#7 — Building connections and AI ventures to collaborate together | Adrian Locher, CEO Merantix

Startup Culture

In this episode, I talked to Adrian Locher, CEO and co-founder of Merantix, a venture studio for artificial intelligence based in Berlin. Merantix is building and scaling machine learning companies through its unique incubation platform. They are also the initiators of an AI campus in Berlin, where over 70 AI companies are working from different ecosystems.

Adrian shared his journey and challenges as the CEO of Merantix, and we deep-dived into these topics:

1. Merantix’s culture and what to focus on at the beginning when building a company
2. Hiring the right candidates, regrets, confidence boost, and trusting your intuition
3. The AI campus ecosystem in Berlin and the different working cultures

1. Merantix’s culture and what to focus on at the beginning when building a company

For Adrian Locher, company culture is all about people. But it also comes from the leadership. In the beginning, the founder had to choose what he wanted to achieve, to later start working on how to achieve it, and with whom. In his perspective; “company culture especially grows in all the situations when things are not going according to the plan, and how you react to it!”. Merantix itself has 10 people in their team but the whole company group is around 200 people.
2. Hiring the right candidates, regrets, confidence boost, and trusting your intuition

Adrian Locher has a regret from the past. He always tried to choose candidates with a good background, with many years of experience in the field that they need. He shared that he always looked for people who are better than him. But in the end, he needed to adapt this mindset. While choosing the right candidate, Merantix does two things: first, they introduce the company authentically and give candidates a lot of touch points. After, they do “onsite days”. That's where candidates work at the company for two days on a specific project. In the end, both sides decide if it’s right to move on together.

3. The AI campus ecosystem in Berlin and the different working cultures

Merantix started with the vision of hosting its ventures in 2016. From that idea, and after moving from several offices, they decided to go big and rented a 5’000 square meter campus in the middle of Berlin. Currently, they are hosting around 70 AI companies from different ecosystems. But as Adrian Locher said, even though these companies are under the umbrella of Merantix, they all have different working cultures but also some similarities. Some of them are fully remote, and some of them prefer going to the office.

Show Notes
00:32 Episode begins
01:30 What is company culture for Adrian Locher, CEO of Merantix
03:14 Proactively shaping the company culture of Merantix
05:45 What is Merantix trying to achieve since the beginning
08:13 Merantix’s hiring culture
10:33 A hiring decision from the past that Adrian Locher regrets
14:29 Adrian Locher explains more about AI Campus in Berlin
19:04 Why did Merantix go entirely to work remotely
23:19 How did Merantix manage the pandemic situation
26:14 Adrian Locher shares Merantix’s vision + surprise bonus: the coming Merantix spaces
27:43 End of the episode
Adrian Locher on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/adrianlocher/

Merantix’s website: https://www.merantix.com/

About Daniel Abebe: Daniel is an entrepreneur at heart with a business and marketing background. His passion is to create and engage with inspiring people, and his experience in no-code development and entrepreneurship turned into his best leverage to

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