Dominik Nitsch's Linkedin Analytics

I never thought, I'd say this, but ... Generalyst  has 10+ open positions that still need to be filled before the summer. So if you:  - are looking for a challenge in Berlin, Munich, or Amsterdam - speak fluent German or Dutch - consider yourself a jack of all trades (with a commercial background) - want to work in an early-stage startup as Founder's Associate, Chief of Staff, GTM Generalist or similar You should apply to the program. We don't accept everyone to keep the circle tight and quality high. If you're in, you get: - instant access to 10+ open positions for generalist profiles (many of which not advertised on the open market) - an invite to a weekly sessions where 1-2 startups come in and pitch themselves - companies applying to you if they find your profile interesting (doesn't happen to everyone, but some do get inbound requests) - to be part of a highly curated Slack community with like-minded generalists also on the job hunt Apply within 5 minutes on our website. (And if you're not looking yourself but know someone who is, tag them below ⬇️) PS: Candidates apparently say nice things about the program – if you're unsure, check out the wall of love tagged in the comments.

I made a huge false assumption when starting my recruiting company: Believing that German language skills don’t matter in Berlin-based startups. You see, I work and live in Berlin. >50% of my daily interactions take place in English, especially at startup events, in my own social circle, and in other work-related environment. Hell, I can’t even order my coffee in German here. So I took in a lot of candidates without fluent German skills. Big mistake. ~80% of open positions (no data here, just gut feeling) on the commercial side require fluent German. That way, the experience for both hiring managers and candidates was terrible – hiring managers couldn’t get the candidates they need, candidates wouldn’t get interviews. It makes sense: generalists are Swiss Army knives, and you hire them so that you can throw them at unknown problems in the future. Without German fluency, the knife is missing one big tool. It takes a ton of other qualities to make up for that. Ceteris paribus, the candidate that speaks German will always win against the candidate who doesn’t. A second aspect is internal culture building. When I first starting working at Sdui, we did all of our all-hands meetings in German. I was confused. Why would we do that? We already had a bunch of developers who definitely didn’t speak it. Turns out, about 30% of the company wasn’t able to speak English at a business level. While I think this is less likely in Berlin-based startups, a lot of informal things still take place in the country’s language. So honestly, the best advice I can give is: if you’re looking to stay and work in Germany for an extended period of time, learn the language. I know it’s hard – I’ve personally seen 400+ people go through an 8-month intensive course. But down the line, it’ll 10X your chances to get a job here.

If you’re a student and you’re considering not doing a semester abroad, watch this: No hiring manager gives a s**t if you spent an extra semester or two studying. It makes zero difference. What does make a difference is international experience:  → in your career → but mostly, in your life By spending time in other countries and making memories, you’re building up a “memory portfolio”. When you’re old, this portfolio will pay “memory dividends”: memories that you’ll gladly think back to, even though you barely leave your house anymore. That’s much more important than having a super-f**king-minor edge in your CV.  Build your career to fit your life, not your life to fit your career.

Generalist vs. Specialist isn't a binary choice. It's a spectrum. (I've channeled all my artistic ability into this index card.) Let’s say you have four people of equal experience, and they all have the same amount of expertise units that they can allocate to different disciplines. (Think: skill points in a video game.) → The purple guy is a true generalist and allocates all units equally. → The red guy is a true specialist and allocates all units to one discipline. → The green and blue guys recognize that it pays to be a bit better in some fields at the cost of being worse in others, but that broad education is important as well. The way you allocate these points defines where you stand on the spectrum. With every new year of experience, you level up, and get to allocate new skill points. The allocation of time spent on activities in real life is equal to distributing these skill points. In Monday's newsletter, I shared: - how I'm allocating my skill points for this year - how you should allocate them based on your career objectives - why it's impossible to be a generalist individual contributor at a large company - how company stage impacts which end of the spectrum they hire Read it here: https://lnkd.in/eecDNDMJ

Your CV / LinkedIn Profile isn’t your life story. It’s your landing page. Here’s how to use this to avoid getting rejected instantly: Most people don’t have short attention spans. They have short consideration spans. This includes hiring managers. I’d guess that the average hiring manager looks at a CV for ~30 seconds before making a judgment. Your job is to make these 30 seconds count: → Bullet points, not walls of text → Results, not responsibilities → A 3-line summary that sounds human, not like buzzwordy GPT gibberish (”I’m a results-driven professional with cross-functional expertise …” – wtf does that even mean?) It’s tempting to include all possible information in the CV.  Don’t. The objective of a CV isn’t to get hired, it’s to get a first interview. You can always communicate more in that interview.

This graph explains the entire philosophy behind Generalyst: In early-stage companies, there are more jobs-to-be-done than people to do these jobs.  → You need generalists (eg. a founding business developer) The more a company grows, the more people there are, so you can begin focusing on fewer things.  → You need T-/E-shaped expertise. (eg. a full-cycle sales exec) In a late-stage company, for every job-to-be-done, there are several people.  → You need specialists. (ie. a B2B mid-market SaaS account executive for DACH) At Generalyst, we're building the commercial talent infrastructure for early-stage startups – by selecting, recruiting, and coaching the top 5% of business generalists. Ironically, that's what we ... dare I say it ... specialize in. PS: Want to increase the quality of your talent pipeline with high-agency, growth-minded candidates? Leave your contact at https://lnkd.in/eibvCJ23 (Credit for graphic goes to the Hybrid Hacker newsletter)

This is what you’re missing out on if you’re chasing logos. Take a look at two candidates:  - Both studied at a prestigious private university in Germany - Both have top 10% grades  - Both did the “mandatory internships” One of them grew up in a suburb of Frankfurt as child to wealthy parents. Never had to pay a dime for her studies. The other is a first-generation academic from a blue-collar family in the Ruhr area. Used his own, hard-earned money, to finance his (private uni!) studies. On paper, they look the same.  In reality, one will be 10X more gritty than the other. A CV shouldn’t be a list of features.  It should tell a story. The best candidates often hide in the details.

Imagine this: you’re running a marathon. At the start, all your friends come out to support you. At the finish line, they’re there again, cheering you on and celebrating with you. But in the middle? When it’s tough? When you’re questioning everything? Nobody’s there. This analogy applies beautifully to social media: We see the start and the finish – the big wins. Not the real work that happens in between. Where you: - Protect your focus (ditch distractions) - Build systems (eliminate, automate, delegate) - Invest in yourself (you’re your best asset) - Create assets (not just income) - Do the work every single day 98% of life is in that messy middle. Where the magic happens. Where you build your extraordinary. Do one thing this week that most people wouldn’t do. Let’s build something extraordinary.

Prediction: within the next 5-10 years, generalists will be more sought after than specialists. In small organizations, you can’t afford to have one person doing just one specific thing. Everybody needs to chip in. Following the trend that we’ve been seeing in the last few years, organizations will continue to get smaller: bootstrapped companies are on the rise, solopreneur businesses take over, and even VC-backed companies are getting smaller. AI only accelerates that by taking over specialized tasks. A company that needed 100 employees to do the work might only need 20 in the future. And of these 20, the majority will be generalists, not specialists. Am I wrong?

Unpleasant advice on how to do anything well: “People who attain fluency practice a lot more than the typical foreign language student. “A lot” doesn’t mean 10% more, 25% more, or even 100% more. People who attain fluency practice about ten times as much as the typical person who is officially “learning a foreign language.” → They study vocab daily (biggest language learning hack) → They immerse themselves in the language → They begin speaking on day 1 Then, they do this for a long amount of time. “Do ten times as much” is good advice if you’re just starting out. As Bryan Caplan notes, “never underestimate your fellow man’s lack of initiative”: it’s easy to post ten times as much when most make 2 LinkedIn posts per year. This is where the “more, better, new” framework comes in:  → First, you do more until you max out your capacity → Second, you do the thing at capacity but better (with improved processes, new insights etc) → Last, you do new things (trying out new strategies) Example – you want to build a personal brand:  → First, you simply post more until you get to 5x / week → Once you get there, analyze what works and what doesn’t, get some coaching, and automate some of the process  → Only when that is working, you add a new social media platform and start from scratch That’s all.

Underrated skill for future founders: Prospecting. (I hate it.) When you're starting out building a business, the only two things you should be doing are: 1. Building a product or service 2. Selling that product or service And if you're a service-led business, you won't be doing a lot of building. Everything really just comes down to one thing: selling. Sales Gurus out there are charging thousands of €€€ to tell you that you need to do more activities, more calls. Crazy to say this, but they're right. In every business I've been in so far, initial success was directly correlated with the amount of effort put into sales. Which sucks. I hate prospecting. I hate the rejection, the ghosting, the "we have a strict no-recruiter policy".  But it's necessary. So instead of (a) not doing it or (b) hating my life, I teamed up with my man Damian Heimel, who hates prospecting at least equally as much. We'd set aside three hours on Thursday morning, sit down together, put up a whiteboard, and whoever had less activities by the end of the three hours would have to buy the other lunch. Quite effective. Even kinda fun with the competitive twist. Doing hard stuff together > doing hard stuff alone.

The people who run the world aren’t crazy smart.  They’re just crazy disciplined. Back in 2022, I had a beautiful opportunity: play Lacrosse for Team Germany and face Team USA. Some of the best players in the world, including Tom Schreiber, the reigning MVP of the professional league. These guys are incredibly good at Lacrosse, no doubt. Crazy game IQ. Fantastic stick skills. Perfectly placed shots. They weren’t infinitely better at all these things than us though. What stuck out was their athleticism: these guys could run faster, change direction in a heartbeat, and still be more physical. 90-100kg pure muscle and yet twice the speed. Absolutely incredible. We just couldn’t keep up. All these guys had the holy trifecta:  - Talent - Practice - Effort They were incredibly gifted athletes.  They work incredibly hard, day in and day out.  They give 110% when they’re on the field. Everybody that competes for Team USA has some sort of genetic & talent advantage. That’s just a given at this point of competition. The differentiators are their effort and their consistency. If you outwork everyone else off the field (consistency in practice), and you out-hustle everybody else on the field (effort), you have a good chance to make it - regardless whether you’re hyper-talented or just somewhat talented. I can attest to this from my own experience. As a kid, I had bad grades in PE. Lost most of my Tennis matches.  Played in the lowest Soccer league. In my exchange year in the US, I picked up Lacrosse. Showed up for every conditioning session.  Did wall ball for an hour every day.  Studied the game daily. Back in Germany, I fell back into a hole. Did things that high school seniors and college students do. So I played second league for the first half of my career - until I stepped up my game and started taking training seriously. Once I got a personal trainer, fixed my injury issues, showed up to train six times a week, and started leaving it all out on the field, things changed. Eventually, the five years of consistent work on the field, in the gym, and in front of the TV studying film paid off. Culminating in the picture below: representing my country and playing against the best players in the world. So when you think about people who are where you want to go: Chances are they’re not crazy smart or talented.  They likely just put in the work, over and over again, for years. So can you. Practice and effort will take you far. Just show up daily.  And leave it all out on the field. PS: Want to know what it's like to compete in an international championship while running a startup? Hit the follow button today – heading off to Poland for the European Lacrosse Championships next week and will be reporting daily.

Netflix doesn’t cost you $10 per month. It costs you: - 1 hour per day - 365 hours per year - 9 work weeks per year “Netflix’s biggest competitor is sleep.” — Reed Hastings Go with the competition and get that extra hour of sleep today.

