Entrepreneurship: Freedom | Creating | Learning – and persevering
16.11.2025
What this is about
This is the third blog post—and an invitation. If you would like to, you can follow us as we build our new company: unfiltered, honest, enjoyable and full of genuine lessons.
What entrepreneurship means to me
Entrepreneurship means freedom to me above all.
It means:
- lifelong learning,
- creating and growing,
- the opportunity to build wealth and escape the financial downward spiral often experienced by conventional employees.
After all, it feels as though debt-servicing costs in many countries are rising faster than productivity—unless AI takes over everything in five years, perhaps. 😉 Money loses value, currencies are devalued and employees repeatedly lose out.
As an entrepreneur, you can change society for the better.
That suits me. I have realised that one of the most important things in my life is to learn, grow and create something new and worthwhile.
Since the days of Steve Jobs and the iPod, I have probably listened to more than 1,000 business and science audiobooks—without exaggerating too much—and tried to put as much of that knowledge as possible into practice.
One book I particularly liked was Kopf schlägt Kapital (“Brains Beat Capital”) by Professor Günter Faltin.
I listened to the audiobook about five years ago and thought it was excellent. Around three months ago, I remembered it again—and used its model as the inspiration for a new venture.
Yes, Kopf schlägt Kapital is the formative book behind auteniQ. And yes, Günter Faltin is still very much around. 😉
Bulk packs, direct sales and the Tea Campaign
I simply adopted the idea of bulk packs and direct sales from Professor Günter Faltin.
In 1985, he founded the Tea Campaign, which remains the world's largest importer of Darjeeling tea. He demonstrated how a continually refined idea—and large bags instead of small tins—can shake up an entire market.
His Entrepreneurship Foundation, his Masterclass—which I am now attending for a year for €850—the annual Entrepreneurship Summit and his “Entrepreneurship Campus” have encouraged and inspired me.
I enjoy the regular exchange with the roughly 100 other participants. It generates ideas and continuous improvements.
No one here is primarily trying to make a fortune. The main goal is to make the world a little better.
We need entrepreneurs like that.
You do not need a great deal of capital, but you absolutely need good ideas—and a willingness to improve them through work. You do not have to be a genius, a born leader or “made for it”.
Persistence beats genius
When I founded the largest solar school in Southeast Asia, I wanted to leave my comfort zone and build a new, much larger one.
I simply started, was courageous, kept believing rather than doubting—and it genuinely worked. With the advice in this article, perhaps it would have worked even better.
Yes, hindsight is a wonderful thing…
It was a great deal of work—being self-employed often means working for yourself all the time—but it does not necessarily have to be that way.
All the qualities described above—courage, a desire to learn and grow, and vision—are powerful, but they are not the decisive factor.
The most important thing is to keep going.
You do not need to be a born leadership guru or a financial genius. Those are all skills you can learn, delegate or complement by working with capable people.
Inspiration and money | Entrepreneurship Summit and the AI paradise
In October, I attended Professor Faltin's Entrepreneurship Summit in Berlin. It was a highly inspiring event.
The focus is on improving society through good startups and pioneers who make things better while enjoying the process.
If money is the primary objective, everything becomes much more difficult. Avoid that false goal.
AI will make many things much easier. Günter Faltin believes we are standing at the gates of paradise: AI will soon produce many things for us, fulfilling an age-old human dream.
But it is entirely possible that we will mess it up. 😅
There are many possibilities—but value is what matters
Not everything has to be brilliantly new. You can:
- sell something,
- provide advice,
- improve something,
- or invent something entirely new.
There are many routes into entrepreneurship, but the most important task is probably understanding potential customers and identifying the benefit you can create.
What do people genuinely need? Sometimes they do not know yet themselves.
Understand yourself—and develop from someone who understands customers into someone who creates value for them.
If you want to start your own project, this can be your starting point:
- Ask yourself what you enjoy and what genuinely interests you.
- Find a real problem in that field.
- Improve the idea: review it, test it, simplify it and think it through.
- Forget the business plan for now. Talk to people instead of merely polishing presentations.
- Allow yourself to learn and grow along the way. Enjoy it—“perfect” is forbidden.
An example
Is Starbucks successful because it sells expensive coffee?
No. It rents out space and offers people somewhere to sit and work for hours, with drinks, snacks and gentle jazz.
That is the value it provides. The coffee price essentially includes a rental fee.
Continually improve your idea
- Simplify radically.
- Remove intermediate stages.
- Improve the offer through a small product range.
- Focus on bulk packs.
- Set prices that provide real added value.
- Build authenticity and credibility.
That is how a win-win situation emerges for customers and providers.
Building a company from components
This means not doing everything yourself, but outsourcing everything you reasonably can to service providers.
You do not need to be able to do everything—you only need to know what truly matters.
The major lever
What could bring about the major change?
Following Professor Faltin's recommendation, I asked myself: what could be the major lever for my new auteniQ venture?
My ideas were already quite good, but they were certainly not that one larger idea.
After asking the question, I found an answer in my own life. Once again, I used myself as the starting point.
One sentence about the idea—for now
In blunt terms: many people consume far too much sugar, suffer from diabetes and are sometimes deliberately overfed and made ill by industrial food—all in pursuit of money.
I would like to develop drinks capable of displacing Coca-Cola and similar products, at least to a small extent.
Healthy, quick, as natural as possible, sugar-free, non-addictive—but delicious.
I cannot reveal any more at this stage.
Otherwise, the product-management team of a major corporation—or someone else—might be reading. 😉
A type of company we may often see in the future
According to the Entrepreneurship Summit team, the company of the future could consist of just two people:
- an originator of ideas,
- an IT specialist who translates those ideas so AI can understand and implement them more effectively.
I expressly do not mean programming in the conventional sense.
Fortunately, we may no longer need that for some time—at least not on the same broad scale as before.
You do not need a perfect business plan to begin
Above all, you need three things:
1. Genuine value for others
Do not begin by asking, “How can I make money?” Ask instead, “What is missing? Which problem can I solve better than it is currently being solved?”
2. The willingness to persist
The most ingenious idea does not win. The winner is the idea that survives, is tested and improved, and is not abandoned at the first sign of resistance.
3. A desire to learn and develop
Entrepreneurship means being allowed to make mistakes, learn, adapt—and continue.
My invitation to you
In this blog, I would like to:
- show openly what works and what does not,
- encourage exchange and inspiration.
If you would like to, you can follow us live through ideas, wrong turns, light-bulb moments, small successes and, naturally, the occasional spectacular flop.
Get involved, test our website and, of course, our products. Advise us and ask questions.
👉 Want to learn more about auteniQ? Read the blog.
Send your feedback directly to me at: a.kaub@inutec-int.com
Warm regards,
Your Alexander