10. Greentech: How to recruit the right team for a seed round, with Christoph Berger (Vilisto, Planet Sustainability)

Today my guest is Christoph Berger, the founder and CEO of Vilisto and Planet Sustainability. 

It is a perfect episode if you want to raise seed funding and to learn:

• how to build the right team and hire the right employees
• how to optimize your recruiting process
• how to build a B2B greentech company with hardware and digital products

With Vilisto, Christoph has developed a digital heat management system with self-learning radiator thermostats which reduce CO2 emissions & heating costs by up to 32%. 

He has founded this company in 2014 directly after finishing his university degree in Energy systems. Since then, the company has 21 FTE, they are currently raising their Series-A funding round and they recently won the German Innovation Award 2020 for Climate and Environment. 

They are rated 4.7 out of 5 stars by their employees on Kununu (the Glassdoor for German companies), so they have an extremely good reputation as an employer. 

We will focus this episode on learning from his experience with his Do’s and Don’ts about:  

“How to build the right team for a seed-round!“

We will also talk about his new online event Planet Sustainability, which brings together innovators and B2B startups. 

Among others, you will also learn:

• How to best manage equity share distribution between founders  
• How they developed their MVP
• How they really failed their Kickstarter campaign and what they learned from it
• How they pivoted from a B2C to a B2B product for non-residential buildings
• How they funded their company until now (with 4 million € raised so far)
• How they found their first B2B client at a fair by doing something most of the startups don’t do at fairs
• Where to find and how to attract interns and working students
• The different types of business models they considered (performance contracting, renting model) 

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