Point Nine Interview: No Portal, No Staged Process, a Blog Post

Point Nine has no standard careers page on its own domain. When the firm opens a rare Associate or Analyst seat, partner Christoph Janz announces it personally, on his own blog, cross-posted to Medium — not through a recruiter or an applicant-tracking system.

The firm behind that unusual hiring habit has run as a four-person equal partnership for well over a decade, backed Zendesk, Algolia, Contentful, Loom and Revolut before most of the industry had heard of any of them, and is the rare venture firm whose own website marks a dead portfolio company "RIP" in plain text rather than quietly deleting the row.

Point Nine at a Glance

How to Get Hired at Point Nine

The obvious URL for Point Nine's jobs, jobs.pointnine.com, is not Point Nine hiring. It's a board listing more than 1,600 openings across the firm's portfolio companies, names like Jobber, Preply, Mambu, Chainalysis, Revolut, Clio, Front and Sereact, built around the pitch that "P9-backed companies are 4x more likely to succeed than the industry average." It's genuinely useful for someone who wants to work at one of those startups. It has never listed a single opening at Point Nine itself.

The 2017 Associate Post, and the "Truffle Pig"

Point Nine's internal hiring has historically run through one channel: a personal post by Christoph Janz, on his own blog. A December 2017 post titled "We're looking for an Associate" is the clearest surviving example, written in Janz's own voice. He describes the role's old internal nickname as "Truffle Pig," on the logic that a VC, like the pig, digs up the best startups among a large number of potential investments — later renamed simply "Associate."

Janz has pointed to a real associate-to-senior pipeline as evidence the role leads somewhere: past associates who went on to become partner, start their own fund, or land a VP seat at a larger firm. Louis Coppey's own path, from associate leading investments in PlayPlay, cargo.one and Qwilr to full partner in 2020, is the clearest public proof that the pipeline is real.

No staged interview process, phone screen, case study or partner round shows up on the public record. That thinness is itself the accurate description of how Point Nine hires: ad hoc, partner-driven, and almost entirely undocumented compared with the structured, staged processes larger firms publish.

A firm that announces a rare opening on a partner's personal blog is telling you something true about its size and its culture: openings are infrequent and evaluated on the specific person in front of it rather than a scripted rubric.

Two True Founding Dates

Point Nine's own pages disagree with each other on when the firm started, and the honest answer is that both are correct, for different things. Its portfolio page frames its track record with "Since 2008, we've invested in 10-12 early-stage startups per year." Its team page instead describes the firm as growing "like a bonsai" over "almost 15 years," which points to 2011.

That 2011 date is the one used consistently by Forbes, Sifted and virtually every outside profile of Janz and Chudzinski. In 2008, Lukasz Gadowski, the Spreadshirt co-founder who would go on to co-found Delivery Hero, teamed up with Kolja Hebenstreit to build Team Europe Ventures, the investment arm of their Berlin incubator, Team Europe. Pawel Chudzinski and Steffen Hoellinger were involved from the start.

On 9 June 2011, that fund was renamed Point Nine Capital. Christoph Janz joined as managing director alongside Chudzinski, the old vehicle became "Point Nine Capital Fund I" in name, and a new fund, Point Nine Capital II, was raised and run solely by Chudzinski and Janz going forward. Gadowski and Hebenstreit stayed on only as venture partners rather than as the firm's founding managing partners.

Who Runs Point Nine

Point Nine describes itself, in its own words, as "a small equal partnership, based in Europe." That wasn't an accident of slow growth; it was the explicit intention from the start. Janz and Chudzinski built a structure where all four investment partners have equal say in every decision, rather than a hierarchy with a senior partner casting a deciding vote.

Louis Coppey and Ricardo Sequerra Amram, the two partners added to that founding pair, both became full equal partners in 2020, timed to the P9 V raise. Two venture partners round out the group on Point Nine's own team page: Kolja Hebenstreit, back from the Team Europe Ventures days, and Michael Wolfe.

