Oliver Hanisch’s first business began with a school-leaving souvenir. He was responsible for the graduating class’s branded T-shirts, disliked the process of getting offers from suppliers, and decided to start a T-shirt business himself. There are grander origin stories in entrepreneurship. Few come with such a useful first customer: a class of people already waiting for their shirts.
He went to Silicon Valley in 2005, stayed for fourteen years, and returned to Germany in 2019 to lead Campus Founders. Today his work in Heilbronn concerns the circumstances around a company’s birth: who a founder meets, how an idea gets tested, where early money comes from, and whether somebody experienced is available before an expensive mistake. The teenager irritated by a purchasing process has become an executive working on the process of starting businesses.
A seat at the table
Hanisch was born in Böblingen, in Germany’s southwest. His education took him to Pforzheim University and Karlstad University in Sweden, where he studied service management at master’s level. His professional geography eventually widened to California. Yet the question running through his later career is surprisingly practical: how do people with different kinds of knowledge get close enough to be useful to one another?
His earlier roles include co-founding SnipClip and German Silicon Valley Innovators, mentoring with German Accelerator, and establishing One49Labs, which offered housing and community for entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. Housing is an unusually literal form of startup support. Before a founder can join the local conversation, the founder needs somewhere to put a suitcase. A spare room can solve a more immediate problem than a slide deck explaining the regional economy.
He also represented North Rhine-Westphalia in the Bay Area. That work involved cultivating business contacts, helping with visits, and connecting companies with opportunities for investment and cooperation. It required familiarity with two commercial cultures and the patience to make them intelligible to each other. An introduction looks small on a calendar. For a company entering an unfamiliar market, it can be the beginning of everything that follows.
A public exchange from 2013 shows that practical side at work. Hanisch was helping arrange rooms in Palo Alto for a visiting team, coordinating who could show the accommodation while he was traveling. The thread included the ordinary business of arrival dates, available rooms and getting the right people in touch. It is a useful glimpse of work that rarely earns a stage appearance. International entrepreneurship also involves finding someone who can show you the house.
Seen from that level, his later interest in a shared workplace has a long prehistory. A founder arriving in a new city needs both space and orientation. Providing one without the other leaves part of the task unfinished. Hanisch’s roles put him near those first encounters, where a welcome becomes useful when it includes an answer to a concrete question.
California, without the souvenir shop
German Accelerator became one vehicle for that work. Hanisch helped co-initiate the program supporting German startups abroad. He has described Silicon Valley as a way of thinking as much as a destination. For somebody whose work depends on crossing borders, that distinction matters: an address can be changed in an afternoon; expectations about what a young business might achieve take longer to revise.
His own first company had been profitable from the beginning. Looking back, he felt he had thought too small and wished an experienced mentor had helped him see a business that could scale. He once wanted to become a chef, attracted by the freedom to experiment. The experiments survived the change of profession. His chosen description of himself was curious, courageous and optimistic; his compact communication motto was “Life is a pitch.”
By 2019, the experiment had a different location. Campus Founders had been established by the Dieter Schwarz Foundation in September 2018. Hanisch arrived to lead an organization intended to connect students, entrepreneurs, investors and established companies. Its nonprofit educational work and the investment activity of Campus Founders Ventures give that mission different instruments. Teaching somebody to test a business and deciding to invest in it are distinct responsibilities, even when the same community brings them together.
What Heilbronn already had
Hanisch’s argument for Heilbronn starts with people who are already there. Universities provide talent. Investors can provide financing. The established businesses of Heilbronn-Franken can become early customers. In his account, paid pilot projects and candid feedback help young teams move forward. Those are specific transactions, with more consequence than simply having a large collection of business cards.
The region’s industrial base makes that argument plausible. A startup can spend months describing a possible customer to an investor. Sitting with a company that might actually buy the product changes the conversation. The questions become less ceremonial. What will it cost? Who will use it? What happens when it fails? For Hanisch, bringing those encounters into reach is part of the work of running Campus Founders.
