シ Sound of the Wind. Shape of a Wave. Some Wave.

Malte Barth is Founding Partner of BITKRAFT Ventures, where he backs the people building games, interactive worlds, AI and the things that happen when play, culture, and technology stop pretending they're separate domains. He has been doing some version of this — building, investing, operating — across media, games, and esports for over three decades.

That's the clean version. But only the mainstream could care about this version of him.

The more curious version might start with a 22-year-old sailing across the Atlantic — not as metaphor, but as from Canaries to Caribbean, actual trade winds, actual big waves, actual 3 weeks of reading nothing but wind, water and the milky way. It might continue through London, Boston, Shanghai, Lisbon  — cities that taught him different rhythms, different ways a system can move. And it might be found now in the sparse, droplet-like dispatches he leaves on X under @mabarth — haiku-length observations about swan fashion cycles, laughter-per-capita as a societal health metric, entropy imports, and Leonardo da Vinci's insistence that everything connects to everything else. His feed doesn't chase reach. It leaves small, precise ripples in the pond and walks away.

Before any of that, there was a teenager in Germany writing code on his first PC while simultaneously water sporting, and graffiti from the cloth of windsurf sails that hadn't asked for it. All of which brings us back to the labels people like to apply: He holds a degree in Industrial Engineering from Nordakademie and still quietly ponders whether his dyslexia was a bug or a feature. He has served as an Industrial Advisor to EQT since 2010. He helped grow Modern Times Group's esports portfolio — ESL, DreamHack, ESEA — into something that changed hands for $1.5 billion in 2022. Since 2016, BITKRAFT has been the vessel: early-stage seeds scattered globally, always near the place where pattern meets play and culture and code mingle.

But the bio only gets you so far.

His Instagram — @danceswithw1nd — is one question asked a hundred ways: what happens when light meets surface in water, stone, cloud, bark, espresso, Pantheon pool tile and the moon. quite a log book of eyes that try to see. His X bio pairs a dove with an eagle — gentle ascent and sharp vision. The wind is invisible direction. The wave is a form that arises and dissolves before it arises again. He treats weak signals sincerely and loud ones with suspicion. Markets, biology, philosophy, spirituality, technology, art and vibes are not, to him, separate conversations — they're expressions of the same underlying source, and the most interesting truths tend to hide in their quiet overlap in plain sight as we learn to see.

He lives in Cascais, Portugal now. Tróia is just across the bay. He has been part of the THU Tribe before, and returns the way certain patterns do — not because they must, but because something in the rhythm calls for it.

Wherever he is at this exact moment, he'd probably rather be kite surfing. And if you find him “judging” your work this September, know that he's reading for the thing beneath the thing — the drop that shapes a wave before it becomes something else.