The "Bonsai" Model

That's a different model entirely from the platform-firm approach a much larger multi-strategy investor takes, with dozens of partners and a large operating staff layered underneath them. Point Nine picked the opposite bet: fewer people making every decision jointly, staying close enough to each portfolio company that a partner can function almost as a founder's own colleague rather than a name on a board deck.

The whole team, across investment partners, venture partners and operations staff, numbers fourteen people on its own team page — a strikingly small footprint for a firm whose name comes up constantly in conversations about European SaaS investing, and precisely the "bonsai" self-description Point Nine uses about itself: deliberately shaped to stay small rather than left small by accident.

4

equal partners

same vote on every deal

14

total team

17

companies over $100M ARR

Christoph Janz's public writing is arguably as consequential to Point Nine's brand as any single investment. It began on a personal Blogger site called "The Angel VC," moved through a Medium publication also titled "Point Nine Land," and now continues on Substack.

The 2014 "Five ways to build a $100 million business" post, later revisited in 2019, introduced a simple taxonomy, flies, mice, rats, rabbits, deer and elephants, for classifying SaaS businesses by how many customers they need and how much each one pays to reach real scale — the kind of framework taught in accelerator programmes and cited in pitch decks years after it was written.

Every Fund Point Nine Has Raised

Point Nine's fund history is harder to pin down precisely than most firms on this list, because it hasn't always announced fund closes with a press release the way its peers do.

Read as a sequence, the pattern is one of steady compounding: from a roughly €6 million first vehicle to a fund north of €180 million, with no fund skipped and no attempt to leap straight from a small seed fund to a growth-sized one.

P9 V's own announcement leaned into its odd number rather than rounding it off — TechCrunch's headline for the close read "I got $99,999,999 problems and carry isn't one of them," landing at one cent under €100 million rather than simply calling it a €100 million fund.

Fund I (2008)

€6M

Fund II (2011)

€40M

P9 V (2020)

~€100M

P9 VI (2022)

€180M

Funds III and IV sit between these without a disclosed size, which is why they are left off. The four confirmed points still show the shape: steady growth, no leap.

The Fund Nobody Announced, and the AUM Figure That Doesn't Exist

At every fund raise since P9 V, Point Nine has stated the same standing commitment: it will participate in the Series A of every company whose seed round it leads.

A minimum ticket that ran €0.5 to €2.5 million per company at P9 V has since grown to a stated $1 to $10 million on the current homepage, tracking the fact that a firm committing to follow its own seed bets into Series A needs meaningfully more capital reserved per company than one writing a single cheque.

Point Nine Capital Fund VII was legally registered in 2025, with a filing that names Point Nine's own Operating Partner, Aleksandra Zorylo, and the firm's Torstraße 19 Berlin address, confirming it as genuinely Point Nine's vehicle rather than a name-collision entity. Point Nine simply hasn't published its size.

What Point Nine Actually Backs

Point Nine's current homepage states its focus plainly: SaaS, AI and B2B software at pre-seed and seed, alongside a newer line about "investing globally in AI for the digital, physical and biological world" — a real evolution from the firm's earlier framing, as recently as the 2022 P9 VI announcement, of being "the partner of choice for B2B SaaS and marketplace founders."

Point Nine invests globally but is based in Europe; around the P9 VI raise, roughly a fifth to a third of its investments sat outside Europe, named specifically as the US, Canada and Turkey.

The named portfolio tells the firm's real story better than any mission statement. Point Nine led Loom's seed round in 2017, years before its rise as one of the defining workplace video tools of the pandemic era.

• Zendesk — customer-service software, one of Point Nine's earliest and most-cited wins
• Algolia — search infrastructure, another name Point Nine points to as proof of its $100 million ARR claim
• Contentful — headless content-management software, the third name in that same claim
• Loom — video messaging, backed by Point Nine at seed in 2017
• Revolut — the neobank that needs no introduction, an unusually large-scale name for a firm this size to have backed early
• Attio — a newer position in the current portfolio

The wider list runs longer still: Delivery Hero, Typeform, Chainalysis, Mambu and Brainly, none carrying quite the name recognition of Zendesk or Revolut, but together showing a firm willing to back infrastructure and enterprise software just as readily as consumer-facing names.