Seems like we need a transfer portal for elite startup talent. (oh wait – that already exists, it's called Generalyst , and you can sign A+ commercial talent for less than 0.01% of what Meta paid, an absolute steal) 🤯

I became an entrepreneur for the freedom.  Not to raise crazy high funding rounds, have a 100M exit, or to be featured in Forbes 30 under 30. While I was employed, I was obsessed with productivity. To get the most out of my time. (Hell, I even made an online course about it after trying to read everything productivity-related for >10 years.) The objective: to free up time for the things that I wanted to do. Specifically, writing, sports, and working on my own entrepreneurial projects. Over the past months, this has become a reality. Today, I:  → write daily  → build my own business  → play more Lacrosse than ever  → can take on side projects if I want to My day still has 24 hours, and I arguably have less unstructured time than before. But it’s my choice, and that fuels the fire. The big enabler here is discipline: sitting down daily to do the work, and then just continuing to do the work for a ridiculous amount of days. Always with the end in mind. Rarely with days off. No crazy hours. Just focused mental work during the day, focused physical work or recovery at night.  Most weeks are pretty similar. Somehow, that enables freedom.  → Freedom to focus on the things that matter because I’ve eliminated most decisions → Freedom to spend my time as I like  → Freedom to live three lives within one That’s kinda cool. You can even miss a day here and there, you just can’t miss a bunch of days. But in order to be able to not miss a bunch of days, you gotta miss a bunch of days – by intentionally taking the time to do something fully different. Starting tomorrow, I’ll be in Wroclaw, Poland, (with Justin Wismer & Wynton Bastian, among others) to compete in the European Lacrosse Championships. Business on the back burner. So that, when I get back, the desire and energy to continue doing the work day in and day out on the business will be replenished. Will be reporting from the fields. Expect different content from the regularly scheduled programming. Follow today to get an inside glimpse inside the athletic part of life of an entrepreneur.

Hi, I'm Dominik, and in my day job, I run a recruiting studio, building talent infrastructure for early-stage startups. But this and next week, I'm doing something completely different: Representing Team Germany at the European Lacrosse Championships in Poland. To give you a brief break from "thought leadership" content that you've been reading until here ... here's a rundown of our first 2 days in Wroclaw at the championships. (Also, I wanna hone my video content skills, which are ... rudimentary at best, as you can see here 😂) First game is today vs. Ukraine at 16:40 CEST. Link to stream in the comments below. (I'm number 8.) Hit that like + follow button if you want more insights of what the day-to-day of an athlete is like at the European Championships.

Instead of chasing fancy titles, C-Suite roles, or name-brand investors, chase this: Career Optionality. “The ultimate career flex isn’t building someone else’s dream, chasing a title, or flying first class to company off-sites. It’s having career optionality – being in a position where full-time roles are just one of many ways you can engage with the market, not the only way and definitely not a requirement.” – Elena Verna Most people are stuck in their full-time job. Addicted to their monthly salary just as humans are addicted to alcohol and nicotine. If they can’t have it, they suffer.  Sometimes, working in a full-time job is legitimately the best option. But ideally, this is a free choice, not a requirement. Elena’s example is spot on: about 1 month after publishing the post I quoted from, she joined Lovable  full-time to lead growth. Totally understandable. Arguably the hottest company in Europe right now, and you’d definitely want to do this full-time. But her career change came from optionality. She didn’t have to. She already has:  → An incredible track record in growth across the hottest scale-ups from Silicon Valley and Europe  → A strong personal brand, with 144k followers on LinkedIn and a newsletter with 56k subscribers → A bunch of paid advisory gigs on the side So worst case, she just continues to write her newsletter, monetizing both paid subscriptions at $9/month and sponsoring the newsletters at $5k/issue, while doing some fractional work. Sounds pretty good if you ask me. Much better than being tied to 12-hour days in an office with a fancy title and first class flights. So, let’s build career optionality. You need: - A track record of success (you can’t just go full solopreneur right away)  - A few assets that make you money - A network that allows you to find work quickly as a fallback This could be the playbook:  1. Begin your career in a company that does great things (for instance, as a Founder’s Associate) 2. Work hard and generate results (ideally taking over a management role after 1-2 years) 3. Use that trajectory to see something else from the inside and/or take a stab at entrepreneurship 4. Begin documenting your journey by writing online 5. If you’re not an entrepreneur, start monetizing on the side (consulting, digital products, etc) 6. Once you have enough going on the side, quit the full-time job and focus on building your solopreneur empire for a bit This will take a few years, but ultimately get you career optionality. PS: The best Founder’s Associate jobs are available at Generalyst . Apply today – we still have 10+ positions we have to fill before the summer. (It’s free, takes 5min, might completely change your career trajectory).

