Meike Neitz, Ambassador Between Continents, Cultures and Companies.

In the dry summer of this year, Meike Neitz walked through Cologne and thought of Namibia. She had lived in Windhoek until 2022, in a country she describes as “recovering from a devastating drought that had cost lives and livelihoods.” Now the parks at home, she says, “turned into colours I associated with Namibia: sand, grey and brown.” She remembers days “when you thought those summer months are the best ones to be outside with your child, only to now realise: it’s simply too hot.”

Cologne is not a special case. Since the 1980s, Europe has been warming more than twice as fast as the global average, which makes it the fastest-warming continent, according to the European State of the Climate 2025 report from the Copernicus Climate Change Service and the World Meteorological Organization.

Meike’s response is to work with the people building alternatives, and to put them in front of an audience. She is an event moderator and the Managing Director of embassidy, the international consultancy she founded in 2024, which operates between Cologne and Windhoek. embassidy designs and runs startup programs and events, and coaches Green Tech and impact startups from both continents in pitching, storytelling and presentation skills. On stage, she has hosted events including Impact Festival, VivaTech, Startup Germany Summit and Web Summit. She has traveled to 96 countries, and she puts the whole of it in one line: “I never want to stop being an ambassador between continents, cultures and companies.”

I never want to stop being an ambassador between continents, cultures and companies.

Every Person Has a Reason

Meike has always enjoyed traveling and living in different places. “There’s this restlessness in me that doesn’t seem to quieten down,” she says. Of everything 96 countries have taught her, she picks out one thing that she admits sounds simple at first: “Every person has a reason to do something.”

Every person has a reason to do something.

Her point is that people judge too quickly and then stay with a firm opinion, at work as much as in politics. “This does not mean, in any way, to justify all actions,” she says. It means remembering that there is usually a story behind an action.

She gives two examples. She traveled to Libya shortly before Gaddafi was removed from power, and to Iran a few years later, during the Rohani years. When Libya later descended into years of instability and conflict, she says the trip helped her understand the news and put it “into a broader human context.” It shaped how she acts: “Instead of judging, I remind myself to ask: What do I still need to learn about the other side that helps me understand why he/she is acting a certain way?”

That’s my idea of Weltliebe: curiosity and openness towards the world, paired with an unshakable optimism and deeply rooted love for people.

She applies the same rule to herself. In a post on what multicultural teams have taught her, she wrote about traveling to Abidjan and saying “Ivory Coast” until a colleague told her the country had officially asked to be called Côte d’Ivoire in every language. She was grateful to be told. “Sometimes correcting someone respectfully is much kinder than staying silent,” she wrote.

Her work on climate started with travel too.

Greenland, Namibia, Cologne

A trip to Greenland in 2017 left a mark on her. She saw the glaciers retreating, with the points they had reached years earlier clearly marked, and it made climate change, in her words, “less abstract while highlighting the urgency to act.” Then came the years in Namibia, and then the summers in Cologne.

At the same time she was going to conferences in Germany and Europe and seeing what Green Tech founders were working on. She believes the work has to happen on all fronts, producing and consuming less and more sustainably. But the pragmatist in her, she says, doesn’t believe companies, especially the big polluters, will change their ways in an instant. “So we will need cost-competitive alternatives!” She points to construction, energy and transport as sectors that need them.

Entrepreneurship gives me optimism because of the agency that it implies: These founders see a problem and say, ‘Let’s build something that solves it.’

Climate change, she says, mostly produces bad news, and that makes many people feel powerless. Entrepreneurship “is almost the opposite mindset. It means action.” After so much travel and working in emerging markets, she also finds it exciting that “these solutions can come from anywhere. And they are needed everywhere.”

That is where embassidy’s projects sit. Meike describes the consultancy as working “at the intersection of entrepreneurship, international cooperation and impact.” Its projects include the CATAL1.5°T Female Changemaker Programme and Pre-Accelerator Programme, which support climate entrepreneurs across Western Africa, and the Startup Germany delegation to the German-African Business Summit in 2024 and 2026. She also mentors startups at Third Derivative on pitching, storytelling and public speaking, and has worked as a partner at TEAM Africa.

By her own count, it took six chapters to get here.

Six Chapters

Meike’s first job after university was as a Country Director for an emerging-markets consulting and research firm, managing projects in Bangkok, Algiers, Tunis, Jakarta and Istanbul.

Back in Germany, she managed the startup investments and media relations of the entrepreneur and investor Vural Öger, a participant in Die Höhle der Löwen, the German version of Shark Tank. She calls it her deep dive into the startup world. It is also the hard moment she names when asked for one: “The bankruptcy of Vural Öger, for whom I had managed and shot two fantastic seasons of ‘Die Höhle der Löwen.’”

