Ex-DHDL juror Frank Thelen starts his own equity fund

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The former DHDL juror is targeting private and institutional investors with his new equity fund. The start of the fund comes at a very inopportune time, however.

Frank Thelen is one of the most well-known venture investors in the country, not least because of his many years of work as a juror on the startup program “Die Höhle der Löwen”. Now Thelen wants to prove his investment skills on the capital markets. With the equity fund “10xDNA Capital Partners – Disruptive Technologies“The investor should act as chief analyst. The fund is expected to focus on technology and crypto stocks. To start with, they want to look at, for example, the big data company Palantir, the crypto exchange Coinbase and the biotech company Fate.

According to Thelen, his investment strategy is based on his experience as a venture capitalist. The fund should contain comparatively few stocks. However, this in turn leads to increased volatility. Thelen therefore only recommends the fund to investors with a longer investment horizon. The actively managed fund charges an annual fee of up to 1.8 percent. There is no minimum investment amount for private investors. Institutional investors, on the other hand, must invest at least EUR 200,000.

Thelen is not the first well-known personality to give her name to an equity fund. In the past, for example, the former Bild boss Kai Diekmann, the former Dresdner Bank board member Leonhard Fischer or the stockbroker Dirk Müller, known from television, had launched their own fund products on the market. In an interview with Focus Online Thelen rejects the description as a “celebrity fund”. Rather, the financial product is “a project close to my heart”.

The starting time for the fund is comparatively poorly chosen. Thelen is currently under criticism due to a statement made in a podcast in 2019. In a podcast broadcast with the author and entrepreneur Anders Indset, Thelen had a state-decreed Forced sterilization of African men cited as a possible means of reducing population growth on the continent. But there was criticism in the social networks.

In response to the criticism, Thelen published a Video on Twitter. In it the entrepreneur declares that he was simply misunderstood. “In this podcast, however, and this is very important to me, I said directly in this sentence, both before and after, that this is not a good idea. Still, I probably shouldn’t have put ‘sterilization’ and ‘Africa’ into one sentence like that, ”says Thelen, who speaks of a campaign against himself in the further course of the video.