""Fail fast" might be the entrepreneurs' mantra, but at Rocket the wisdom is slightly different: scale fast."
This is what the UK edition of Wired magazine writes in their portrait about the Samwer clan. Is is one of two big stories which have been published about the Samwers recently.
While Businessweek lets the mud-wrestling of the last months pass with pleasure, Wired tries to get a deeper look into the structure and the mode of operation of the Samwer clan.
Here, one learns something about the original idea behind Rocket Internet for example:
"At some point in time, we had a shift in orientation," Oliver says, "[...] we found our back-to-the-roots, true orientation, which is building."
In 2007, Oliver approached Weiss, who had been a trusted associate of the Samwers for several years, and proposed joining forces to create a new kind of incubator, dedicated to building technology companies from the ground up. Its name would say something about its mission: Rocket Internet.
"We were always fascinated by the idea of starting something new," explains Weiss. "That was the original idea for Rocket: bringing together people who will then allow us to be faster than competitors whenever we have an idea, because we can start right away."
Florian Heinemann appears as one the most important advocates:
"He denies that the Samwers are building businesses in order to flip them quickly. "We would never rely on building a business that can then be sold to somebody just because they are stupid enough to buy it, because you can never be sure whether you'd actually be able to sell it to somebody eventually," insists Heinemann.
Also, he talks about his understanding of innovation:
"What a lot of people do not recognise is that innovation does not only happen on a conceptual level, on an idea level, but also on an operational level," he says.
While the story in Wired ("Inside the clone factory: The story of Germany's Samwer brothers") largely keeps its promise, the Businessweek counterpart ("How Three Germans Are Cloning the Web") could be classified as light entertainment.
Regarding the latter, the only exciting piece of information might be that the Samwers anticipate a fluctuation of employees of 5%, in other words the teams are renewed every 20 months.
Earlier posts on this subject: