October 28, 2025
Trutz: My name is Trutz, I’m one of the co-founders of green account. My team and I are working on providing a market for nature restoration on a European level.
Trutz: I like the setting, the building itself, which is a nice historical building. We are based in betahaus Kreuzberg, right in the middle of Berlin and very close to Mitte. There are lots of different people here and I just like the general feeling about it and how easy it is to work here!
Trutz: Yes, we’ve met quite some interesting people during our time here already. We also like to work from other betahaus locations, so I've been in betahaus Hamburg for example, and met people there too.
You really never know what the person next to you is doing so the coffee machine is a great place to chat! We have quite a few good connections from that already.
Trutz: Yes, we decided to have our own office within betahaus so we could have a dedicated room when we want to talk about certain things or if we need space for a meeting. But I mean, the whole wall is made of glass, so that already says that our doors are always open for collaboration!
We are still very well linked in to all the other companies on our level at betahaus and I like that setting a lot - to be surrounded and connected, but still with our own private space if needed.
Trutz: We are working in a hybrid approach, so we have dedicated office days when everybody will be here. We also have another office in the town of Bielefeld so only half of the team is here in Berlin.
Trutz: In Europe we are trying to find and build a scheme in which private companies can invest in nature, because it is a critical infrastructure for all of us living on this planet! To do that we are providing landowners with help to make a product out of nature restoration cases on their land and then helping them to find the investment money to make that project become a reality.
Trutz: The problem set of what we do is in the mostly unhealthy ways that we as humans interact with nature. The way we do business, the way we live, it all involves some interaction with the environment around us and that isn’t necessarily for the benefit of that environment. So if you think about it as how we use the land on earth, we tend to control it - to organise it in a way we need, which means we tend to sometimes exploit from nature what we need for our economy. And what we are now experiencing in the degradation of nature around us is that we are losing lots of species, we lose habitats and since we are also only part of this world,it starts to also influence what we do. It influences our harvest, our crops and our livelihood in general.
So we really need to think about how to divide the space, the land, into its different services that we need it to be. Restoration is part of recreating nature, recreating habitats which we desperately need because diversity is key and not the streamline things we as humans like to build up.
Trutz: What we do is quite a task and involves a lot of future work before it yields results. And obviously, you can’t run a business on a good idea alone. You need a tangible business case. Luckily, in Germany, we have a system that allows investments into structured restoration projects, and these investments can be translated into a kind of currency. It’s called Ökopunkte (Ecopoints).
Ecopoints are a currency for nature restoration projects and are required by law if you are building something in Germany. If your planned construction interferes with nature, for example if you destroy some habitat, you are obliged to buy Ecopoints, which represent restoration efforts elsewhere so that your impact is compensated.
What we do is make use of this system. We take part in this market and learn from it as we move towards our goal of creating an investable asset for nature as a whole.
Trutz: If you haven’t done it before (and I’m a first time founder), you can’t truly grasp the scale of the challenges you’ll face when starting a company.
In Germany and many other countries, there are a lot of regulations that could be different for small companies like us. Startups are about trial and error and we would like to fail fast and to change things fast. If we have to comply with lots of regulations in between, that sometimes just prolongs the process. I think regulation is a good idea but if you are still in the testing phase it sometimes just prolongs the process.
You also have lots of opportunities in this country. There are many many companies sitting here, you normally get contacts and get interviews quite fast so that’s also a very strong position we have in Germany.
Trutz: It’s probably the most interesting part of our job, connecting our landowners to the investors. And as I explained before, we do this for most part at the moment by complying to that regulation in Germany. But it is interesting because there are two very different groups of people meeting each other. Landowners, in our case mostly farmers and foresters, are very strong on what they do, they are really experienced in most cases and they really know what is happening on the ground. Connecting them to investors who are the buyers on the other side can be very interesting because you have two completely different people. Many times we are amazed how interesting the talks become once they are settling into the topic.
Trutz: Very interesting question, what should we as a species of humans stop today? I think the most important part would be to understand our position on this planet. From my perspective, we tend to think we rule this world and we rule the system. That appears to be true, but in the end, we are only a species. We are only part of the system, and the longer we think we can exploit the system around us, it will only make the reaction of the very system worse, because in the end, nature always gets its will. It will turn against us. It already does in some places of the world. So we will definitely need to reconsider our position and then shape the future systems being the economy or whatever together with nature and not against.
Trutz: If you're thinking about joining betahaus, come here, have a look. The people are really nice, they’ve been really good to us, because whatever you need they will make it possible. And it’s just a great way of talking to each other; you will find like-minded people here and it’s a lot of fun.
