About me

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.

• 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.

Furthermore I am quite experienced with the APIs of various online marketing platforms, e.g. Google AdWords, Microsoft Bing Ads, Criteo and Facebook Marketing.

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

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

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

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.

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.