Biography

From an intern to Managing Director. From an IT start-up to a public company. From buying companies to selling the company. From customers in Germany to customers worldwide.

During my professional career I am constantly being part of an ongoing business adventure. Let's start from the beginning: Parallel to my studies of computer sciences I started as an intern and software-developer at a small IT start-up company in Munich, Germany. The business grew quickly and along this line, the garage company changed into a mature company with departments and subsidiaries in the UK, US and Asia. At the peak we employed about 300 IT professionals in various countries.

Right after our successful IPO at the German Stock Exchange in 2000 I became a board member and executive officer in charge of Marketing, Sales and Acquisitions. Later on, the area changed to the general responsibility of the company's core business "directory solutions for telephone companies and service providers". After a change in the shareholder structure in 2005, the majority wanted to reposition the software company as a service provider in the internet. This was the right time to sell our profitable core business to a competitor in the US and I went with it.

Now I found myself being part of a large multi-national, multi-billion-dollar company with a corresponding long chain of command. Here I got new experiences when we had to merge our German facilities with the European subsidiaries of the new owner in the UK and the Netherlands. Cross-border teams and development labs in US, UK and Germany as well as combining the sales organisations and at the same time keep the customers confident and happy. Sometimes it was a somewhat bumpy road but finally it worked.

In 2008 our mother company acquired an US corporation dealing with phone line subscriber listings data and I took over the responsibility of its business outside North-America. Managing and selling content instead of running a software company was a true game changer to me. I found myself being a publisher of directory content. The traditional business of this company was to provide up-to-date phone book data to Directory Service Providers in Europe. As this business was very much in decline, we started to transform it to act as an internet publisher.

So we developed cool stuff on web services and Apple's iOS platform for international markets. More importantly we experimented with different business models to monetize our phone book databases more efficiently. Working as a publisher with Google, Apple and other affiliate partners in the area of on-line advertisement is exciting and got me a lot of new insights. Optimizing our various web services in multiple countries to provide most relevant content to local search results at the major search engines is another area of expertise which I got here.

End of 2014 the business was sold to an US Private Equity company and in 2015 I moved on and left the company. Since then I am drilling deeper into the exiting and growing business areas of web services and mobile applications.