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In this episode, Christian Steiger (Founder & CEO, Lexware) and Miriam Wohlfahrt (Founder, Banxware) talk about why nobody starts a business to deal with finances and why that's precisely where so many companies end up failing.
The conversation covers liquidity, speed, and the question of why traditional systems almost always look backward, while entrepreneurs need to look forward. Also part of the discussion is the AI business partner: not as a tool, but as a thinking partner that takes over the parts you don't want to deal with and makes better decisions possible.
Transcript (editorially adapted)
What drives a CEO who leads a company with 600,000 customers and €220 million in annual revenue? For Christian Steiger, Managing Director of Lexware, the answer is surprisingly clear: it's not about growth for growth's sake. It's about making life noticeably easier for four million self-employed people in Germany.
Christian is a father, a former passionate electronic musician, and today one of the most committed voices on the topic of entrepreneurship in Germany. Every morning he drives his daughter to her Montessori school, an educational concept he's enthusiastic about because Maria Montessori was genuinely rethinking things over 120 years ago. That same principle runs through everything he does at Lexware.
Lexware has existed since 1989 and has established itself over decades as a provider of accounting and inventory management software. With the development of Lexware Office, Christian, acting as an intrapreneur within the company, did something decisive: he didn't use the cloud simply to move existing software online, but to fundamentally rethink what entrepreneurship should actually look like. Today, over 400,000 entrepreneurs use Lexware Office, and the company finds itself once again facing a true game changer: artificial intelligence.
A central theme is a bitter truth about why businesses fail: the most common reason is not a bad product, but poor liquidity management. Many founders start with a great idea and passion, and then lose track of their finances. Using the bank account as the sole management tool is dangerous. Those who don't know when taxes are due, what expenses are coming, or how the next few months will develop can run out of money, even when the business is actually doing well.
Banks look at the account in real time, but only backward. Tax advisors look one year back, sometimes two. Accounting is by definition retrospective. But entrepreneurs want to know: where do I stand right now? And above all: where am I heading? This forward thinking is the core of what modern software should deliver. Those who have a handle on their financial data can not only spot liquidity bottlenecks early, but also have the foundation to receive real decision support from AI.
A striking example: an entrepreneur selling refurbished Apple products gets a short notice opportunity to fulfil a large order if he can act within 48 hours. His bank was unable to respond that quickly. With an alternative financing solution, he was able to handle the order and double his revenue. A similar story comes from a founder of vegan milk alternatives: she wanted to apply for a bank loan and was confronted with a list of documents and appointments that would have taken weeks. Her conclusion: yes, an alternative loan is more expensive on paper. But when you factor in her time, it was worth a hundred times more.
Perhaps the most fitting image for the future of financial management is Uber. Get in, get out, done. Payment simply didn't happen. No receipt, no card, no hesitation. That is the goal: to automate things to the point where, from the customer's perspective, they no longer take place at all. Accounting, loan applications, liquidity planning, nobody really wants to do any of that. The logical consequence: it has to be designed so that you simply must do it. And ideally in a way that feels as though it's already been taken care of.
Less than three years ago, "ChatGPT" was a term hardly anyone knew. Today, everyone says "just ask ChatGPT" as naturally as they once said "just Google it." The speed with which new technologies enter everyday vocabulary shows: when convenience is right, behaviour changes faster than we think. The same was true of the iPhone, apps, and cloud software. And it will be true of AI, no matter how many voices are still hesitant or cautioning today.
Many people still use AI like a better search engine: summarising, translating, rewriting. That's thinking in tasks. What's really needed is a shift in mindset toward goals and outcomes. Not "write me a text," but "I want more visibility for my business, take care of it." That's the difference between prompting and mandating. And it is precisely this mandating that will define the future of business management.
Lexware is working on a concept internally called the "Lena Principle." The idea: every entrepreneur gets an AI powered co pilot by their side, a kind of virtual Chief of Staff that runs in the background, keeps an eye on finances, informs the tax advisor, reviews marketing campaigns, draws industry comparisons, and acts independently when needed. Not a jumble of dozens of different agents, but a single entity you give a goal to, which then orchestrates the right specialists. The aim is for this to be a reality by 2030.
No company today can manage everything on its own, neither small ones nor large ones. Technology is developing so fast that even well positioned organisations can no longer keep up with implementation. The answer is: focus on the core business and forge smart partnerships for everything else. Those who try to build everything themselves risk falling behind, like Blackberry, Nokia, or Kodak once did. Incidentally, Kodak invented the digital camera. They just didn't think big enough with it.
Four million self-employed people in Germany collectively employ around 12.5 million people. When these businesses start to struggle, society as a whole has a problem. And yet these are precisely the small enterprises that are barely talked about. The baker around the corner cutting four jobs doesn't make the front page. And yet today's large companies all grew from exactly these small beginnings. Amazon, Apple, the families behind Europapark, they all started out as individuals at some point. Supporting entrepreneurship is not a niche. It is a societal responsibility.
In the end, everything comes down to one thought: the highest level of "just getting it done" is when it's already done. When accounting simply happens. When liquidity gaps are identified and closed before you even have to think about them. When entrepreneurs can once again focus on what they originally set out to do: their passion, their product, their idea. That is the vision. And it is closer than you might think.
