Why KREATIZE? – Interview with Carlo Schmid

Our former working student Carlo Schmid was kind enough to stop by our Berlin HQ to give us an interview about his time with KREATIZE. Find out what he learned while working for KREATIZE and how this benefited him in regards to future projects, such as Second Ride, in our video, and short article. 

Back in the summer of 2018, Carlo Schmid was looking for a job in mechanical engineering and wanted to experience the startup environment, which is why he applied for the open position as a working student here at KREATIZE. Back when he worked  in our operations team, KREATIZE only had around 20 employees and was stationed at a smaller office. 

“It was quite fascinating to see this development”, explains Schmid. “It was a very cool and agile work environment to be in.  By being in a company that grows this quickly you can learn alot by jumping around different tasks. I was really impressed with how fast I gained responsibility, even as a student, and this is not something you see at many companies.”

Schmid learned many valuable experiences during his time at KREATIZE, and was particularly impressed by our vision of fully digitizing the procurement process.  He was fascinated by how our IT department made all the processes, and cost calculations extremely efficient. Further explaining  that due to looking at multiple technical drawings and calculating the prices of custom parts, he now has a good grasp of determining manufacturing costs. 

“By far my biggest learning was to get a sense of how much a custom part will cost. Because that’s really not trivial. To see a part that has never been manufactured before and tell whether it will cost 500 euros or 50 euros,” confessed Schmidt. 

As mentioned earlier, Schmid doesn’t work any more for us, but he has a pretty cool project in which we had a hand in helping him realize it. After his job at KREATIZE Schmid thought a lot about traffic transitions and the problems of manufacturing electric vehicles.  This is why in early 2020 he started a second-hand mobility project at TUB, which investigated the feasibility of turning regular vehicles into electric ones at a high scale. For 3 semesters he worked together with 15 students on a toolkit, which allows any customer to easily convert their Simson motorcycle into an electric one. 

“It’s easier than assembling an Ikea shelf”, said Schmid. 

 How did we at KREATIZE help with this project?

“We needed custom manufacturing parts for the development of these toolkits. I approached KREATIZE  and was really impressed by the amount of support they offered us. We got a sponsorship which financed our prototype. I am really thankful for all the support i received after my KREATIZE career as an alum,” explained Schmid

While the university project is currently over, Schmid is now in the position to fund his own company, which sells the aforementioned conversion kits. In fact the project recently won the CESAR Competition Best Idea 2021 with a prize of 20,000€. 

We are happy to have Schmidt as our alum and wish him and his project the best for the future!

Are you someone with a desire to work to start their career in a place where entrepreneurial skills are learned?  Perhaps you’re an experienced professional looking to strengthen your overall business, product, tech, strategy or engineering acumen? We are hiring for lots of roles, so please check out our careers section today if you are looking for a one of a kind opportunity that will allow you to grow professionally by stretching your overall professional toolkit. 

To find out more about Second-Ride, check out their website here.