Germany, 1810. The Napoleonic Wars are raging across Europe. Bavaria has been a kingdom for four years. And Crown Prince Ludwig of Bavaria is about to marry Therese of Saxe-Hildburghausen.
The wedding takes place on 12 October. Five days later, on 17 October, the celebrations end with a horse race on a meadow outside Munich. The meadow is named Theresienwiese after the bride. That horse race becomes Oktoberfest.
There are no beer tents. As many Ferris wheels as I have in my apartment. No chicken rotisseries. Significantly fewer than six million visitors. “Just” a royal wedding. 216 years later, we know it as the Wiesn.
What on the surface looks like a two-week excuse to drink beer and chant folk songs has been a fixture in the calendars of founders and investors. Munich is filled with dinners, investor events, and founder gatherings. People come for the beer, obviously. But there is something about the Wiesn that makes it a surprisingly good place to think about venture.
On the surface, there is not much connecting a 200-year-old beer festival to innovation or investing.
But as is often the case, there is gold beneath the foam.
A steady core in a changing market
Oktoberfest is considered a tradition. That is misleading. Without changes, the tradition founded in 1810 would have probably disappeared long ago.
The original Oktoberfest was a horse race. In 1811 it was repeated, with an agricultural show bolted on. In 1818 beer was served for the first time, next to one carousel and two swings. A year later, the city took it over, for the reason cities take things over: it drew crowds, and it made money.
In 1835 a costume and marksmen's parade was added. In 1880 the Wiesn upgraded from candles to electric light. In 1881 the first chicken rotisserie opened. The large beer halls arrived in the 1890s, and by 1907 the small stalls had given way to the big brewery halls that define the picture today. The keg-tapping ceremony everyone treats as ancient began in 1950, when Mayor Thomas Wimmer needed 17 strokes to open the first barrel. The horse race that started it all is now a historical footnote. Understandably, given what else there is to remember.
None of this existed in 1810. And yet the thing itself remained recognisable.
The best companies work the same way. They do not preserve the product they started with. They preserve the reason they matter.
Consider Nintendo. Started in 1889 – making hanafuda playing cards. Then toys. Then arcade machines. Then consoles and a handheld nobody else wanted to build. Not one product from 1889 survives. What survives is the reason people keep coming back. The how is changing – the why remains.
Customers change. Technology changes. Distribution changes. Entire categories disappear, and new ones emerge overnight. In 2026, we can apparently have a new LLM champion every other Tuesday.
The Wiesn has been doing this for two centuries. The rides changed. The food changed. The technology changed. The beer halls changed. The rituals changed. Even the festival itself was repeatedly interrupted. Napoleon cancelled it in 1813. Cholera cancelled it in 1854. Wars and economic crises caused further cancellations and smaller substitute festivals. Then, in 2020 and 2021, COVID did what cholera and Napoleon had already managed to do before it.
Yet the Wiesn came back.
That is a useful distinction for company building. Adaptation is not about throwing away what made you interesting in the first place. It is about changing everything that needs to change while keeping the part that actually matters.
The wedge survives. The product around it evolves.
Whether that wedge is a particularly strong team, a deep customer problem, a distribution advantage, a culture or a mission, the principle is the same. Find the thing people care about. Then do not become overly attached to everything else.
A mini-market
Spend enough time on the Wiesn and something else becomes obvious: it's a live case study of a market at work.
In 2026, 954 businesses applied for a place on the festival grounds. 478 were approved. The festival covers 34.5 hectares and employs around 13,000 people. There is scarce capacity. There are incumbents. There are new entrants. There are rules determining who gets access to the best real estate. And there is pricing power. A Maß costs between €14.80 and €15.90 this year. Six traditional Munich breweries supply the official Oktoberfest beer. Close to 7 million litres are consumed in an average year.
What we now take for granted – chicken rotisseries, elaborate rides, different types of tents, even the wine tent – would have looked rather strange to the people attending the first Oktoberfest. Until it didn't.
Markets work like this. Incumbents defend their position. New entrants look for a way in. Customers decide what survives. Regulation decides who gets to play. Scarcity creates value.
Even access has its own market. Getting onto the Wiesn is free. Getting into the right tent at the right time is a different matter. At peak times, tents shut their doors. Tables seem to be passed down through generations rather than booked.
The current fights around the Wiesn make the comparison even more obvious. In 2026, restaurateur Alexander Egger is challenging the system used to allocate the large festival tents, arguing for a broader European tendering process. At the same time, Giesinger Bräu is challenging the established six-brewery structure and seeking access to Oktoberfest beer service.
Tradition meets competition. Incumbents defend distribution. Challengers want in. The regulator decides where tradition ends and protection of incumbents begins. And in the end the people drinking the beer decide what survives.
It's Econ 101, just with significantly more beer. And perhaps that is the reason founders and investors feel strangely at home there.
Off-script
There is another reason.
Investing is a game of access. Access to founders. Access to capital. Access to customers. Access to future investors. Access to buyers. But as I learned as a banker – the best deals often happen after a few pints at 10pm. And where London has its pubs. Milan has aperitivo. Munich has the Wiesn.
There is no prepared 30-minute agenda in a beer tent. There is no carefully rehearsed founder story. Nobody is asking you to walk through slide 14 again because they “have one final question on the cohort data”. You sit down, have a Maß, put on your Lederhosen and talk. You find out what someone is actually interested in. What they are building. What they are worried about. Whether they are funny. Whether they listen. Whether you would want to spend five years working with them. You build relationships.
On its surface, investing is about markets, numbers and models. But just as the Wiesn is not just about beer and pretzels, investing is ultimately about people.
The Wiesn does not magically make people more authentic. Nor does drinking beer dissolve hierarchy, status or incentives. But an investor can become a person before becoming a cheque. A founder can become someone you want to know before becoming an investment opportunity. The most valuable relationship you build at Oktoberfest may not be with someone who has a company you can invest in today. It might be someone you meet two years before they raise their next round. Or someone who introduces you to the founder you actually end up backing. Or simply someone you would like to have a beer with again.
So why should a VC go?
You can probably construct a venture analogy around almost anything if you try hard enough. A beer tent does not become an IC because an investor is sitting in it. Oktoberfest is not a venture conference with better catering.
But Oktoberfest offers something useful to the tech ecosystem. It is a 216-year-old institution that has survived wars, epidemics, economic disruption and a pandemic by changing without losing its identity.
It is a functioning market, with scarce resources, incumbents, challengers, pricing and access playing out in public. And it is a place where relationships are built to last without having a Calendly link.
