Munich and Tokyo: running a company from two homes

It is dark in the kitchen and the clock on the oven says 06:45. In Tokyo it is a quarter to two in the afternoon. My colleagues there have had lunch. The thing I said I would look at last night has been sitting in front of them since their morning, and they have been polite about it.

I live in Munich. The company is in Tokyo. Nihonbashi, to be precise, which is where the registered address sits, and there is a room in Munich and an office in Seoul as well. People assume the split is glamorous. It is mostly arithmetic.

The arithmetic

Japan is seven hours ahead of Germany in summer and eight in winter.

I take calls from nine. Tokyo stops around six in the evening. So in summer that leaves two hours of overlap, and in winter it leaves one.

One hour. That is the whole shared working day between me and the company I run, for roughly half the year.

Everything follows from that number. Anything I have not answered by eleven is not answered later today. It is answered tomorrow, and tomorrow in Tokyo starts while I am asleep, so the actual gap between a question and my answer is closer to twenty hours than to the twenty minutes it would be if I were in the same building. Multiply that by every small decision that needs me and you get the real cost of living where I live. It is not the flights. It is the queue, and I am standing at the front of it.

The fix is not a better calendar. It is having fewer things that need me, which is a slow and slightly humbling piece of work, because every one of them is there because at some point I wanted it there.

What Munich is actually good at

Hardware. If you are building something physical, this is a serious place to build it. The Technical University of Munich is here, with Fraunhofer and Max Planck institutes around it, and underneath all of that is the part nobody puts on a slide: machine shops, suppliers, people who can turn a part for you by Thursday. A founder here can get a bad prototype into her hands in a week. That is worth more than any accelerator.

The second thing is not a business reason. My children are six and four and they are growing up in this city. I would rather be ten minutes away from them than optimally located for anything else.

I am not going to dress that up as strategy. I moved my life around them, and the company had to arrange itself around that fact rather than the other way round.

What Tokyo is actually good at

The buyers.

A climate technology becomes real when a large industrial company places a first order. In my experience the people who decide that are as often Japanese as European, and they are not reachable from a conference. They are reachable through someone who will vouch for you, and that person only exists if you have been showing up in Tokyo for years without asking for anything.

That is what Tokyo is for, and it is why I have kept convening people there since 2024. Not because Tokyo is where the ideas are. Because it is where the orders are, and because a relationship in Japan is maintained by presence at intervals over a long time, which is exactly the thing that living eight time zones away makes hard.

The things I get wrong

I treat the time difference as extra hours. It is not extra. It is the same hours, moved, and every one I spend on Tokyo at ten at night is borrowed from the morning I owe Munich.

I decide things alone at night. Munich at 22:00 is a very quiet place to be confident. By the time anyone in Tokyo can tell me I am wrong, I have already told three people, and unwinding it costs more than the decision was worth. Most of my genuinely bad calls have this shape. Not one of them looked like a bad call at the moment I made it.

I book the trips too tight. Four days in Tokyo, meetings from the morning of arrival, the last one scheduled for the day of the flight home. Then I land on a Sunday and I am useless until Wednesday and I count that as a good trip because the calendar was full. It was not a good trip. I was there and mostly absent.

And I still propose meeting times that are eleven at night for somebody. Two clocks on my phone, and I do it anyway.

Which one is home

People ask, usually kindly, which city is really home, as if there is a tie-break somewhere I have not looked at.

The company is Tokyo. My children are Munich. I have stopped trying to resolve that into one answer, and most of the discomfort I used to feel about it turned out to be about wanting a tidy story rather than about the actual life, which is fine.

What I would tell anyone doing the same thing: pick the city your family belongs in first, then be honest about what that costs the business, and pay it deliberately instead of pretending it is free. It costs one usable hour a day in winter. It costs presence in a country where presence is the currency. It is worth it to me and it might not be to you.

It is 10:51 now. The kitchen is not dark any more. Tokyo has nine minutes of working day left, and I have not opened the thing I said I would look at last night.