Germany's Samwer Brothers To Become Billionaires With Rocket Internet IPO

Oliver Samwer (left) and his brother Marc Samwer (right) at the DLD Conference in Munich in 2010. (Photo: Andreas Rentz/Getty Images)

For the last seven years, Rocket Internet and its German founders, Marc, Oliver and Alexander Samwer, have made a living taking the billion-dollar ideas of successful American technology companies and cloning them abroad. From Zalando, the Zappos of Europe, to Lazada, the Amazon.com of Indonesia, the Berlin-based startup incubator has had helped launch more than 75 different companies and is now exploring an initial public offering, according to sources.
When Rocket Internet does go public, the company will seek a valuation anywhere from 3 billion euros ($4 billion) to 4 billion euros ($5.4 billion) according to those those who attended a potential investor presentation earlier this month in Berlin. Even at the low end of that valuation, an IPO would turn all three Samwer brothers into billionaires.

After spending years mimicking billionaire entrepreneurs from the other side of the Atlantic, the Samwers will finally join the 10-figure fortune club, a sign of validation for the brothers’ vision for global e-commerce domination. They currently own 65% of Rocket Internet through their investment company, European Founders Fund. That vehicle also holds a 17% stake in Zalando, the private fashion retailing sensation that is valued currently at $5.3 billion and is also taking steps toward an IPO.
Those investments, plus successful exits on past ventures, will make the brothers worth at least $1 billion each, even when accounting for dilution from the sale of new shares in Rocket’s IPO. The company could raise around $750 million through the sale of new primary shares in the IPO, which will also see the Samwers hold on to all their shares, said sources.
The Samwers declined to comment for this story, but middle brother Oliver, 40, has given a number of interviews to other publications as the IPO rumors have come to a boil.
“We want Rocket to be the biggest consumer internet group outside the US and China,” he told the Financial Times earlier this month.
That’s a bold statement for the trio of brothers whose infatuation with American tech firms began when they were business school students in the late 90s. In 1998, the Samwers lived in San Francisco and studied many of the companies emerging Silicon Valley, with Oliver co-authoring a book on his findings entitled America’s Most Successful Startups. The time spent in California also served as inspiration for the brothers’ first venture as they noticed that plenty of people at the time were starting to buy and sell on eBay .

Moving back to Germany the next year, they started online auction copycat Alando in Berlin and launched the site on Mar. 1. By May 30, they had met with eBay cofounder Pierre Omidyar and had agreed to sell the company to eBay for $43 million.
That success would provide the blueprint for the next decade. By August 2000, they founded Jamba!, a wireless content provider that had pictures, games and music for mobile phones. They sold that to Verisign in 2004 for $273 million. That act was followed by the backing of StudiVZ, the German clone of Facebook, as well as a smart investment of more than $10 million in Mark Zuckerberg’s company in 2008.
The brothers founded Rocket Internet in 2007 and did little to hide their intentions to mimic the best American e-commerce companies. Zalando was created in 2008 by cofounders Robert Gentz and David Schneider, who closely watched the developments of online shoe retailer Zappos. Back then, the American company’s ascent to $1 billion in gross sales gave the Samwers proof that global e-commerce would be a rapidly evolving industry, where companies that established themselves quickly and executed well could dominate their local markets.
In 2010, Rocket cloned Groupon with German company CityDeal, becoming a market leader in Europe in less than half a year. Groupon went on to buy CityDeal for $170 million five months after CityDeal’s inception.
“Maybe we didn’t get the best price for the highest innovation, but what does it matter?” said Oliver Samwer at London’s NOAH conference last year. “In the end we are entrepreneurs that say ‘Whatever it takes.’”
Though that mentality has given the Samwers an unrelenting focus, it also has stoked the flames of controversy. A now infamous email published by TechCrunch in late 2011 detailed one email from Oliver Samwer to Rocket-backed entrepreneurs that evoked World War II imagery, something that is not embraced in Germany.
“There are only 3 areas in e-commerce to build billion dollar business [sic]: Amazon, Zappos and furniture,” he wrote. “The only thing is that the time for the blitzkrieg must be chosen wisely.”
Oliver Samwer is the driving force behind Rocket Internet, said Mato Perić, who helped establish the incubator’s ventures in India and Southeast Asia as a managing director.
“Ollie is 1,000% intense, 0% bullshit and 100% rational,” Perić said. “He used to say, ‘There’s only one company in the entire world that can do things we cannot do and that is the CIA.’”

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