Germany
I'm a long-term thinker and do-er, founder, builder, strategist, technologist, ex-engineer and economic computer scientist. I bring an uncommon perspective to startup and enterprise challenges having 15+ years' experience at individual contributor, director as well as CEO, CTO and CDO levels across 5 companies ranging in size from zero (seed) to 3B+ (series F) and directly selling to and working with 500+ customers, including Fortune 100s.
[innovation company] co-builds new products and ventures in internet, web, and computing technologies.
EDITIVE's vision is to build "GitHub for content" and to redefine content-based collaboration: Put an end to your document file chaos with multiple competing versions, incomprehensible change history and merge conflicts. EDITIVE is a technology spin-off of the chair for Open Source Software at the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg (FAU). I co-founded EDITIVE with Hannes Dohrn (CTO), Taina Temmen (COO), Marius Kreis (CPO) and Prof. Dirk Riehle (Chief Scientist). First Employees: Mark Rudtke (Engineer) and Thomas Brunner (Senior Engineer). My achievements include: * Winning and complementing the founding team * Securing 1.1M € seed funding: public fundings as well as angel investments from Peter Vatter (Ex Schaeffler), Marius Kreis (Co-founder Elohna) and Paul E. Sevinç (Co-founder Doodle) * Customer development: 100+ discovery calls and vision gen / technical demos * Winning the first 50k € of revenue through direct sales * Launching blitzcompare.com with 100+ public beta users, including some DAX logos
Traveled once around the globe, visiting Sri Lanka, Japan, and the United States. Spent the most time in Tokyo, San Francisco, and Sunnyvale for personal experiments.
Founded in 2013 by Sascha Konietzke and Paolo Negri, Contentful has pioneered the headless CMS space to become the leading intelligent composable content solution in the market, revolutionizing content experiences for thousands of global brands like Atlassian, Bang & Olufsen, Electronic Arts, Ikea, Red Bull, Spotify and Porsche and 30% of the Fortune 500. With a $175 million Series F funding led by Tiger Global, Contentful soared to a valuation of over $3 billion. Backed by Tiger Global, Sapphire Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, General Catalyst, Benchmark, Balderton, and more. The Solution Strategists - imagine a team of field CTOs - provide value as thought leaders within the pre-sales team, offering strategic guidance as to the quickest way to achieve value with Contentful. I was the only external hire into the team. My achievements include: * Co-creating value with Contentful's 1M$ accounts in EMEA * Co-strategizing with C-level and digital leaders in 100+ high-stakes sales opportunities * Detangling customer challenges and designing a way to overcome the most critical business issue * Driving adoption from single use cases to building digital factories in multi-brand enterprises * Impacting average win-rates (+35%) and deal-sizes (+45%) and growth beyond 200M$ ARR * Inspiring customers and partners, e.g. about the future of web
I joined the FAU's chair for Open Source Software to spin-off and co-found EDITVE.