Welcome back to the Verarius blog. Today's entry is a little different – less dissecting, more connecting. Because the past couple of weeks have been a masterclass in what happens when you stop treating events as isolated dots and start seeing them as parts of the same picture.

In January, I joined Uwe Leider and Asmus Eggert in the management of mip Consult GmbH. It was not planned. It grew out of a first meeting where I asked what mip stands for and got the answer "Menschen, Information und Prozesse" (People, Information, Processes). Damn, I thought – I could have called my own Verarius that as it is EXACTLY what it stands for. From that first "Aha," a collaboration grew until we decided to make it formal. This was not planned or calculated, serendipity at its best. What I only start experiencing is how quickly the new chapter tests its own premise. These two weeks have been a wild rodeo – and the most exciting things happen not inside bubbles, but in the space between them. And it’s up to us to create and claim it!

The IHK Nachfolgetag. I represented mip at the Succession Day organised by IHK Berlin, and my little economist soul took a brief trip to Nirvana. Sustainability here was not a buzzword on a slide – it was the entire point. Business succession is about life's work, responsibility, continuity, and change all at once. Deeply complex on paper, even more deeply emotional in practice. While Berlin celebrates itself as a startup capital, this room showed a different economy: people willing to drill through thick boards. Entrepreneurs who had the courage to say: yes, we are looking for a successor, yes, we are opening our life's work for the next chapter. Or, put differently: these too are founders, yet founders with history and a story to tell – loud and clearly. I took some of it into the next event…

The Berlin–Warsaw Conference. Days later, the Polish Embassy in Berlin. The occasion: 35 years of the Berlin–Warsaw city partnership – a generation-long timespan that has allowed something more than cooperation to emerge. A corridor of talent, ideas, and companies moving naturally between both markets. Although – a corridor? Ambassador Tombiński set the tone: the "corridor" should become a "valley." Not just a nod to Silicon Valley but a vision – enlarging the shared space for innovation, more touchpoints, more opportunities for the right people and ideas to meet and more chances for luck to strike. In the panel "Growing Startup Ecosystems," I brought up a thought I feel strongly about: innovation must not stay trapped in the startup bubble. In Berlin-Brandenburg alone, thousands of businesses face a generational transition – a massive market that barely registers on the startup radar. That the topic of succession, which I managed to "smuggle in," resonated so strongly genuinely delighted me. It strikes a nerve – even in contexts that seem to have little to do with it at first glance.

mip Consult has its own stake in this corridor story. Almost 25 years of history, a German office focused on data protection and IT security, a Polish office bringing strong software development capabilities. Working between both worlds means translating regulation into working systems and building infrastructures that pass audits without slowing innovation down.

Meanwhile, in Hamburg and Potsdam. While I was at the DSAG Technology Days in Hamburg, my colleague Mohammed Haidarah was at the SIBB event on AI in Requirements Engineering, Software Architecture, and Testing in Potsdam. So here it was: Two places, one team. What stood out for both of us: AI was not presented as a silver bullet but as a tool. The conversation covered opportunities and boundaries, risks and responsible use. That these points were discussed openly and critically made the exchange all the more worthwhile.

And this is the thread running through all of it: Succession and startups, regulation and innovation, Germany and Poland, Hamburg and Potsdam – same day, great team energy. Not just connecting dots – but piercing the bubbles that keep them apart to let energy flow and crescendo build. For whoever stays only within their own ecosystem misses exactly the connections from which something new grows.

Here is to more of that and to all amazing people who were part of this!