Rainer Märkle is a venture capital investor at HV Capital with over two decades of experience who backed Zalando from a €250k seed check to IPO and was the first institutional investor in HelloFresh and Scalable Capital, staying with companies through both near-failure moments and hypergrowth phases. He helped design HV Capital's generational transition to ensure the firm can outlive individual partners and created Europe's first GP-led continuation fund in 2021, while also being an Ironman world championship finisher who explicitly connects endurance sports principles to his approach to long-term company building.