The three Samwer brothers (Oliver, Marc and Alexander) founders of the Rocket Internet incubator in Berlin, are a phenomenon. They are far and away the most successful Internet entrepreneurs in Germany. They have launched and exited at least six major startups since the late 1990s, from ebay clone Alando (€48m to eBay), Jamba (€228m), StudiVZ (€85m), MyVideo (€27m), BigPoint (€100m), and the latest, Groupon clone CityDeal to Groupon for an estimated €750m in cash and shares. And yet they remain famously publicity shy. I personally have asked for an interview since at least 2009. So when I was offered the chance to interview Oliver Samwer – considered by many to be the heart of the operation – I jumped at it. Once a year he or one of his brothers journey to the annual business school conference IdeaLab (http://www.idea-lab.org/), aimed at budding entrepreneurs. It's there that Rocket Internet famously recruits its next generation of startup CEOs for their startups – often companies which greatly resemble the business models of US startups, like Wimdu (http://wimdu.com), which mirrors AirBnB (http://airbnb.com).
The young student organisers of IdeaLab faithfully checked and re-checked that Oliver would do an interview. Today I got up at 5am in London to get the flight over to Frankfurt, then drove 100 miles to the small management school, WHU (http://www.whu.edu/) where IdeaLab is held.
But when it came to it I had a 5 minutes 14 seconds with the Rocket Internet guru, much of it walking after him out the building as he repeatedly refused to conduct an actual interview.
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