Beyond Venture Theater: Felix Hüttenbach on Building Long-term Substanz as an Operator-Investor
Interviewer: Felix, there’s a specific kind of fatigue in the current venture ecosystem. We’ve moved from an era of growth-at-all-costs to a sudden, almost panicked obsession with "efficiency." But you’ve been talking about something different—Substanz. When you look at the landscape today, how much of what we see is still just "Venture Theater"? Felix Hüttenbach: It’s a significant portion, honestly. Venture Theater is what happens when the metrics become the mission. It’s the cycle of raising a bridge round to justify a previous valuation that was based on a narrative rather than a unit economic reality. For me, the theater ends when the operator realizes that a high valuation is actually a debt to the future. If you haven’t built the underlying plumbing—the operational rigor—you’re just a protagonist in someone…
