Dirk Bischof’s early education in enterprise came with dirty machines. On Saturdays, as a boy in East Germany, he cleaned equipment and the factory floor in his father’s engineering business. The company was a response to upheaval: an old state employer was being dismantled, and his father bought machinery and started again. For the families whose wages depended on it, this was a fairly immediate demonstration of what a business was for.
Three decades later, Bischof is working with people trying to launch investment funds in Guernsey. Between those two settings sit an engineering apprenticeship, ventures that worked and one that closed, a South London charity, a bicycle in Japan and a deliberate departure from the organisation he founded. His career has accumulated titles. The more revealing detail is the sort of beginning that keeps attracting his attention: someone has a plan, but needs a practical way to start.
The Saturday job that came first
His father’s company offered a possible future for Bischof, too. His parents encouraged him towards metal engineering with the idea that he might eventually take over. He undertook a three-and-a-half-year apprenticeship, living during the week in a small village. Work began at six in the morning. Books filled the quieter hours. It was a substantial preparation for a career he would eventually take elsewhere.
By 2020, his connection to his old home around Elsterwerda was still strong enough to feature in a local newspaper’s account of a return visit. He was pictured mushroom hunting with his father and daughter. Later, looking back on the entrepreneurial thread in his life, he would connect his father’s example with childhood forests and autumn foraging. Work and the outdoors occupy adjoining rooms in his story.
Forty founders and a question about the bill
In Britain, his route ran through vocational training, sustainability and social enterprise. From 2004 onward, his work included projects connecting people and institutions across borders. He learned the considerable craft of turning a proposal into funding, then delivering what had been promised. The romantic image of entrepreneurship rarely makes much room for a well-written grant application. His experience gave it a proper desk.
There were experiments that ended. A renovation and home improvement venture attempted around 2008 closed within two years. Bischof later described the time spent as a lesson in finding a place in the market. By the time he founded Hatch in 2013, he was already helping people informally with their businesses. Making that help durable meant answering an awkward question: who would pay for it?
The people he wanted to work with were often starting small, outside the technology ventures that attracted conventional accelerator support. They needed advice and time before their businesses could afford much of either. A service priced to cover its own costs risked excluding its intended customers. Bischof’s answer was to bring in partners who could finance the support and contribute expertise.
“It was a business model decision to become a charity.”
Dirk Bischof, 2017
Hatch’s first youth enterprise incubator launched in Lambeth in 2014, with backing from J.P. Morgan. It supported 40 founders. The partnership also brought access to employees who could mentor them. Money paid for the work; people helped do it. That combination made the offer more useful than a collection of encouraging speeches, however attractively those might have been printed.
A bigger invitation
The programmes grew more specific as Hatch learned who was coming through the door. By the period described in a 2019 interview, women had accounted for roughly 65 to 70 percent of attendees after its first three years. Bischof thought the local focus, approachable atmosphere and in-person format might have helped. He presented that as a possible explanation, rather than a formula for everybody else to copy.
A female founder programme and an accelerator-level programme arrived in 2016. An incubator for women of colour followed in 2019. These were decisions about whom an organisation should serve and what kind of setting might help them participate. An open invitation still requires some thought about the people receiving it.
The geography changed as well. In 2020, Hatch moved its in-depth programmes online within two weeks. That transition opened participation to founders across the UK. A charity rooted in South London could now work nationally. Its 2020-21 activity included support opportunities for more than 940 founders and a mentoring and coaching programme matching nearly 330 founders with experts.
Hatch’s 2024-25 impact report. These are organisation-wide results.
By the close of Bischof’s leadership, the totals had reached another scale. Hatch reported supporting more than 10,000 founders through programmes and events. Its grant fund had distributed £1 million over three years. Those are collective achievements, involving a team, funders, partners, volunteers and the founders doing the actual work of building their companies. The first group of 40 had become the opening chapter of a much longer undertaking.
The CEO becomes the newcomer
In 2023, Bischof temporarily changed his own position in that picture. He took a sabbatical in Japan from April to July, beginning with cycling in Kyushu before working with ETIC, a Japanese nonprofit supporting social entrepreneurs. He had first visited Japan in 2009. A longer stay had been on his mind since 2018, giving this departure considerably more planning time than a last-minute flight search.
The trip also made room for martial arts. Bischof began practising in 1998 and studies kobudo, a Japanese martial tradition. Returning to teachers was part of the purpose of the visit. Here was an experienced founder arranging time to be a student, while Hatch continued its work at home.
At ETIC, the unfamiliar element was organisational. It had moved to self-management after its founding CEO retired. Bischof knew enterprise support and had studied organisations, yet the working arrangements took time to understand. Direct questions and documents supplied only part of the explanation. Meetings, shared work and conversations with colleagues slowly made the culture more legible.
That experience brought a useful complication to the visiting CEO’s expertise. Knowing a sector did not mean instantly understanding how another organisation in it made decisions. He worked on presentations, articles and discussions with a potential corporate partner. Participation gave him something observation alone had struggled to provide: a place inside the work.
An organisation with a future of its own
The sabbatical also involved a practical transfer of responsibility at Hatch. Rebekah served as interim CEO while Bischof was away, following preparation with colleagues and the board. Two years later, the succession became permanent. Bischof stepped down in August 2025. Rebekah Sun became chief executive in September, the first woman to lead Hatch.
In his farewell, he credited the team, board, partners, funders and founders. He had spent twelve years building the charity. Leaving gave the next leader room to make decisions about its future. The handover was a substantial career event, even without the usual founder photograph beside a cheque or an acquisition announcement.
Another change followed: after nearly 25 years in London, Bischof moved to Guernsey, while continuing to split his time between the two. His early dispatch included cycling around the island, foraging, looking at the sea and discovering that the local chess club could administer a brisk correction to his ego. A new setting had supplied both introductions and an efficient reminder that experience travels imperfectly.
“My current hypothesis: more connection, more focus, deeper impact.”
Dirk Bischof, on moving to Guernsey
Now help the people who back the founders
His investment work had already begun to take shape. Korra Ventures, co-founded with Tania Rahman and Dr. Thomas Schreiber, publicly launched in July 2025. The angel syndicate focuses on overlooked founders and ventures combining commercial potential with measurable impact. At launch, it announced an ambition to deploy £50 million over a decade. That was a target for the future, rather than money already invested.
Bischof also offers coaching for founders and CEOs dealing with starting, changing, scaling or leaving a business. The list resembles stages in his own working life. Alongside that work, his 2026 writing with Caroline Gormley argued for better coordination between enterprise programmes, funders, companies and councils. Shared referrals and practical infrastructure, he suggested, deserved attention alongside the next new programme.
In Guernsey, he became a director at Foundry Partners, working with Rebecca Booth and Justin Sykes on the Fund Foundry. The programme supports first-time and emerging fund managers. It offers five places each year, twelve months of support and service vouchers towards costs such as legal work, administration and audit. The people raising capital to invest in businesses have their own version of the starting problem.
Discussing the programme in August 2026, Bischof emphasised the cohort itself: participants could become a network for one another, sharing approaches and contacts. By late September, the first selection had taken place. Twenty finalists pitched; five managers were chosen. A proposition about bringing people together had acquired its first group of people.
The setting is a long way from a factory floor or Brixton’s first incubator. The practical questions have a familiar sound. Who can make an introduction? Who pays for the advice? What has to be in place before a capable person can begin? Bischof keeps finding another version of that work. For someone whose father bought machines to make a new start, there is a certain family resemblance.