Just like Seth Godin, I can't really tell what Career am I pursuing. I can't say "I'm a Product Manager" or "Digital Consultant". I see my Career as a string of diverse projects, every single one with unique experiences, growth challenges and new people to connect with. I define myself as an Innovation Catalyst with many projects done so far, the silly ones first:
1993 - My first entrepreneurial attempt: when I was seven I got into the boutique waffle business. I turned the family garage into an improvised kitchen for a day or two where I would prepare waffles, which I then deliver for a dollar to the neighbors. I made over 30 Deutschmark on Day 1.
1996 - With ten, I finally proved to be an extrovert: I was playing a small side-role as a fish in the school play "The Fishermen and his Wife" for new elementary students and their nervous parents. I hated it.
1997 - With a group of friends, we started a local "police" to fight “crime”. We put reflective stickers on our bikes, prepared document templates, crafted fake Police-IDs and hurried up the road to chase speeders. We soon became the Sherifs in Town.
1999 - Verba volant, scripta manent: Started a School Newspaper named "Gehirn", published every 6 months luckily not in Latin. The production yammed my Dad's copy machine often. Two years later the School Newspaper with 6 editions in total got awarded by the cities’ biggest bank. One edition was raising money for Mozambique.
2003 - Started a school company named "clip it". We "sold" shares (100 x 10 Euro) to friends in order to produce, design and sell name badges to local businesses. I held the position of chief salesman and CEO. The company with the duration of one school class was a success and remaining budget (6 Euro per Share) was donated to the Red Cross. During that time I also ramped up the local Red Cross Youth and interned at ART CONCERTS, one of Germany’s most innovative producers and event management agencies for international music events at that time. I also raised money with a "sponsored Walk" for Chernobyl-Relief. As a reward for the highest amount raised I was invited to visit Minsk, Belarus. It was also my chance to drink vodka in the morning.
2004 - To improve my English, my parents sent me to the United States for an exchange year. During my junior year in New Mexico I firstly got my driving licence, shrewd business decision, and then used my welding skills to completely makeover an 1985 Chevrolet Pickup. Later, I launched an initiative among the high school students at my school. "Change Drive" encouraged over 300 students to donate their pennies - surprisingly 1,50 US-Dollar on average per kid - to the Red Cross and its Tsunami relief.
2005 - Pay it forward: New students arrived at Norwich University to get familiar to the US-Culture. I guided them for three weeks thru the on-boarding process. I received my first hypnosis and we have dressed up like Britney Spears and rocked the stage at the last evening. Then I returned back to Germany in the Age of 18.
2006 - My first book "The Best Year of my Life" got published - it's a mix of an entertaining diary of my High School Year in the US and a guide book. About third of all outgoing exchange students from Germany have read my story the following years in order to get prepared for an studying abroad. I was also summer intern at Johnson & Johnson, creating user manuals for prostheses and joints. My creativity peaked in Vienna and I made an ad with Shakira titled “Hips don’t lie”. We started also the Rurdesign Web Agency to build real websites for the first time after abusing Microsoft Frontpage for so long.
2007 - Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose: My High School for Economics joined the regional school competition of the national youth radio... and lost. But things were going well at our school club during my time as the president. I became also board member of the local Red Cross until 2015. Within the Red Cross I became a certified Leader for Disaster Control.
2008 - Received my high school diploma in Business and Economics. We partied hard and carbon neutral as we were organising the first carbon neutral graduation party in Germany, neutralizing over 9.000 kg CO2. I wanted to study something that has to do with ‘serving people’. I moved to Stuttgart in order to join the Cooperative University with IBM for a Bachelor of Arts in Business Studies and Service Management, IT-Consulting and Services.