A hill I will die on: the best way to drive change in this world is entrepreneurship. And last week, I saw prime examples of this again at the Enactus National Cup. Enactus is a students’ organization looking to solve social & environmental problems in the world via entrepreneurship. It’s been around for 50 years today. I was part of the Munich team from 2012-2016 and my projects there fundamentally changed my life trajectory (but more on this in a separate post). Once a year, all teams from Germany get together and compete. The evaluation criteria: -> Entrepreneurial leadership → Innovation → Use of business principles → Sustainable positive impact Evaluated by judges, with a mix of corporate representatives, entrepreneurs, & alumni. Honestly … this is so cool. As a semi-pro athlete, the competition aspect always spoke to me. And you compete in making other people’s lives better? I love that. The highlights:  - A simple machine to home-grow Spirulina (algae superfood with little CO2 impact) at home (Enactus Kiel, Ben Schwedhelm) - A way to grow algae in the sea that produce rice-like grains, using no water and reducing CO2 (Enactus Münster e.V., Emily Purnell) - A scrappy, yet ingenious water pump that requires no electricity and allows for irrigation of fields (Enactus Köln e.V.) - A plant that uses leftovers from beer production to grow Black Soldier Fly larvae to turn them into animal feed, preventing deforestation in the rainforest (Enactus München, Rosina Glas) Promising projects, all contrived by students who are STILL IN UNIVERSITY. Hate as much as you want on the new generation coming out of university (to the tune of “nobody wants to work anymore”), the reality is that nobody is as driven to drive positive change for the future than these talents. Give a 20-something capital, guidance, and freedom. Then, let ‘em cook. They’ll do great things. Special kudos to the enactus Germany team & board (CC: Prof. Dr. Oliver Faber, Sebastian Johnston) for making the organization even more entrepreneurial than it used to be. I love what I saw this week. PS: Also a fantastic way to make lifelong friends, such as Kai Hübner & Chiara Secules.

Hard work pays off. Proud (not humbled or honored) to play another tournament with the German National Team at the European Lacrosse Championships in July. Had you told me that I'd be playing in the European Championships in 2025 eight years ago, I'd have told you that you're a lunatic. Thousands of hours spent on the field, in the gym, working with coaches, and watching film later, here we are. Super excited to be competing in Wroclaw from July 9th to 19th with these wonderful men. 🤝 LFG.

A quote I can’t stop thinking about: “There are really two types of companies that are truly VC-backable – super deep tech companies with deep strategic moats, and companies that are riding a tectonic shift (eg. delivery companies during COVID, Facebook / Google when the internet made everything accessible, Instagram when mobile became a thing etc)" Not sure where I read it, but it summarizes the current reality pretty well. In a world where you can literally just do things, building defensible startups becomes harder and harder. So you can either:  → build one of those 2 types of defensible companies, or → build something that doesn’t need defensibility A small company serving a niche can be highly profitable without needing massive defensibility. The recipe:  Relentless execution + brand + niche market. That way, you can establish yourself as the go-to player without having to build crazy moats. Your name, your brand, your process becomes the mini-moat. A palace needs a wall, because what’s inside is incredibly valuable.  A garden needs a fence, because that minimum of deterrent is sufficient for what’s inside. Build companies that need fences, not walls.