RIP: The Failure Point Nine Names Itself

Almost no venture firm marks its own losses on its own website. Point Nine does. Its portfolio page tags Airstoc, a Sheffield-founded marketplace connecting businesses with professional drone pilots and stock aerial footage, first backed in 2015, with a plain "RIP" label, the only company on the page carrying that specific tag among those checked.

It's a small detail with an outsized signal. A firm willing to put the word "RIP" next to a company name it once believed in, in the same typeface it uses for Zendesk and Revolut, is telling a candidate something real about how it thinks about its own track record: winners and losses sit on the same page, not sorted into a highlight reel and a quiet deletion.

The rest of Point Nine's "Acquired" tags read as ordinary, healthy outcomes: Automile, sold to ABAX in 2020; Back, acquired by Personio in 2022; Bearer, acquired by Cycode in 2024; Brightback, acquired by Chargebee in 2022; and Athenian, absorbed into the Linux Foundation. Airstoc stands alone as the one the firm calls what it is.

What a Strong Answer Sounds Like

A candidate who has read Point Nine's own writing, not just its portfolio page, has real material to work with:

• Know the 2008-versus-2011 founding story well enough to explain it in one breath, rather than treating it as a contradiction to point out.
• Reference Janz's "$100 million business" framework specifically, by name, rather than gesturing vaguely at "their content."
• Have a real opinion on why a four-person partnership has stayed that size for over a decade, rather than assuming small means less serious.
• Know that Point Nine marks Airstoc "RIP" on its own site, and be ready to discuss what that kind of public candour signals about the firm's culture.
• Understand the firm's standing commitment to follow every seed lead into the company's Series A, and why that shapes how much capital each fund needs to reserve.
• Be able to name jobs.pointnine.com correctly as a portfolio job board rather than the firm's own hiring page.

The generic answer, naming Revolut and Zendesk, is available to anyone who reads the homepage for five minutes. A sharper answer treats the firm's writing and its RIP label as evidence of a specific, consistent personality: plain-spoken, writing-led, unbothered by headline numbers.

How to Prepare

1. Read Janz's "Five ways to build a $100 million business" in full, both the 2014 original and the 2019 revisit, since it's the single piece of writing most likely to come up in conversation.
2. Learn the 2008-to-2011 origin story well enough to state it plainly if the topic comes up.
3. Check Point Nine's own portfolio page directly for its named companies and its RIP-tagged failure, rather than relying on a secondhand list.
4. Talk about individual fund sizes, roughly €100 million for P9 V or €180 million for P9 VI, rather than reaching for a firm-wide total.
5. If you're aiming for an Associate-style role, watch Christoph Janz's own writing rather than a job board, since that's historically where openings have actually been announced.
6. Prepare a specific, current view on one SaaS or AI company you'd want Point Nine to back, since a hands-on, four-partner firm is more likely to ask what you'd actually invest in than to test you on a generic case.
7. Be ready to explain Point Nine's Series A follow-on commitment and what it implies about how the firm reserves capital.
8. If the name Point Nine turns up on Glassdoor, check the company description first; two unrelated businesses share close enough names to cause a genuine mix-up.

The Bottom Line

Fifteen years after a Berlin incubator's investment arm quietly became one of Europe's most-cited SaaS funds, the firm that resulted is still four people making every decision together, still writing the essays other investors forward to founders, and still willing to put "RIP" next to a company name rather than pretend the loss never happened.

A candidate walking into a Point Nine conversation isn't meeting a brand built by a large platform or a marketing team. They're meeting four people who have spent fifteen years making the same kind of call together, in public, wins and losses both, and the interview is really just an extension of that same habit.