2009 - Within my IBM internships my first stop was at HR to create a Portfolio for personnel measures and run data analysis for the German CFO. I later designed a Guideline for the internal Top-Talent Program. The second internship was at IBM's Sales & Distribution – Dynamic Infrastructure and I was responsible for Target Accounts and wrote a paper about roll-outs of Innovations. My boss Prof. Dr. Gunter Dueck (aka "Wild Duck") had a great influence on how I see Corporate Innovation today. At University, my professor in Business Modeling let me run his course and I taught my Students the brand-new Business Model Canvas. That year was also my peak year of certifications: ITILv3, PMI CAPM and Lean Sigma Green Belt.
2010 - Being an consultant: Another two internships were part of my curriculum: First I was part project management assistance für strategic outsourcing of SAP services at Henkel Düsseldorf. Then I did some Consulting in Business Optimization with Social Media Analytics. I wrote a thesis on Web-Monitoring for Re-Insurances and how the Loveparade Tragedy was forespoken online and could have been altered by the power of the crowd. In Fall that I attended the very first Startup Weekend here in Germany and we won it with the idea of "myPad" - mass-customization of coffee pads and nespresso capsules. Early experimenting proved the very promising concept unrealistic.
2011 - Ideas are easy. Implementation is hard: I wrote my Thesis about "Startups as an Customer Segment for IBM Cloud Computing". After receiving my Bachelor Degree more ideas failed; e.g. a Groupon clone named "FairDeals" that donates to charity partners with every Deal. I left IBM and joined the Startup Autonetzer.de, a P2P-Carsharing Startup. We were three passionate first-time entrepreneurs and I was responsible for online marketing and analytics, the year after for product development and customer service.
2012 - Moved to Berlin for six months and "studied" Design Thinking part-time at the Hasso Plattner Institute. We were creative problem-solving for three clients, including a rental-system of high-end dresses for the OTTO group. In desperate search for a German Term for Collaborative Consumption, Michael and me came up with the german term "KoKonsum". We have built a German-speaking community and blog around the Sharing Economy Trend, that has still some traffic on its subject. I experimented with different startup event formats, including "UX Pizza" and "Business Innovation Hackathon". I have also initiated a Partnership with Airbnb and the famous Agency Jung von Matt.
2013 - Having learned more and more about Lean Startup, I started believing that traditional Business School Knowledge can't be applied to either Innovation nor Startups. This made me leave Autonetzer at it's peak with eleven employees and 25.000 active members. The company closed down and was sold two years later. From that day I promised to always focus on the customer first.
I became a freelancer and Ebay was among my first clients, redesigning the communication experience for one of their subsidiaries. I begun speaking on topics like Share Economy, e.g. at the CeBIT Conference and a dozen of others. For Alexander Osterwalders' Company Strategyzer I was building the international Customer Support and joined all his business design workshops and master classes for the next two years. Startup Weekend (a non-profit acquired by Techstars) has led me to Iran twice, Switzerland and Japan in order to facilitate their events. I also joined the European Innovation Academy in Tallin for and my team worked on Snapbike, a P2P-Bikesharing platform. That year I became member of the German Startup Association and represented the State of Baden-Württemberg.
2014 - NEXT Stuttgart, an intensive 5-week Pre-Accelerator Program run by Benjamin, Nina and me, became very successful: Out of 5 startups, 3 are still existing today: Agenturmatching, WeTrack and MAPT. I traveled to Silicon Valley twice that year - once for attending an Educator-Seminar by Serial Founder Steve Blank and later scouting different Coworking Concepts for a Space that I thought about building up in Stuttgart. Back there I published the german translation of Steve Blanks book "Startup Owner's Manual". Meanwhile, Bosch became a client among a few others for guiding a handful of Corporate Startups. We have founded Startup Stuttgart e.V. in order to catalyse the local startup ecosystem. But I'm lucky to be invited to Incubators and Accelerators around the world like Avatech, Startup Pirates and HugeThings.
