She is a star of the German start-up scene – and a team player. That fits with her latest project: Verena Pausder wants to make women’s football profitable.
Wow, pretty nasty here today. A cold wind blows into the arena in Berlin-Lichterfelde, then it starts to snow. It’s time for spring, also in the women’s Northeast Regional Football League. “Anyone who comes today,” says Verena Pausder, jumping on the spot, “proves genuine conviction.”
One woman, many facets
Which brings us to the topic. And with Verena Pausder. If you ask her yourself, her job title is: entrepreneur. Others say: serial founder, multi-investor, digital lobbyist. One thing is certain: Pausder is one of the busiest women in the German start-up scene. As early as ten years ago, she organized “Ladies Dinners” for Berlin founders and launched initiatives to get teenagers excited about founding a company. Today, as a business angel, she supports young companies, preferably those run by women, on a large scale. And you always have the feeling: she does it out of deepest conviction.
Like today, when her current favorite project is playing: the women’s soccer team from Viktoria 1889 Berlin. Pausder is an investor here. She wants to lead the women’s soccer team, currently in the third division, to the Bundesliga by 2027. Make the club a nationwide brand and make women’s football profitable at all. “Gamechanger” is written on the fan scarf around her neck – she really wants to change the game. She has five other women at her side in the investor team, including the two-time world champion Ariane Hingst and Tanja Wielgoß, the former CEO of Vattenfall Wärme Berlin. The two are not here today, but instead Lisa Währer, Felicia Mutterer and Katharina Kurz, the other investors, are now welcoming Pausder most warmly. In general: Everyone here comes up to them and presses them, from the club president to the ticket inspector. Verena Pausder is probably the most hugged person in Berlin this Sunday afternoon.
We will do it!
The story of Viktoria Berlin began in Los Angeles. There, in 2020, actress Natalie Portman and other prominent women founded Angel City FC, a women-run football club that aims to change the conditions in which women play. When Pausder heard about it, she was intrigued. And not just them – at the same time other Berliners from sports and business were also thinking about whether this could also work in Germany: women who are finally making women’s football profitable. We found out about each other, in November 2021 the six of them finally sat together around Pausder’s large dining table and swore to each other: We’ll do it.
They found a club: Viktoria Berlin. And prominent supporters like the ex-skier Maria Höfl-Riesch. They set a sum: they wanted to collect one million euros, spread over many shoulders, the participation limit is 15,000 euros. The project immediately attracted a great deal of attention. The million was quickly reached. “You have to imagine,” says Pausder. “We have to send people away with their money.”
The name is program
Fifteen minutes until kick-off, the team is warming up on the pitch. Pausder was a player herself up to the D-Jugend at TuS Hoberge-Uerentrup. And in the university team in St. Gallen, with the operations team at Munich Re. In the breaks, on vacation, she always kicked. When they took over the women’s team in 2022, they didn’t buy any new players. They invested in better coaches, better pitches, physical therapists. The first league game of the season against Union Berlin was narrowly lost. After that none more. Since the end of August 2022: nothing but victories for Viktoria Berlin.
It’s a bit dangerous, because you learn from defeats. Also knows Pausder. She comes from a family of entrepreneurs in Bielefeld, in the textile industry, but nobody in her home made a fuss about it. “We always had to earn our own money.” We, that’s her and her sister, whose name is Viktoria, like the club in Berlin. For her riding lessons she worked as a waitress and used a hand vacuum cleaner to get dust bunnies out of the looms in her parents’ textile factory. Nothing comes from nothing, she grew up with that attitude. But also with: trust yourself. Do something with your ideas. “But doing things to show off something,” she says, “my parents still don’t do that to this day.”
Things didn’t always go smoothly
She learned early on that failure is also part of entrepreneurial life. In 2004, a chain of salad bars that she had founded with a friend from college flopped. On the other hand, Pausder was really successful with the children’s app company “Fox & Sheep” from 2012. She has three children of her own, two from her first marriage, which ended when she was 32 and her sons were still young. That was one of those defeats too, abandoned overnight, out of nowhere. Her second marriage, she says, has been an empowering patchwork relationship for ten years with her two boys, her husband’s son and their five-year-old daughter.
She’s 44 now, has a podcast, an Instagram book club, Viktoria. She quarrels a bit with the fact that she has now arrived in the middle. But she also sees that getting older can strengthen you internally. For example, the feeling of being inadequate is now gone. “For four, five years I’ve arrived. I’m combustible for things that feel right. And then I do it, even if I have enough to do.”
Commitment to social added value
She likes making things profitable based on people getting involved. Finds that volunteering can and should be financially worthwhile. Economy that is only about making people rich without society benefiting, “I can’t do anything with that”. She is also driven by the topic of digitization, she founded the association “Digitale Bildung für Alle eV” and created a homeschooling website during the lockdowns. A year and a half ago, she also wrote a book, a kind of instruction manual on how to think differently about brazen, paralyzed Germany. “The new country” is the title, subtitle: “How things will continue now”.
After the kick-off, it’s tough on the pitch. Blau-Weiss Hohen Neuendorf is an uncomfortable opponent, the first quarter of an hour is a mess, but now Nina Ehegötz breaks through from the left, passes back to the edge of the penalty area, where Corinna Statz takes the ball and flicks it into the far corner. “Yes!” shouts Verena Pausder, jumps up; her co-investors, standing further down, turn to her and cheer her on.
In the end, Viktoria wins 3:0. Later in the club home, the team gives Pausder a framed photo collage “for everything you do for us”. She is happy, there are, once more, hugs. And says: This isn’t about me. If Viktoria stays at the top of the table, promotion games to the 2nd Bundesliga are waiting in June, then the 150 spectators of today should become 2000, at least, that’s what it’s all about here. And about the visibility of women’s football, about it finally becoming a profitable business.