An Evening for Real Conversations: The First LTC Founders Dinner
Honest conversations, deep insights, and important firsthand lessons: Our Members Dinner on January 28th was a great success! In a relaxed atmosphere, we spoke openly about the highs and lows of founding a company and exchanged valuable experiences.
At the end of January, we hosted our first LTC Founders Dinner. The idea was as simple as it was valuable: to bring our Legal Tech Colab founders together away from pitch decks, sharing great food and truly honest conversations.
Our goal was to create a safe space where mutual exchange and personal stories take center stage. In the often hectic everyday life of a startup, caught between product development and fundraising, there is usually too little time for this kind of connection.
Hard-Won Lessons: “What almost killed us”
The evening kicked off with a keynote by Johannes Hussak, co-founder of our alumni Kertos. Under the title “I can’t tell you how to be successful – but I can tell you what almost killed us,” he shared the most critical turning points on their road to Series A.
Johannes explained that it is rarely a single mistake that endangers a startup, but a combination of several failures at the same time. Here are the central lessons he shared with our cohort:
- Don’t Wait for the Product to “Sell Itself”: Founders with a technical background, in particular, tend to get lost in development and neglect sales and marketing. But a product isn’t finished before you sell it, it only becomes market-ready through the actual sales process and direct customer feedback.
- Ideas are Hypotheses, Not Marriages: A strong emotional attachment to the original idea can be dangerous. Founders often tend to argue away negative market signals instead of accepting them as data points. Most startups don’t fail because they pivot too early, but because they dare to change course too late and lose valuable runway.
- Maintain Roadmap Integrity: The temptation is great to overturn an entire strategy for a single “Very Important Customer” or a big logo. But those who make too many exceptions gradually turn their product into a mere collection of special requests. The key insight: the customer who pays the most is not necessarily the one who teaches you the most about the scalable product.
- Decisiveness in Personnel Decisions: Avoiding tough firing decisions is humane in the short term, but it causes massive long-term damage to the company. It undermines team morale, dilutes standards, and penalizes your strongest contributors. Every time a hard people decision is postponed, the company ultimately pays a high price.
An Evening that Resonates
The conversations weren’t about the glamorous milestones you usually read about on LinkedIn, but about real challenges: wrong decisions, difficult investor meetings, and those moments when you, as a founder, had to completely rethink your path.
A big thank you to Johannes for this “deep dive” into the reality of founding and to all participants for the open exchange. One thing is certain: this was just the beginning, and we are already looking forward to other meetings like this.
