About
I'm Haris Rehman. I build ventures and products, and I have done it from inside corporate venture builders, from my own companies, and alongside founders.
At FoundersLane and Creative Dock I worked across a portfolio of corporate ventures with large partners in mobility, energy and industry. The hard part was almost never the product. It was the people who had to agree, the budget that moved, and the question nobody had written down yet.
Through Rapid Venture Lab I run that work directly. An enterprise B2B proposition for a ride sharing operator in Saudi Arabia. A product line at a chemical manufacturer in Pakistan that grew 300 percent once the R&D money moved onto what could actually sell. A financing model for battery storage. I also stopped a marketplace venture while we were still shaping the idea, because the assumptions about supply, trust and demand did not survive the stress test.
I teach some of this at ESCP Business School, and through Westerwelle Foundation, enpact and AsiaBerlin, mostly with founders working out whether their idea holds.
These days I build the products myself. One of them uses no AI at all, because a model would have made it worse. Another draws a map, because a model would have answered a question nobody asked. Most of the job is deciding what to leave out.
Availability
- I have worked across Europe, the UK, the Middle East and South Asia
- I hold full work authorisation in Germany. You would not need to sponsor a visa.
- I am based in Berlin, open to hybrid, and open to relocation for the right role
- I currently focus on founders and teams entering Germany and Europe
Teaching and speaking
- Guest Lecturer in venture building at ESCP Business School. Four cohorts, more than 200 founders and venture builders trained.
- AsiaBerlin Ambassador. Connecting startups, investors and policymakers across Asia and Berlin.
- Venture building hackathons and startup pitch juries.
- Mentoring through Westerwelle Foundation and enpact.
Career
- Venture Builder and Product Lead, Rapid Venture Lab
- Guest Lecturer, ESCP Business School
- Venture Lead, FoundersLane, acquired by Creative Dock
- Senior Strategist, icon group
- Entrepreneur in Residence, Beam GmbH and Amplon Ventures
- Chief Product Officer, greenbox Global Holding
- Chief Technology Officer, Smart Wins Technologies
- Co-Founder and CEO, Elbowroom International
- MSc Renewable Energy Engineering, KTH Stockholm and UPC Barcelona
- BS Aerospace Engineering, Institute of Space Technology
Affiliations
ESCP Business School, Westerwelle Foundation, AsiaBerlin Forum e.V., enpact, FoundersLane, Rapid Venture Lab
Client work
Shared mobility, Saudi Arabia
Enterprise B2B from a blank page.
100M in qualified pipeline from an eight to ten week sprint. A ride-sharing company entered enterprise services with no B2B proposition. I led a cross-functional team through the sprint, owning discovery, use-case definition, commercial sizing, MVP scope and go-to-market.
Chemical manufacturing
Sales up 300 percent after refocusing the portfolio.
R&D and product effort spread too thin. I built an evaluation framework, benchmarked the portfolio against the client's own best performers, and refocused R&D investment on what was working.
Marketplace validation
A clean no-go.
A venture was ready to build before anyone had tested its supply, trust and demand assumptions. I ran a structured validation sprint and aligned the stakeholders on the decision. Roughly 50K saved, plus the months a build would have taken.
Energy storage, Europe
Priced a market with no public price.
A developer hit a financing wall on battery storage. I mapped the specialty risk-transfer landscape, opened direct relationships with the counterparties who write these structures, built an interactive comparison tool on the client's real project numbers, and delivered an evidence-based go/no-go in eight weeks.