In 2020 he resisted the suggestion that Heilbronn needed to become another Silicon Valley. Useful practices could be studied and adapted. His explanation of company-building was equally grounded: talk to customers, test assumptions, build something, measure the response, improve it. He warned that the desire to perfect a product before showing it could leave a team too late to change course. Thoroughness has its virtues; sometimes it needs an appointment with a customer.
“Fall in love with the problem you want to solve. Not with the idea you have.”Oliver Hanisch, 2022
Help that travels onward
Community, in this account, involves obligations as well as benefits. Hanisch has explained that support often cannot be repaid directly to the person who gave it. A founder can help somebody else later. That gives the familiar practice of introductions a longer life: today’s recipient may become tomorrow’s mentor, customer or investor. It also puts a demand on membership. People need something to contribute, even when they have much to learn.
Campus Founders’ Venture Studio makes another part of that relationship explicit. Hanisch serves on its investment committee alongside Jens Horstmann and Günter Steffen. The committee assesses companies for investment and admission, while also helping teams reach customers, partners and people who can support their next stage. The arrangement puts experienced operators close to early decisions. Its usefulness depends on the quality of those decisions and the honesty of the conversations around them.
The educational side has its own expression. In 2022 Campus Founders launched the LearnTech Hub, led by Fabian Klein, to bring startups, companies and educational institutions together around the future of learning and work. Hanisch’s argument was that new ways of working require new ways of learning. The initiative fits a career spent moving between places and roles: knowledge acquired once needs company, practice and renewal.
People, programs and introductions turn nearby institutions into working relationships. A conceptual map, rather than a measurement of outcomes.
A building with a name to live up to
In December 2025, the idea acquired a conspicuous home. GRAVITY officially opened on Heilbronn’s Bildungscampus. Hanisch spoke about a building that deliberately interrupted the harmony of its surroundings, comparing that interruption with startups questioning an existing economic order. He also thanked Björn Conrad, who had helped develop the premises, with a custom baseball cap carrying the GRAVITY name. Institution-building, it turns out, can include a small hat ceremony.
The building gives meetings somewhere to happen repeatedly. Its offering includes coworking spaces, private offices, workshop rooms and a media studio. A public restaurant and a lounge create other reasons to turn up. These details matter because useful conversation does not always arrive wearing a conference badge. People can meet before they have a formal reason to collaborate, then return when the reason becomes clear.
By August 2026, regional reporting described seventy startups in GRAVITY and coworking occupancy of around seventy percent roughly six months after opening. Those figures offer a view of activity inside the building. They are also appropriately modest measures: occupancy shows that people are using a place. The harder questions concern what happens between those people, and what their companies manage to do afterward.
Reported in August 2026. A snapshot of the hub, not personal performance figures.
The invitation changes; the work continues
Heilbronn Slush’D had given the community a recurring occasion to bring founders, investors and businesses together. By late 2025, Hanisch described an organization with programs, premises, relationships and early investment working alongside one another. Each answers a different question. A room provides a place to work; a mentor helps interpret a setback; a first investment buys time to keep going. A festival can make several of those conversations happen in a day.
In March 2026, Campus Founders announced that SLUSH had decided to discontinue the Slush’D series worldwide. It also announced a partnership with TECH by Handelsblatt and a House of Startups for that year’s conference. The new platform was designed to connect startups with investors and corporate decision-makers. The event name changed, while Hanisch’s stated purpose remained recognizable: give young companies access to the people who can help them make progress.
His return from California makes sense in that light. He brought experience of founders, cross-border business and the everyday mechanics of making contacts. Heilbronn offered institutions and companies with which to put it to work. The story began with classmates needing T-shirts. It now includes a building full of teams needing something less easy to order: a useful first conversation, a willing customer, an informed answer. Hanisch has chosen to work where those needs meet.