Two personal fates are behind the deal between Carsten Maschmeyer, Dagmar Wöhrl and the startup Zockerhelden – which came about as announced.
Zockerhelden founder Werner Hansch, former football commentator, and Marc Ellerbrock, lawyer. RTL / Bernd-Michael Maurer
He was very impressed by “this emotional pitch,” investor Carsten Maschmeyer told Gründerszene. And it was certainly emotional when founder Marc Ellerbrock, together with his co-founder Werner Hansch, pitched the gambling debt legal platform Zockerhelden, which provides legal support for the reclaiming of gambling losses. The 85-year-old Hansch, who has worked as a sports reporter for more than thirty years and commented on hundreds of football matches on the radio, spoke openly about his own gambling addiction.
Maschmeyer, who himself confesses to being a recovered addict, spoke directly about the connection to himself and his addiction to pills, which he suffered from in 2009, when he offered the founding duo to take part in their deal – 125,000 euros for ten percent of the shares. But Dagmar Wöhrl also had a connection to what the retired football reporter and the lawyer and specialist in banking and capital market law had started together: “I thought, from lawyer to lawyer…?” she said. The Bavarian is not only an entrepreneur, but also studied law and is a lawyer.
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Tears of joy for the founder
Ultimately, it was Maschmeyer who quickly turned it into a double deal: “Wöhrlmeyer,” as he said, offered 125,000 euros – the founders agreed with tears of joy. “Our investment teams are currently in a very constructive exchange,” Maschmeyer told Gründerszene about the progress of the deal after the broadcast.
“The pitch was recorded very late and the broadcast will take place quite early,” Werner Hansch explains to Gründerszene, which is why the ink on the amount is not yet dry. “That’s why the discussions are still ongoing.”
Online gambling operators without a license
“Zockerhelden is a startup with real purpose,” says Maschmeyer about his reasons for investing in Hansch and Ellerbrock. But there is also a solid business model behind it: The lawyer Ellerbrock and his law firm have been advising and representing gambling addicts for years who want to recover gambling debts from online providers. In many cases, this is possible up to ten years retroactively because numerous online casinos, poker providers and betting offices did not have or do not have valid licenses.
In the meantime, he and his colleagues are no longer able to handle all the cases themselves, which gave him the idea of setting up a lead business with Zockerhelden: On the site, those affected can use a “self-test” to check whether their case has a chance. Zockerhelden then puts them in touch with lawyers who represent those affected. The site earns money from this.
Personal fate as an incentive
Hansch, however, has a different motive: he wants to help people who share his fate. And that is hard, as he reported in an interview with Gründerszene a year ago when he co-founded Zockerhelden: After more than 30 years as a sports journalist for ARD-Sportschau and Sat1, among others, his professional life is coming to an end at the age of 65. A situation that he was not prepared for, says Hansch today, looking back. “I suddenly had a lot of time, I had enough money. But I was missing meaning in life,” he says in an interview with Gründerszene. That was the basis for the crash that followed. “During this phase, I walked past a betting shop, the door was open and I heard voices.”
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Hansch makes a momentous decision: He goes in and allows himself to be persuaded to place a bet on a horse race, which he promptly wins. A few days later he goes again, this time the horse he bet on only comes second. “I thought, you can’t end it like that. I bet again – and in doing so opened the door to hell,” he remembers.
Hansch falls into a gambling addiction that costs him his entire fortune. He gambles away money borrowed from friends and acquaintances, has to sell his house and is left by his partner. “In the end, I felt like I was just a shell of flesh. All my values, everything that once defined me as a person, was gone.” A friend finally sends him to therapy and to a self-help group that is supposed to help him overcome his years of addiction.
With his startup, Hansch, as he also said during his appearance on DHDL, has a purpose again and thus finds meaning in his life.
