About me

I've been fascinated by technology since early childhood, which led me to founding 1aim, an IoT startup. I ran 1aim together with my co-founder Yann for seven years before it was acquired by FSB, a market leader in door hardware. After that, I provided advice to some founder friends and their early-stage companies. In late 2020, I joined On Deck. After many conversations with On Deck fellows in SaaS, I started building Wingback. Besides building businesses, I'm interested in Formula 1, cars, and planes, but also in traveling, architecture, fashion, and history.

I was born and raised in Oberhausen, Germany. It's a relatively small city close to Düsseldorf that sits right in the middle of a lot of other small towns. Since early childhood, I have been fascinated by technology. I still remember watching planes take off and land from the visitor terrace at Düsseldorf Airport when I was three years old, and rebuilding the airport in Lego after that experience. When I was nine, I became very interested in Formula 1. It became a real obsession. I spent most of my time in class drawing F1 cars, and I even recorded each F1 free practice session on DVD. When I was 13, I turned my fascination into a business by reselling F1 merchandise for a profit on eBay. I did the same with camera equipment when I started taking motorsports pictures at 15.

In 2008, I moved to Hanover, where I started studying Mechanical Engineering. My best friends were based there, and Mirko Schaper, chief engineer at the Institute for Material Science in Hanover at the time, provided great support to us and our personal projects. I spent way more time on these projects than on studying. One of them was building a speed record-breaking radio controlled electric car. But studying was never really my thing. I quit my studies and moved to Berlin in 2013 when we received the first governmental funding for my startup, 1aim.

During the first 18 months in Berlin, my co-founder Yann and I had an office in an office furniture storage space. We lived there too. There was no running water, which meant we had to go to the public swimming pool to take showers. It was a great time.

After we sealed a partnership with the Hörmann Group, a global leader in the access industry, we received the first Angel investment, moved offices, and hired more employees. When we finished the development of our first product, we raised more investment from Angels and strategic investors. The team grew significantly, and we became an upcoming player in the archaic door hardware industry.

Even though 1aim was based in Berlin, I was traveling around a whole lot. At first, just within Europe. But from 2017 onwards, I spent about half of my time in the US. Acquiring more industrial partnerships and the maintenance of the existing alliances was my focus whenever I was in Europe. We signed a further collaboration and an investment with the door hardware manufacturer FSB in 2018.

We unveiled the FSB partnership product to the public later in 2018. In early 2019, we displayed a total of six different hardware products and a suite of software products at a world-leading construction trade show in Munich. Three months later, FSB acquired 1aim.

Yann and I decided to leave FSB after managing the transition. After some traveling, I started helping some founder friends out. Even though I feel like there is an endless amount of things for me to learn, I'm glad that my 1aim experience can be helpful to other founders.

I wanted to apply my learnings and build another company, which is why I joined the talent accelerator Entrepreneur First. But I did not find anything great to work on there.

In late 2020, I joined On Deck. I met a lot of interesting people and had a lot of great but also some bad experiences. Through conversations with more than one hundred other On Deck fellows in SaaS, we defined what was to become Wingback.

Yann and I started Wingback in 2021. The idea was that a software company should be able to change its pricing and charge for any feature set of their product without asking an engineer for it. Everyone I described it to had the problem, which is a good sign and also a dangerous one.

We raised a seed round, got into Y Combinator, and put together an outstanding team, spread over five continents. I was in the Bay Area, surrounded by some of the best founders in the world, it was amazing. We were on a high at Demo Day. But then the batch ends and you are alone with the actual numbers, and the growth we expected did not arrive. We built well. We sold too slowly. We reached a point where we could not go further without more capital, and unfortunately, that did not come together.

So I went back to consulting other people with their companies. One of those projects was the opposite of everything above. Matchwinners was a small company that puts LED advertising boards into sports venues. An existing business, fairly conservative, bank financed, with a working product and one larger customer.

There was also no name. Not a weak brand, none at all. There was no CRM and no sales process. So I came up with the name and built a new identity with a designer I had worked with for years. We created the website and all other marketing assets, and I even shot most of the marketing pictures at sports events myself, which I had not done seriously since I was photographing as a teenager. I also introduced a modern CRM, new tools for internal communication, and vibe coded internal tools myself. What surprised me was how much of it worked. Things that are ordinary in a startup were new there, and they moved the company a lot further.

I do not differentiate very much between business and personal life; for me, it is pretty much the same. Apart from building businesses, I'm still very much interested in Formula 1, other motorsports, cars, and football. I also very much enjoy reading and discussing aviation and trains, or traffic infrastructure in general. Besides technology, I'm also very interested, and very opinionated, when it comes to architecture, fashion and history.