Bits & Pretzels 2025 – A first time at the Founders Festival
This year, GTW took part in Bits & Pretzels for the first time—and it was absolutely worth it!
The festival wasn’t a traditional conference but an intense, inspiring format that brought founders, investors, and corporates together as equals. For three days, Munich became the center of the European startup scene, and the energy was palpable.
Content-wise, the event was tightly focused on topics we at GTW deal with every day: digital business models, the platform economy, subscription approaches, and scalable monetization. What was particularly impressive was how openly many speakers talked about their growth phases, learnings, and stumbling blocks. No empty buzzwords—just honest insights into how a vision becomes a viable international business model.
As a company that has already supported several larger scale-ups and implemented highly scalable billing solutions for complex, platform-based business models, it was exciting to see how dynamic the market currently is. Many conversations revolved around the same core question: How can growth be managed efficiently without being overwhelmed by complexity? — that’s precisely our playing field.
The planned conclusion of the festival—traditional networking at Oktoberfest—had to be canceled this year due to a security incident and the short-notice closure of the Theresienwiese. That was unfortunate, as this third day is considered the heart of personal encounters. However, a few days later a replacement event was announced to take place digitally—a clear sign of this community’s agility and solution orientation.
Our takeaway: Bits & Pretzels is more than just an event—it’s a meeting place for people who take innovation seriously. It was inspiring to see how consistently founders, investors, and corporates are working on the future of digital business models. And that’s exactly where GTW comes in—with the experience to transform such ideas into scalable structures, automated processes, and resilient monetization models.
We’ll definitely be back next year—hopefully with a Maß, pretzels, and real handshakes at Oktoberfest.