The Journey Is The Goal with Manuel Prinz

In this episode, Michael Dargie sits down with Manuel Prinz, a co-founder of the AI e-commerce startup Keep Converting, calling in from a sunny Friday in California. Manuel spends his days between product management, opening new markets, and pointing cutting-edge AI at the sort of thorny problems that keep e-commerce brands up at night. But the conversation quickly leaves the boardroom and heads somewhere more interesting: how a kid from rural Germany ended up building companies half a world away.

Manuel grew up near Stuttgart, in the shadow of Mercedes-Benz, Porsche, and Bosch, where becoming an engineer for a car manufacturer was less a dream than a default. A hands-on internship, all tooling and hard labour, quietly closed that door. He pivoted to business and economics, and there he found a one-sided exchange with UC Santa Barbara buried at the bottom of his university's agenda, so overlooked that nobody had used it in years. He drilled down, made contact, and made it happen.

Landing in California was, in his words, all explosions and fireworks. The polished SUVs at the airport, the investment banker, skateboarder, and homeless person sharing a single block in San Francisco's financial district. For someone raised where everyone lived the same levelled, middle-class life, watching people chase their own individual dreams cracked something open. He wanted in.

That curiosity turned into a career. Manuel joined an early payments startup, Paymentwall, an early answer to what Stripe would become, and helped grow it across nearly every continent. He reckons he's now been to more than a hundred countries. He talks warmly about Vietnam, a Hanoi office, and a local chef who served the team fish soup at eight in the morning, and about the balut he bravely tried on a beach in the Philippines.

Woven through the travel stories is a quiet philosophy. Manuel shares his move for any new city: get the rundown from a talkative taxi driver, then find a local bar that first night and go with the flow. He talks about needing two or three days to settle before a holiday actually feels like one, because sitting still makes him anxious. And he lands on the thing he wishes the world knew, that the journey is the goal, that there's no end state where complete happiness finally arrives.

For the rebels in waiting, the ones stuck between wanting and doing, Manuel's advice is plain: if an idea won't leave your head, even when you try to talk yourself out of it, that persistenc