At the sixth edition of Gründerszene × The Delta, Verena Pausder joined the stage for a conversation that covered nearly three decades of building, failing, and starting again. As the founder of Fox and Sheep, Chairwoman of the Startup-Verband, and co-founder of FC Victoria Berlin, Verena is one of the most influential entrepreneurs in Europe.
But as she reminded the audience, it all started with a sushi restaurant in Bielefeld that most customers didn't want.
A family that treated business as a way of life.
Verena grew up in an entrepreneurial household unlike most.
Her family's textile company had been running for over 300 years. A former German president sat in her extended family tree. Her father worked through every holiday he could. Her mother, unwilling to simply be a supporting figure, opened her own interior design business from scratch.
Saturdays meant going to the factory to deliver the post.
That environment didn't hand Verena a golden spoon. What it gave her was resilience. In the 1990s, nearly the entire textile market her family served moved to China almost overnight. Her father, still relatively young, was facing the possibility of ending a nine-generation legacy. Verena watched him hold the company together and keep going.
That image never left her.
The sushi restaurant nobody asked for
At 19, Verena and her family returned from a trip to New York full of enthusiasm about sushi restaurants. Bielefeld had none. So they opened one.
The city was unconvinced. Early customers walked in and asked if there was anything on the menu without fish. The restaurant's response was a dedicated page of cucumber rolls and egg dishes for anyone who wasn't quite ready for raw fish. Those dishes became bestsellers.
The restaurant ran for twelve years. It was never a spectacular success, but it never collapsed either. And it taught Verena something she still carries today.
As soon as you actually do something, you realise how hard it really is. The gap between talking about starting something and running it is enormous. But if you keep going anyway, something worth building tends to emerge.
That lesson stayed with her through everything that followed.
The idea that became Fox and Sheep
A decade later, Verena was working at a browser-based children's online world called Panfu, where kids could play as pandas and chat with each other. The company had serious backing and real traction, but in 2011 the team made a difficult realisation.
Everything was built in Flash. The mobile era was arriving. The platform couldn't make the jump.
Verena and her co-founder faced a choice. They could try to rebuild Panfu for mobile, or they could accept that the best years of that business were behind it and start something new.
They chose to start again.
It was a harder decision for her co-founder, who had founded Panfu. For Verena, who had joined as a hired CEO, it was painful but clearer. Looking back, she describes it as the right call. The old thing would have gone down anyway. The new thing needed a clean start.
That new thing became Fox and Sheep.
The Monday morning that changed everything
In early 2012, Verena and her co-founder launched their first app. It was a children's bedtime app called Night, available in twelve languages, designed to help small children wind down at the end of the day.
They had twelve people in a Berlin office. They had no certainty that Apple would feature them. And they had no idea what was about to happen.
On that Monday morning, they woke up to discover they were App of the Day in 122 countries. They had 50,000 paid downloads on the first day.
Verena was 32, a single mother of two young boys. She and her co-founder had tears in their eyes.
They both knew: if this works, it changes everything.
They never repeated those numbers. But they didn't need to. That morning was proof enough that the idea was real, the product worked, and the market was there.
The crash bug that still stings
Not everything went that cleanly.
Fox and Sheep's most expensive app ever was a children's doctor game, illustrated by an Oscar-winning artist. It launched to the top of the charts in 120 countries. And in the first second you opened it, it crashed.
It was Thanksgiving. Nobody at Apple was answering the phone.
For 28 hours, the team watched one-star reviews arrive in a steady stream. Every minute that passed made the damage worse. There was nothing to do but sit with it.
Verena is direct about how that felt. You can just cry. Literally cry. So much work, so many salaries, so many months of development, all surfacing at once in the moment it was supposed to pay off.
Apple never gave them quite the same level of trust again. The company went on to succeed and eventually sell, but Verena believes the story might have looked different if that launch had gone as planned.
She also believes it was part of the deal.
If you could only play the game when everything goes right, everyone would be an entrepreneur.
40 million downloads and a decision to sell
By 2014, Fox and Sheep had 40 million paid downloads across a catalogue of beautifully made children's apps. Paid apps as a business model were beginning to soften. The team decided to test the market.
An offer came in. It was good enough to say yes.
Not because they had built it to sell, but because the exit unlocked something more valuable than revenue. It gave Verena the freedom to give back, to fund other founders, and to shape the ecosystem she had come up inside of.
She stayed on as CEO for five years after the sale before leaving on 1 January 2020, just weeks before the first COVID lockdown was announced.
Today she has 50 angel investments. Half of them are in women-led companies.
Founder Learnings
The gap between talking about an idea and actually running it is where most people stop. Keep going past that point.
Pivoting away from something that isn't working is not failure. It is how most good companies actually begin.
A single moment of product market fit can validate years of uncertainty.
Failure at scale is part of building at scale. The question is whether you carry it or let it define you.
An exit is not an ending. It is often the beginning of the next, more intentional chapter.
If you are ready to start building, The Delta Campus is where that journey begins, so book your tour now or contact us.
Written by Alexandra Matthews
Chief Operating Officer
