It's a bold vision: to change the way commerce is conducted over digital networks. But Stefan Roever, Ariadne Capital investor and serial entrepreneur, is no stranger to bringing new ideas to life. He talks to Ariadne Capital about his new venture, Navio, and his experiences growing global businesses.

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When did you decide to become an entrepreneur?
I decided I wanted to run my own company when I was 12 and lived in Silicon Valley with my Dad. I went to the first PC fair ever in a Santa Clara school gym in 1976. It was filled with new startups presenting a technology trade show. There were lots of people from companies like Tandy Computer with two 3X6’ “booths” supplied by the school. Not very high tech, but I was impressed. I thought to myself, ‘I can do this.’ These people have figured out how to create something out of nothing. They are changing the world with their inventions, and doing it on their own without anyone telling them how.

What lessons did you learn from your previous experiences?
My first company was called Roever Software, GMBH, which I started as a student. I learned from this the importance of having a good team. It was a corporate vehicle for my own products and services, but it was a one man show. If I wanted to scale, I had to have a comprehensive founding team that could work for equity, share a vision and complete a skill set broad enough to grow a company. Brokat, my later company, brought together all the right ingredients. We chose banking software out of the economic crisis in Germany. Banking was the only industry with any money. So, in the early ‘90’s, we saw proprietary systems like AOL and CompuServe converging toward the Internet. There was not wide-spread adoption of the Internet however, so we focused on a multi-channel business model to leverage the convergence of Internet and existing banking systems.

What is Navio?
Navio will fundamentally change how commerce is contracted over digital networks. It is a digital commerce service provider, with the first comprehensive solution for content companies to establish reliable revenue streams over mobile, internet and PDA environments.  

Navio’s network combines identity management, content packaging and payment functions to solve the access and distribution challenges that have limited the growth of Internet commerce for digital products. Navio Titles, or digital receipts, can authenticate who uses digital files and motivate users to offer their files to family and friends, enabling viral marketing and affiliate buying chains.

Is Navio inspired by Brokat?
Navio is not really borne of a Brokat influence. What we learned at Brokat was simply how to build a multi-national corporation. We took the company from 5 persons to 2K employees, with a $6 billion market cap and $250 million in revenue.  We had offices in 17 countries, 40 total.  What we learned is how to scale internationally, to raise money relative to needs and growth potential, how to do M&A…and we learned the regulatory environment in each European market. So it’s really the complexity of this type of operation, and understanding we are only as strong as our weakest link. That is what will make Navio succeed and grow quickly.

How do you think entrepreneurship - and the investment community - differs in the US and Europe?
In a European startup environment, there are more challenges with local/regulatory issues. In the US, you can focus more on the business challenges, but in Europe it’s the idiosyncrasies of each region in which you do business. At the end of the day, it’s harder to scale in Europe than the US, and therefore harder to grow internationally than to grow in the US alone. There is more competition in the US because of the amount of innovation that happens there. However, if you get it right, you can really grow in the US. But even if you get all the business challenges right in Europe, you can still fail because of the challenges of local business climates.

What company do you most admire and why?
MSFT is a great company. They grabbed an opportunity with IBM and completely dominate a market where they have successfully defended their position through multiple changes in technology. The very advent of the Internet threatened their existence, but they turned it into opportunity. They now have as strong a hold on their market as one company can have.