Adventures of a Digital Privateer

Against the Coworking Space

Sun, 29 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The modern coworking space is a marvel of category confusion: it charges the price of an office while delivering the ambiance of an airport lounge. It wraps commercial real estate arbitrage in the language of community, innovation, and — that most debased of words — synergy.

Let us be clear about what a coworking space actually is. A landlord leases a floor of a building at a long-term rate. A coworking operator subleases desks on that floor at a short-term rate, pocketing the spread. The desks come with a coffee machine, a few meeting rooms bookable via app, and a Slack channel where strangers post about their startups. This is presented as a revolution in how we work.

Hello, World

Sun, 29 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

After a period of digital dormancy — during which the domain sat behind an expired Squarespace subscription like a shuttered townhouse on the Croisette — we are back.

This site is now powered by Hugo, hosted for approximately the cost of a single espresso per year, and dedicated to the proposition that a man with too many projects should at least write about them.

Expect essays, venture dispatches, the occasional invective, and whatever else washes ashore.

Launching Hirschen Capital

Sun, 29 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Hirschen Capital exists to find, acquire, and operate a single outstanding small or mid-sized business in Germany’s industrial heartland. We are raising €1 million in search capital — twenty units at €50,000 each — to fund a disciplined search targeting companies in the MEITAC sectors (manufacturing, engineering, industrial technology, automation, and components) with EBITDA between €1.5 million and €5 million.

The thesis is straightforward. Germany’s Mittelstand is experiencing a once-in-a-generation succession crisis. Hundreds of thousands of profitable, well-run businesses need new ownership over the next decade, and the pipeline of qualified buyers is thin. Private equity is too large. Strategic acquirers are too slow. The founders’ children have moved on. We intend to step into that gap.

The Mittelstand Succession Crisis and Why It Matters

Sun, 29 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

There are roughly 3.5 million small and mid-sized enterprises in Germany. They account for more than half of the country’s economic output, employ over 60 percent of the workforce, and are the reason German towns you have never heard of produce components the entire world depends on. The Germans call this ecosystem the Mittelstand, and they are justifiably proud of it.

They should also be worried about it.

Over the next decade, an estimated 600,000 of these businesses will need new ownership. Many were founded in the postwar boom, passed once to the Boomer generation, and now face an uncomfortable reality: the children do not want the factory. They have moved to Berlin, or London, or into consulting. The founder, now in his seventies, has spent forty years building something that has no obvious successor.