Alexander
Joël-Carbonell

Alexander discovered his passion for investing early on, making his first stock trade at the age of 14 from his one-year pocket money savings. While still in high-school, admittedly missing a class or two, he started building up a portfolio of stocks with an affinity for tech-driven companies. Only to lose it all in the dot-com bubble in 2000. Having been burnt from investing, he re-focused on his education: He pursued a Bachelor and two Master degrees from EBS and the University of Cambridge, graduating top of his class and being awarded various scholarships and prizes such as DAAD and Student of the Year.

Alexander started his professional career at Morgan Stanley's investment banking team amid the challenging times of the financial crisis. Being a stickler for loyalty, he stayed at the bank for nearly a decade in different roles and locations, deal captaining executions of a variety of banking products within M&A and capital markets such as IPOs, equity, debt and derivatives.

Afterwards and with his experience from MS, he supported Delivery Hero in its successful IPO in 2017 and jointly helped turn it into a DAX company, leading its M&A and VC efforts as Head and Group VP, and also being responsible for all of its corporate finance activities. This included >20 investments in growth companies with a total AuM of nearly EUR 1 billion, including successfully picking several unicorns and decacorns, among others, Glovo, Rappi, Zomato, Impossible Food, EatJust, Ola and Instashop as well as other cross-vertical investments in the FinTech, B2B SaaS, FoodTech and ESG space.

Through his bi-cultural background from living in Berlin and Bogotá, both two very divergent cultures, he feels incredibly lucky having learnt to appreciate the diversity of people's behaviour and perspective – not always picking up the best virtues of each culture, he admits.

He always had a passion for products with the ability to fundamentally change consumer behaviour such as last-mile logistics, scalable marketplaces, alternative protein or ESG in general. Given his role in co-leading the Growth Team at HV, however, he predominantly looks for sector-agnostic criteria in passionate and ambitious founders.

In his spare time, Alexander enjoys traveling, street art and Italian wine. But mostly he likes sports, anything competitive, preferably with any type of racket.