresh eye on it. When you are in the system, you accept things as given. I was experiencing that when I started in banking. I had no clue about banking and after working for one year, we hired off. We had one person with a banking background and he was working in customer service and we tried to absorb his information.

Each week I had at least one person telling me that’s not possible, you cannot build your own payment system, you cannot build your own banking, you cannot send money via email and we did all that because we challenged these convictions. We found out that things have changed and actually there was a regulation enabling it and we used the technology of mobile banking to achieve that.

And for health it is similar - it is a really complicated industry and I still don’t understand everything. But going into it and learning it, you can learn so much about how it is today and you can challenge it.

You mentioned that you failed with your first own project. In my perception European founders pursue their ideas for a long time even when it is clear that these are ideas are not feasible. What do you think?

Everyone talks about failures and that it is okay to fail but I don’t think it is well perceived. People don’t see it as a learning journey. People are also not trained to fail fast. It often takes too long to fail. One of my hardest experience personally was stopping Six Voices. Shutting down when you have a team already and a product and certification is hard. We had something quite exciting but still, we didn’t get the funding. It was such a hard decision. Yes okay, we failed I tell this to the team but it takes actually a lot of courage to admit it to yourself. 

You started Vivy in Berlin. What supporting factors do you believe make the Berlin startup scene attractive?

It is definitely the success cases that they have there already. There is more capital and more VCs. It is easier to get funding and more funding means more talent and definitely the cost of living - you can live on a very low budget. This kind of ecosystem is the right thing if you are starting a company. You also don’t have big government hurdles. You can set up a company very fast and you get all your banking contracts fast. All tbasics are fine. There is a lot of government support there and a lot of events. This might be true for other cities but the ecosystem is bigger in Germany and more sustained.

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