In 2016 she founded her first consultancy, Zukunftsmanufaktur, working on PR, pitching, storytelling and marketing, and her work as an event host took off across Europe. In December 2020, GIZ made her Digital Ambassador to Namibia, and she lived in Windhoek until 2022 to help grow the Namibian startup ecosystem. Returning to Germany, she joined Germany Trade & Invest, where she was in charge of the international affairs of de:hub, an initiative of the Ministry of Economic Affairs.

At the beginning of 2024 she left to do her own thing. “I never knew where my career turns, which took me all over the world, would get me and if the fact that I kept reinventing myself would eventually bankrupt my career,” she says. “But it didn’t.” She calls herself a “neo-generalist.”

She credits one person in particular. Someone in the public sector, with whom she had worked closely in her previous job, “could have just let me go.” Instead, she and her team started to hire Meike for projects and events. “I believe without those initial bookings and important signs of trust I wouldn’t have made it to where I am today,” Meike says.

Pitching in Service to the Audience

A large part of that work is coaching founders from different countries before they pitch. Asked what separates a technically good pitch from an outstanding one, Meike says it is “when founders are pitching in service to their audience.”

She means two things. The first is adapting the pitch to the people in the room (investors, an expert audience, a mainstream one) and to the occasion. The second, she says, might sound funny: “even though you are pitching your company, you can make it not about yourself.” The founders who stand out tell a story people remember, use examples specific to the event, break complex things down in easy language, stay out of the technical detail, and have “slides that are actually readable.” A founder who took a single coaching session with her wrote in a recommendation that she “has a way of making you feel comfortable opening up while still pushing you to think about your narrative and slides in clever new ways.”

Recently she has started coaching corporates and agencies as well. “Honestly I’m often rather shocked at conferences when I see how corporates are presenting themselves,” she says. Her list: not engaging, too long, crowded slides, too technical, too many numbers, “no stories, no fun.” Startups, she points out, usually have less than five minutes to present. So they know how to prioritize: the problem, then the solution, then only the most important points. With the corporates and established agencies she has begun working with, she says, “it was amazing what a turn around it was when they got a bit of that startup spirit!”

it was amazing what a turn around it was when they got a bit of that startup spirit!

She learned most of this standing on a stage herself.

Saying Hello to Friends

“I am not really great at anything, but I enjoy bringing movers and shakers together, and I’m so excited to learn every day,” Meike says. Being on stage gives her that. She can help the people around her “shine,” and ask the questions that let them share what they know.

At VivaTech this year she was on stage four days in a row, something she wrote she had never done before. In September she hosted To The Peak in Bolzano, and before it began she ran a moderation training for the members of the organizing team who host panels, pitch semi-finals and side events. They worked through how to bring something of yourself onto the stage, how to introduce speakers and how to politely interrupt people who speak endlessly. On preparation, her note was “less ChatGPT, more LinkedIn!”

Her single most important piece of advice for anyone going on stage is to speak slowly and conversationally. When she started, she rushed, as most people do.

Now I’m not thinking ‘opening moderation’, but ‘saying hello to my friends in the audience.’

That thought, she says, makes her slow down, breathe normally and take pauses.

There is a personal side to how she has set this up. She limits her moderation to one or two engagements a month so that she is not away from her daughter too much, and spends the rest of her time working mostly remotely on entrepreneurship projects and coaching.

Where Meike Is Now

embassidy is two years old. Between now and Christmas, Meike hosts the African Business Summit in Cologne on 8 October and beyond economy in Munich on 28 October. She will moderate sessions at the German-African Business Summit in Accra from 23 to 25 November, where she is also coordinating the Startup Germany delegation, and will finally host the Pitch Night of the de:hub Initiative on 3 December.

The people she wants to hear from are the ones her profile lists: organizers looking for an experienced MC for a tech conference or event, organizations that need a startup expert to design and run a program, and teams that want coaching in storytelling, pitching and public speaking. Professionally, she says, the best feeling she has had is being able to say “I’ve arrived.” She wants to keep going: supporting ClimateTech, hosting events, designing and running entrepreneurship projects around the world, and traveling to her 100th country.

A colleague once called her “superglue,” which she counts among the nicest things anyone has said to her. Her habit, she says, is to connect people whenever and wherever she can. Outside work, besides time with her daughter and all sorts of sports, there are the mountains. “I love hiking and the mountains,” she says. It “makes me feel small and unimportant and appreciate the power of nature, of which we are only a tiny piece, which is what I believe could be useful for a few other people out there too.”

On Children’s Day in Germany she wrote, “When I grow up, I want to be like my daughter.” Children, she says, “are not supposed to know everything yet, so they ask questions, they observe, they try out, they find out.” She would like adults to keep more of that, at work included.

“It’s still the same world,” she says, “but looked at through my child’s eyes, it seems much brighter and much more full of possibilities.”