At the seventh edition of Gründerszene x The Delta, Dr. Patrick Andrae joined the stage for a conversation about what it takes to build a company from scratch, scale it across 30 countries, and take it public on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange.
As Co-founder and CEO of HomeToGo, the leading European vacation rental group now projecting 400 to 410 million euros in revenue, Patrick is one of the most grounded operators in European tech. But as he reminded the audience, it all started with a teenager redesigning a local internet provider's website without being asked.
The kid who started before he was allowed to
Patrick began coding at 12. By 15 he had taught himself HTML and built enough to show something real. When the local internet service provider in Hanover advertised for a web designer, he did not have a portfolio. So he took their website, redesigned it, and handed it over at the interview.
They told him he could start when he turned 16. He did.
What drew him in was the instant feedback loop. Unlike the compiled languages he had tried before, HTML let you hit F5 and see the result. For someone with high curiosity and low patience for friction, it was the perfect entry point. He started freelancing shortly after, working mostly with US clients, while still in school.
The long way around
What followed was not a straight line. Patrick studied law, then business. He sat both state exams. He completed a PhD in law. By the time he was done, he describes himself as having spent too long in the ivory tower.
But the detour was not wasted. Legal training in Germany is less about content and more about pressure. Every exam covers everything you have learned across years of study. The grade on that single exam is the only grade that counts. That kind of training teaches you to filter noise from signals, stay calm when the people around you are not, and hold structure when everything is moving fast. For a founder who would later navigate a pandemic fundraise and a public listing in the same breath, it turned out to be worth something.
Rocket Internet and the education money can't buy
Patrick joined Rocket Internet through a mandatory internship during his business studies. What he found was a place where very smart people worked very hard, where no one had come for work-life balance, and where the contract was clear: you get enormous responsibility and fast learning in exchange for everything you have.
He moved from Rocket to home24, where on his second day he was handed a team of 50 people. Something was burning and they knew he could deal with it. Within weeks the team had turned around a margins problem that had been dragging for months.
What he took from that experience was specific. Seeing how quickly motivation collapses when people work hard and feel unseen, and how quickly it recovers when the opposite happens, became one of the things he was most deliberate about building into HomeToGo. He also accumulated a clear list of things he wanted to do differently if he ever founded something himself. He did not want to keep extinguishing other people's fires.
The founding of HomeToGo
The idea did not come from Patrick alone. Two future co-founders approached him: one had previously built and sold a small vacation rental website, the other had built Swoo, a leading meta search for flights and hotels. The hypothesis was simple. There was already a meta search for hotels. There was a meta search for flights. There was nothing for vacation rentals.
Patrick had a personal version of the problem. Finding a vacation rental was genuinely painful. The market was huge, fragmented, and deeply unprofessional. Aggregating it was itself the solution, before you even got to price comparison.
They built a click dummy. Put search engine marketing behind it. Checked whether the clickthrough rates and commission economics could work. They did. HomeToGo launched in Berlin in 2014. Series A in 2015. Series B in 2016. Series C in 2017, led by Insight Venture Partners, who preempted the round and stayed as lead investor all the way to the IPO.
The meta search that had to become more
Growth came fast, but a problem became visible. Sending traffic out to suppliers with websites that were not even mobile-responsive was destroying conversion. The fix was to bring bookings onto the HomeToGo platform directly.
That decision met internal resistance. Some people worried it would push suppliers away. Others doubted the team could build a better experience than the suppliers themselves. Patrick pushed through it anyway.
Once the platform was converting well, the next question became obvious. If it is this easy to improve supplier performance on our platform, why not offer that software to suppliers outside it too? That question became HomeToGo PRO, the B2B software and services business. Through organic growth and acquisitions it has grown to roughly two thirds of total revenue today.
From the outside, people call it a pivot. From the inside, Patrick said, it felt like the plan was working.
Founder Learnings
- Curiosity and a willingness to just try something are often more valuable in the early days than credentials or a complete plan.
- Disciplines that train you to stay calm under pressure and filter what matters are more useful in a founder's toolkit than they look from the outside.
- Role modelling the work ethic you want from your team is not optional. You cannot ask for something you are not visibly doing yourself.
- Resistance to change inside a company is normal. The founders who execute through it tend to be the ones who survive long enough to be right.
- Evolution is not failure. The companies that last are rarely the ones that stayed exactly as they started.
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