About me

Start smart, scale hard!


André Kolell
I've been passionate about online business, web technologies and online marketing since I got online with AOL in 1997. While still in school, I taught myself the fundamentals of programming and founded my first company with a friend of mine. We developed an affiliate network, ran it and finally sold it in 2003.

During my studies of business administration and informatics I worked for OTTO.de, where I learned a lot about huge companies, IT departments and legacy applications. After having spent one year abroad in Sydney, Australia, where I got my masters degree in information and communication technologies with a GPA of 7.0 I joined Blue Summit Media, a young online marketing agency, to built up their IT department and develop innovative tools to optimize online marketing.

In 2012 I started working for Hamburg based entrepreneurial investor TruVenturo as CTO. One of my greatest projects at TruVenturo was being responsible for all technological aspects of FINANZCHECK.de's turnaround from a business with significant losses into Germany's fastest growing loan brokering platform with a Series C funding of $33 million.

In September 2016 I joined Berlin based PETS DELI as CTO. Together with the company's investors - Rocket Internet, Project A Ventures and Index Ventures - we provided four-legged customers with species-appropriate and healthy pet food in a convenient way at competitive rates. As we did not manage to achieve an acceptable burn rate while growing extremely fast, the business went insolvent mid of 2017. I left the company after having migrated the tech stack to a company that decided to continue PETS DELI's business in a less aggressive way.

When About You's CTO, Sebastian Betz, shared his vision with me I was quite excited. Building and running the company's backbone IT infrastructure not only for the rapidly growing company itself but also for external clients sounded like an ambitious challenge and made me join the team and its journey in September 2017.

I enjoy working with those who are smart and skilled, pushing each other forward to constantly improve both on an individual and a team level to gain the ability to reach the most ambitious goals. The feelings of when a challenging problem has been solved in a perfect way or a big milestone of a venture's journey has been reached please me and keep me constantly pushing forward.


General Skills

  • Leading teams of software developers, dev ops, system administrators, database experts and UI/UX designers.
  • Using agile methodologies like Scrum and Kanban to integrate IT and business (Certified Scrum Master).
  • Rising IT departments from start-up chaos to professional organizations (ITIL Expert).
  • Thinking in terms of business and IT - bringing both worlds closely together.
  • Diving deeply into new ideas, analyzing every aspect and making motivating feasible plans.

Technological Skills

Some of the Dev and Ops technologies I have worked (or at least played around) with:

Programming Languages Frameworks Front-End
PHP Python JavaScript Java Laravel Symfony Zend Spryker Magento Express.js Bootstrap jQuery Less Bower
Relational Databases Various Databases Big Data
MySQL MariaDB PostgreSQL SQLite Oracle MongoDB Redis Elasticsearch Hadoop Google Big Query
Container Technologies PaaS & IaaS Virtualization & Hosting
Heroku Docker Kubernetes Heroku Google Container Engine Amazon ECS OVH VM Ware & various Hosters
Web Server Monitoring & Log Management Development
Apache nginx Tomcat Papertrail Logentries Pingdom New Relic Zabbix, ELK VirtualBox Vagrant IntelliJ IDEA Cloud9 IDE
Messaging Cloud Services Operating Systems
RabbitMQ Amazon SQS Resque Amazon EC2 Amazon S3 Amazon RDS Amazon ECS Amazon SES Mac OS, Ubuntu, Debian, Windows
Version Control Continuous Integration Browser Testing & Automation
GitHub Git with gitflow Jenkins Bamboo Travis CI Scrutinizer Headless Chrome with Puppeteer Phantom JS Selenium

Some (business) tools I have work with:

Collaboration Web Analytics Sending Mails
Google Apps Jira Confluence slack Google Analytics Piwik MailChimp Amazon SES Mailgun SendGrid
Furthermore I am quite experienced with the APIs of various online marketing platforms, e.g. Google AdWords, Microsoft Bing Ads, Criteo and Facebook Marketing.

Publications and talks

Online Marketing Steuerung mit Open Source Technologien bei FINANZCHECK.de

Talk at eMetrics summit 2016 and Data Driven Business Conference 2016.

Wettbewerbsvorteile durch den richtigen Umgang mit technischen Schulden

Talk held at developer week 2016, webtech 2016 and International PHP Conference 2016.

Retargeting

T. Schwarz (Ed.): Leitfaden Online Marketing Band 2: Das Wissen der Branche, Verlag Marketing Börse, 2011.

Workflow Management Issues in Virtual Enterprise Networks

12th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems in Funchal-Madeira, Portugal.
Publication of selected papers in J. Filipe, J. Cordeiro (Eds.): Enterprise Information Systems, Springer-Verlag, 2011.

Perfect data for perfect search engine advertising

Talk held at online marketing conference dmexco 2010.
During my time at Blue Summit Media I published articles about search engine advertising and online marketing in general in various magazines, e.g. Venture Capital Magazine, webselling, suchradar.

About this website

This website and its articles are published with the flat-file CMS Grav.