---
title: "Venture Capital in Germany and Japan | Oskari Lehtonen and Claes Mikko Nilsen | Negotiator 134"
titleOriginal: "VC Saksassa ja Japanissa | Oskari Lehtonen Claes Mikko Nilsen | Neuvottelija 134"
episodeNumber: "134"
guest: "Oskari Lehtonen, Claes Mikko Nilsen"
datePublished: 2022-04-25
duration: "46:09"
youtube: "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxaERHMcnR0"
originalLanguage: "fi"
topics: ["investing_markets","ownership_capital_tax"]
subtitleMethod: "none"
provenance: "Owner page assembled from YouTube metadata and the neuvottelija.fi episode record. The publisher published no chapter marks for this episode, so none are listed here. No transcript is published either — the channel has no English caption track for this episode and the Finnish one is YouTube's automatic track. Both guests were raising or deploying the funds they describe when this was recorded, which makes parts of the conversation promotional; nothing in it is an offer or investment advice, and the fund sizes and market conditions are those of spring 2022, before the funding market turned."
fiCanonical: "https://www.neuvottelija.fi/fi/episodes/179-vc-saksassa-ja-japanissa-oskari-lehtonen-claes-mikko-nilsen"
canonical: https://www.neuvottelija.com/podcast/episodes/ep134-vc-saksassa-ja-japanissa-lehtonen-nilsen/
---
# Venture Capital in Germany and Japan | Oskari Lehtonen and Claes Mikko Nilsen | Negotiator 134

English subtitles are not available on this page. This is an episode summary, not a curated transcript.

## Summary

Oskari Lehtonen of Redstone VC and Claes Mikko Nilsen of Nordic Ninja VC explain how a venture capital model changes when the money behind it comes from a German family business rather than from a Japanese industrial group. Nilsen explains why Panasonic, Honda, Omron and Japan's state bank decided to channel a hundred million euros into the Nordics and the Baltics, and why the fund's complete independence was a condition of the whole undertaking. The conversation covers LP and GP structures, exit channels, and why European funds nearly always include public money while American ones never do.

## Capital is not interchangeable

The premise worth taking away is that a euro from a German family business and a euro from a Japanese industrial group buy different behaviour from the same fund. Patience, sector preference, tolerance for a slow exit and appetite for follow-on all track the source, which makes the LP base a strategic choice rather than a funding detail.

## Independence as a condition

The counter-intuitive part of the Nordic Ninja arrangement is that the industrial backers insisted the fund be independent of them. A corporate venture arm that invests to serve its parent sees a narrower deal flow; the strategic value they wanted required giving up the steering.

## Public money on one continent only

European funds are built with a public participant almost as a matter of course, and American ones are not. That difference propagates all the way to risk appetite and time horizon, and it explains more about the two ecosystems than the usual comparisons of deal size do.


## Watch

The recording lives on the Neuvottelija channel: [VC Saksassa ja Japanissa | Oskari Lehtonen Claes Mikko Nilsen | Neuvottelija 134](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxaERHMcnR0).
A Finnish edition of this episode is published at [www.neuvottelija.fi](https://www.neuvottelija.fi/fi/episodes/179-vc-saksassa-ja-japanissa-oskari-lehtonen-claes-mikko-nilsen).

## In depth

The Neuvottelija AI editions carry a long-form write-up of this episode:
[English](https://www.neuvottelija.com/ai/ep134-vc-saksassa-ja-japanissa-lehtonen-nilsen/) · [suomeksi](https://www.neuvottelija.fi/economy/ep134-vc-saksassa-ja-japanissa-lehtonen-nilsen/).

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Cite as: Sami Miettinen, Neuvottelija — Venture Capital in Germany and Japan | Oskari Lehtonen and Claes Mikko Nilsen | Negotiator 134, https://www.neuvottelija.com/podcast/episodes/ep134-vc-saksassa-ja-japanissa-lehtonen-nilsen/, 2022-04-25. For quotes include episode 134 and timestamp.