Building a 200-Employee M&A Firm | Mark Miller on the Finance | Data | People Podcast

In the first anniversary edition of Finance | Data | People, Mark Miller, Founder and Managing Partner of Carlsquare, joins Dr. Sascha Haggenmueller, Co-Founder & Managing Director of Radial. Mark shares how he and Michael Moritz built Carlsquare as an M&A advisory from scratch.

The conversation also covers:

• How Mark found his way to entrepreneurship through a training program at Deutsche Bank, studies at Witten/Herdecke University, and the New Economy era at Bertelsmann

• The milestones Carlsquare reached from bootstrapping through the community platform “Venture Lounge,” joining the Globalscope network, to establishing offices in Munich, Stockholm, Copenhagen, London, Paris, Warsaw, San Francisco, Vancouver, Boston, and Frankfurt

• The personal setback Carlsquare faced during the buildout of the Munich office and how it became one of the most formative phases in the company’s history

• How the firm maintains a shared culture across borders with six global sector teams, a consensus principle among partners, and deliberately few fixed rules

• How AI tools like Claude for Excel and PowerPoint are integrated into the daily deal process today, and why Mark remains convinced that M&A advisory is fundamentally a human business

• What Mark advises young people who want to enter the advisory industry

Listen to the full episode (in German) on Spotify or Apple Podcast, or watch on YouTube