On the Record with Hendrik Bartel, PostSig Co-Founder & CEO

Hometown: San Francisco, CA

Hobbies: Spending time with my daughter, being her Uber driver

3 words to describe you: impatient, curious, and over-prioritizer (constantly trying to balance everything and wanting to do it all)

Let’s start at the beginning: what were you like as a child and how do you think that shaped who you are today?

So I was an only child, growing up in suburban Northern Germany. It was the eighties, and Europe felt much smaller then, so my parents were very open to letting me do whatever I wanted.

They were very young when they had me, still finishing their degrees and just beginning to build their careers. I spent a lot of time with my Grandmother, but also had the freedom to try and do whatever it was I wanted to do. Mainly, I wanted to travel. I took my first solo flight when I was five, flying to West Berlin to spend the summer with my uncle and aunt. When I was 10, I spent a Summer on a container ship with my Uncle who was the captain of the vessel. We sailed from Germany across the English Channel, traveling to Spain all the way down to Portugal.

That thread of freedom and travel carried all the way to my time in college. However, the moment I graduated from university, I moved straight to San Francisco.

What inspired you to move to San Francisco, specifically?

I initially came to SF to meet with a company that was loaning equipment to me for research in college. The moment I stepped off the plane in San Francisco, I knew I needed to move here. It was one of those rare moments in life where you immediately feel: this is where I belong.

That was in 1999. At this point, I’ve lived in SF longer than I’ve lived in Germany.

What would you say has been your biggest or most unexpected challenge?

I’m not sure if this is a challenge or just a personal defect, but I’m the type of person who really likes building companies. It’s really challenging, probably one of the most challenging things you can do, but once you start, it becomes so much fun. There’s a lot of problem solving, but that can also be extremely creative and rewarding. It’s challenging, but it’s a really good challenge.

Well, that’s my answer for the professional side at least. On the personal side, obviously, it’s raising a child. Especially raising a child while building and scaling companies. You know, with entrepreneurship and scaling a company in the background. My daughter is already pretty entrepreneurial herself. She has this sort of innate curiosity and appreciation for these things. I can’t say for sure whether it’s the right path to end up in; you can’t answer that for someone else. But, she certainly seems drawn to it. Her biggest thing right now, or really for the last summer or so, has been to open up a candy store. She’s 8, turning 9, and she’s literally sitting there trying to figure out how to open up a candy store in San Francisco. She saw that there was no candy store in our neighborhood, and ever since, she has been noticing the potential market. She’s like, “There’s three schools in the area, and no candy store. All the kids are going to CVS to buy candy.” After our recent trip to NYC, she’s even had the idea to bring a DJ into the candy store on Thursdays. She was explaining to me that adults would come in to take pictures for Instagram and listen to music. When I heard that, I was surprised! I was like, “Where did you learn all that?” How did you pick up on all of that?”

Incredible, like Father like Daughter! What about after your last company, TruValue Labs? Were there any in-between moments where you felt the walls close in on you a little bit?

Oh, totally. I think I realized at one point that I was unemployable. Which is a hard realization to have. I had this moment of realizing, “Oh shit, what would I even do outside of this?”

Who would hire me, and what would I even do?

What am I going to do, sit at a desk and push paper from left to right all day? Or go to Google and just disappear inside a huge organization? Those options were all non-starters.

At a certain point, I just had to come to terms with the fact that building companies was all I was ever going to do. I have a number of friends who got very successful with their companies. They’re now in their late 50s and early 60s, but they’re building companies left, right, and center. One friend sold three companies successfully and then built a Ventures studio; now they’re on company number 15. There’s just no stopping.

I think that’s the path for me as well. That’s also why I don’t have any real hobbies, because this sort of life is all-consuming.

What excites you most about the work you’re doing?

It’s absolutely the people. It’s such a joy to be able to work with such a great team. The majority of the team are people that I’ve already worked with at TruValue Labs. That company was eventually acquired by FactSet, and many of the same people decided to join me again for PostSig.

I’m so humbled that they want to work with me again and come along for another ride. I’m glad I didn’t piss them off too much the first time around.

When you build a company together once, you build a kind of trust that’s hard to replicate. That trust is the foundation for building the next one faster and better.

What’s also exciting to me is the pace of this market. Unlike my last company, it doesn’t feel like lifting weights every time we try to explain the problem.

Even if customers don’t buy immediately, they still acknowledge the problem early on in the sales cycle. It just feels more intuitive. That’s accelerating to me, that’s fun. You don’t have to sit there selling to skeptics. It feels gratifying to see that your product is solving a real problem.

What does company culture mean to you?

Well, I think it means a lot to me. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have worked with these people for the past 15 years. Some of them I’ve known and worked with for going on almost 20 years at this point, like Phil and Faithlyn. That definitely shapes our culture.

I can’t write down exactly what that culture is, but I would say PostSig has a welcoming culture that is very interested in learning new things. The unique challenge of having a team that you built a previous company with is the naturally higher bar that sets for each new hire to ramp up quickly and contribute to the team. Even though we might start off in our old ways, making sure we know what’s working, we’re very open to understanding and learning new ways of doing things. That in turn helps us reshape our culture.

When you think about bringing in a new person, what sort of traits do you imagine they need to adopt to be successful at PostSig?

We’ve all been doing this for a while. So the people coming in need to be able to stand up to that level of experience. There are different ways to do things, and they shouldn’t be afraid to say so. They need to bring in a certain gravitas to shake the table.

