Assertion Partly supported
Hommels: Germany and UK have only four days of ammunition left
“The ammunition is, is a cruel one, yeah. So, so the numbers I have from the military is like four days in Germany and UK and five in France, which is 25% more, but it doesn't make a difference.”
Assertion Contradicted
Hommels: US fighter jets require real-time remote US clearance to start
“Even if you buy US fighter jets, Yeah. So the way how it works is you are the owner. It stands somewhere in the hangar, and you want to, you know, start flying. You have to put it in the way where, where you want to fly, and then this data is sent to the US, a…”
Assertion Contradicted
Hommels: Europe cannot independently launch satellites after Ariane sold capacity
“Yeah, currently we either we get a slot in a SpaceX, yeah, with all the with all the restrictions that there are, or we have Ariane, but Ariane base lastly sold a hundred percent of the defense transport capacity to Amazon. So basically, as Europeans, we are, …”
Insight
Klaus Hommels: Having one or two standout investments makes any portfolio successful
“I'm not so keen of building portfolios. If I find cool companies that make a difference, that is where the beef is. And if you have one or two of them, every portfolio looks great.”
Opinion
Hommels: Venture portfolio construction exists only to satisfy institutional LPs
“It is a, it's a mean to an end. You have to build portfolios in order to get money from institutional investors. But on the way there, you make a lot of concessions.”
Opinion
Hommels: Trump is right that Europe naively expects others to fund defense
“Trump has a point, because it's pretty naive to think that everybody else pays and we don't need to pay, yeah.”
Opinion
Hommels: Top European founders match US drive, broader base is entitled
“So I think on the very top of the pyramid, it's exactly the same. You will, people fight like maniacs, and there is everything that you do in order to get somewhere, but I think the broader base under the bell curve is more complacent, more entitled,”
Assertion Partly supported
Hommels: Europe under-finances innovation by 8x compared to historical levels
“And in Europe, we are at all .5% of GDP. So we are under financing innovation by factor eight in comparison to the levels that made us wealthy in the fifties, sixties, seventies.”
Assertion Supported
Hommels: American pension returns far outperform German funds by retirement
“For example, if you have a normal worker that pays in a thousand euro a month at the age of 20, 20 something, and when he is 64, with a German pension fund, he has 750,000 bucks, in an American one, 3.5 million, just because of compounding of higher yielding a…”
Assertion Supported
Hommels: Low-cost autonomous defense hardware destabilizes legacy military equipment
“You have a thousand euro drone that takes us a ten million tank. You have a 500,000 submarine, yeah, unmanned, which can take out a five hundred million The submarine, the classical one, and the same for basically every category.”
Assertion Contradicted
Hommels: Russia's PPP defense spending exceeds all NATO member states
“So, for example, everybody says, yeah, but Russia has the capacity or the economic power of something between Portugal and Spain. But in terms of purchase power parity, they're spending more on defense than the entire NATO member states.”
Assertion Partly supported
Hommels: 60% of Germany's 1.4% GDP defense budget goes to salaries and pensions
“Not only didn't we pay two percent but whatever we paid of the 1.4, 60% of that is salaries and pensions. It's not that you buy equipment and become more able to defend yourself.”
Insight
Hommels: Defense primes resemble pharma giants focused on regulation over innovation
“The pharma industry, if you think about innovators, they are basically a gigantic organization if it comes to distribution and regulation, but not invention. So, a big prime as Moloch in distributing because they have I have years and years of lobbying into th…”
Opinion
Hommels: Relying on US growth capital compromises European tech sovereignty
“If the gross capital is always provided from the US, then basically you are abolishing your own sovereignty at that stage already again, because then you have the influence in the boards, which then comes from the big investors, which might have at some point …”
Insight
Hommels: Price sensitivity does not matter in venture capital investments
“Because the good things, I would still do them, the good companies I've invested in, even if they were 30% more expensive, and the shit, I don't want to have it, but it's worth 30% cheaper. So the beauty is, I'm not in the buyout where buying makes a differenc…”
Assertion Supported
Hommels: Spotify had no music rights when he evaluated investing
“So you could say when the time I was looking at Spotify, it was, I'm not sure, I wouldn't say it's illegal, but we had music and we didn't have the rights.”
Insight
Klaus Hommels: Venture capital isn't about sitting back and passing judgment
“Venture is not sitting in a nice office with borrowed power of LPs and playing like in old Caesar's times, thumbs up, thumbs down.”
Insight
Klaus Hommels: Founder-focused early stage investing does not scale with money
“I'm always intrigued by the technology or by the founder, and this doesn't scale with money so much.”
Insight
Hommels: Heavy social media use correlates with operational inefficiency
“So what I really, really despise is vanity. So there is a high correlation between people that post a lot. Or tweet a lot, or whatever. So using social media a lot, and efficiency.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Hommels: 2000s European Tech Lacked Technical Founders and Genuine Innovation
“If you think about the 2000 and early 2010, there were no technical founders. So that, and I thought lengthily about In fact, why is that? Because we had the copycat nations where the Samba brothers built the machine rocket internet, but this was basically an …”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Hommels: Top European Universities Are Producing Genuine Tech Innovation, Not Copycats
“If you now look at ETH or the Technical University Munich or the KTH in Stockholm, the quality of The founders is very, very different. You barely have any copycats anymore. You really have general, genuine technological innovation and ideas.”
Assertion Supported
Klaus Hommels: European pension funds invest just 0.02% in venture capital
“And the European pension funds invest oh point oh two percent in venture.”
Assertion Partly supported
Hommels: Hypersonic weapons reduce US presidential reaction time to 12 minutes
“So, for example, that with the new hypersonics, if they have a warhead, the reaction time of any The US president is 12 minutes.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Hommels: Rheinmetall's Dortmund sponsorship was coordinated with politicians to normalize defense
“Rheinmetall has become sponsor of Borussia Dortmund. So this is also done, this deal, in, in sync with the politicians to bring this topic in the midst of the population and make it visible to everybody.”
