Was Toto Wolff a Private Equity Investor?

Toto Wolff was neither a private equity investor nor a venture capital investor.

After he decided to stop racing, he spent a short time as an employee in a steel manufacturing company and did not like it. He then read about internet companies in the U.S. Netscape was one of the first he got interested in, along with Yahoo and AOL, the star companies of the time. He lived in Vienna and looked across the German-speaking countries for who was doing the same work in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland. He found little startups that sometimes were not even a legal entity, young people working out of a children's room or a kids' room. The Nasdaq effect brought absurd valuations for companies with no revenue. In Germany, the Neue Markt was the equivalent and even crazier about who could list, with no boundaries. He got into his car, went to the founders, and said he liked the business and wanted to help raise equity or list the company on the stock exchange. If the raise or the listing succeeded, he wanted 10 to 50 percent of the company.

The offers led to shareholdings. Some people said a business was worth 10 million euros, and he knew it was not worth it.