Bio
Armin Steuernagel is a serial-entrepreneur, and co-founder of several businesses, amongst others Purpose Foundation and PurposeCapital. He founded his first business at the age of 16 – a mail order company for sustainable toys that is active in Germany. An other companies try to get children exited about good food and is active in over 20 countries. Currently he helps many purpose-driven companies in Europe to become self-owned companies with new legal structures. The self-ownership structure helps them to stay mission-driven for the long term and ensures they do not become a speculation object. He also recently founded Purpose.Capital, an investment fund for self-owned/cooperative startups that want to grow without selling themselves.
Steuernagel studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at University of Witten/Herdecke and Oxford. Currently he also studies at Columbia University, New York.
Purpose.Capital is an evergreen fund that finances self-owned companies. We help in three dimensions. We are helping companies to adopt a corporate ownership form that helps them stay on mission for the long run. We call it self-ownership, or worker owned companies.
We provide patient capital in an evergreen form – we do not do exits (we only take dividends) and take no voting rights to keep the start-ups mission driven. We think companies are not a speculative good.
Our start-ups collaborate in a new way, since they are all purpose driven and can help each other without being afraid to only maximize the others personal wealth. We call it the purpose economy