In general, you should never doubt yourself at a startup. That’s the beautiful thing about a startup. You can literally do whatever you want. You get hired in one job, but you can shape and grow that job however you want. It’s not like getting hired by a massive corporation where your job is set, and your lane is defined. “Don’t go outside because left and right is politics”.

Oftentimes, you get hired for one thing and end up doing something totally different in startups. Not everyone is cut out for that. It comes with a lot of self-direction and accountability.

What sort of traits do you look for when bringing in someone new?

We like to bring in people who have the courage to suggest new ways of doing things and aren’t afraid to challenge convention.

Are there any life lessons you live by?

I think everything has a life lesson you can learn from. You have to stay curious and playful!

Having a young child definitely helps with that. It keeps you on your feet, keeps you trendy, keeps you plugged in.

As someone who considers San Francisco home and has had the opportunity to scale multiple companies over the last decade, how do you think “the age of AI” has changed the startup scaling story?

It is an entirely different cycle, and I’m very fascinated by it. The speed AI offers is phenomenal. Scaling timelines are extremely compressed. The decay factor between ideation, customer onboarding, and fundraising has never been higher.

People are starting to think in days and weeks instead of quarters.

I’m really fascinated to see how this behavior will translate to the corporate world. They’re still moving in quarters and years from an integration perspective. But in San Francisco especially, cycles are compressed into days and weeks. That’s entirely fascinating to me, but also very, very scary.

As a repeat founder yourself, what do you think are some of the misconceptions around building a successful business? What things get overlooked, and what advice is misleading?

The current AI cycle makes everything pretty new. Some pages of the scaling playbook are holding true, but so many of them are being rewritten.

What you must expect from advisors, for example, has changed. Advisors need to be hands-on and faster at iterating. They must be in vogue and with the times. It’s not enough to be on the sidelines recommending you do this or that. I think there’s more action needed earlier.

The other big misconception is around venture funding. People are reading headlines around AI funding, thinking venture is just pouring money into startups. But if you strip away the handful of mega funds and the outlier raises like OpenAI and Anthropic, I think it becomes clear that there’s less venture dollars out there competing for more companies.

As a result, building a solid business showing real metrics and customers is more important than ever. I think we’ve learned over the last year or so of this AI cycle that churn risk is very real. People may sign up for your product, but then never come back or become repeat users. From an enterprise perspective, it’s becoming a new fundamental to make the case on how you grow within their organization.

Contracts are long and can cause stakeholders no shortage of headaches. As you continue to build out the functionality of a contract intelligence platform like PostSig, what do you let guide the product expansion process?

Getting to insights much, much faster. Time to insight is our driving metric right now. How long does it take me to get relevant information? The best answer is not me doing the manual work of searching myself through prompts or queries.

The best answer is not prompting the system to get insight, but rather allowing the platform to guide you proactively. The goal is for the system to come to you and alert you, giving you the most relevant information right away. So I think that’s one of the big things we’re looking for and trying to constantly improve ourselves and our system on.

I think the other big thing we’re looking for is an understanding of the different ICPs that touch the different parts of the contract cycle. What are their pain points, and how do we become the unification layer that allows them to access the insights they need quickly?

These days, I spend a lot of time thinking about knowledge hierarchy. How does knowledge become insights? How does data become insights, and how do we get that to users early? Is all of that being done in dashboards, or are we moving beyond that? I think the future of insight will require adding more intelligence, making our platforms anticipate our needs rather than react to them.

How do you think about pushing customers to accept change? It must be challenging to navigate within enterprises that are familiar with certain processes and introducing new solutions to them.

Yeah, that’s a great question. You have to be sensitive.

No one is going to go out there and rip Salesforce from a multibillion-dollar customer. It has to be a gradual process. At the same time, though, the timelines for ripping and replacing are definitely starting to compress.

To me, the key is not touching the existing applications on the users’ desktops. Whatever ERP, CRM, or HR systems they use need to stay in place; all of the magic of our solution has to be felt in the background. When the magic of insights get delivered consistently over time, the users start to believe in the potential for a different future.

It’s natural over a ten to fifteen-year period that different department heads will have their own software and preferences. We don’t want to punish them for that. A CRO might insist on using Salesforce because it’s the one he’s used for the last 20 years of his career. The head of finance may insist on Oracle because that’s the system she’s used at her last 2 companies. If the head of legal has similar feelings about a specific CLM, well, it’s easy to see how an enterprise ends up overpaying for their software stack by tens of millions. You don’t want to go in there and tell them the $30,000,000 they’ve spent over the past 10 years was wrong. You need to win them over to your side by building the magic in the background. You don’t replace systems by telling people they were wrong. You replace them by quietly showing them there’s a better way.

Hendrik Bartel is a repeat entrepreneur and the CEO and Co-Founder of PostSig, an AI-native platform helping organizations turn contracts into systems of intelligence. PostSig builds software that transforms executed contracts into a system of intelligence, enabling organizations to understand what they agreed to, what it means operationally, and how it impacts the business.

Previously, Hendrik founded TruValue Labs, a pioneer in AI-powered ESG and materiality analytics used by global financial institutions and acquired by FactSet in 2020. After the acquisition, he served as CEO of Infima, guiding the company from MVP launch to exit. Originally from Northern Germany, Hendrik moved to San Francisco in 1999 and has been building companies there ever since.