2015 - Together with my friends Adam and Benjamin I have founded Strive. The ideas was an SaaS for growth metrics and traction. Since my workshops are mostly about qualitative validation, this platform was about quantifying growth. Later I became an active Investor to this Startup that unfortunately hasn’t launched two years later. Meanwhile I continued consulting clients like BOSCH and MAK3it to validate ideas on the market. As I'm passionate about connecting thought leaders I organized a yearly un-conference called Leancamp Stuttgart and this year was already its 5th edition. I had the pleasure to facilitate the MedTech Startup School in Tübingen including it's Demo Day that was based on Steve Blank's LeanLaunchpad curriculum. I have done that also successfully for the following year. New Years Eve Kamil and me have published a free ebook called "Mit Customer Development durchstarten" to make Lean Entrepreneurship available to everyone speaking German. One side-project I created was "Nie mehr tanken" - a concierge refuel service for car owners. I brought the Team behind Startup Campus Stuttgart (now Pioniergeist) together. That year, I have also started moderating Google Design Sprints, and I love it until today!
2016 - Hanging around at startup conferences like the Pirate Summit, I have met Rob Fitzpatrick, an awesome Author of the book "The Mom Test", that deals with Customer Interviews. This was the second book I have published a German Translation a few months later - this time together with Anastasia Podolean. I left Stuttgart and came back to the Rheinland and joined MAK3it as a managing partner, designing and creating new services and trainings for Intrapreneurs. We have successfully run an innovation program at Daimler Financial Services, (Google) Design Sprints at FRANKE and an adapted Adobe Kickbox program for more than 120 employees at Dräger and Bosch. We fell in love with systematic invention and therefore Kamil and me supported the translation of the Book "Startup mit System", originally from MIT Professor Bill Aulet. As a hobby, I invalidated one idea called Whats-Guru, a micro-learning service on Whatsapp.
2017 - At peak we had 20 startup mentors guiding 80 international teams simultaneously from three major corporations on our 12-week corporate innovation program. Over 100 entrepreneurs have joined MAK3it's Corporate Startup Mentoring program. Our Team is expanding so Leadership and Awareness became a bigger topic for me. I still travel occasionally to Stuttgart for Strive (they have become a digital team of tech-talents), my Masters in Intra- & Entrepreneurship and facilitating Events like Social Startup in 54h. I became mentor for the Ignition program Düsseldorf and at ProjectTogether, focussing on social entrepreneurship. That will be fun! My interest shifted even more to Impact / Social Startups as well as Social Entrepreneurship. Ah, and I moved to Düsseldorf even the fact that Berlin was still my favourite place to visit. I failed investing in bitcoin.
2018 - I started my year with Seth Godin's intense altMBA program and professional changes are coming up. Our Innovation Kickbox has empowered over 500 employees from 20+ different countries. This year we supported e.g. Jägermeister. As tech become more and more impactful, Kamil and me did a Meetup on "Humane Tech Rheinland", raising awareness for ethical design and beneficial business models. I funded various social projects over the last years and my kickstarter funding budget maxed out this year. I also became a mentor for the CEO of Worldbrain.io. In order to experience a "New Work"-Environment, I joined sipgate as a Wayfinder part-time from October. sipgate is a Voice-over-IP SaaS from Düsseldorf with over 170 employees. As New Work, Agile & Lean is overhyped today, they decided to shift towards this new way of organising already in 2006! More than 10.000 visitors stop by every year in order to learn about our way of running lean. My role, similar to an intrapreneur, is to bring sipgate closer to archiving its winning aspiration in the B2B market. Therefore, I switch teams every two to three months. I started in the Sales-Department and moved on to our corporate startup CLINQ in order to foster lean b2b-thinking and traction. We have shifted the team-focus towards marketing and doubled the user base.
2019 - The European Parliament Elections gave me the chance to volunteer in Berlin for ProjectTogether. Since anti-democratic tendencies are growing, #Europawahl19 was our 5 week long attempt to motivate non-voters to vote on May 26! Participations was at an all-time low and only one-third of young adults went to vote in 2014. We organised a one-day Boostcamp four weeks before the elections to bring 10 existing campaigns together with 30 creatives and 20 top online influencers, in order to motivate at least one million young adults to go and vote! Together with a lot of other awareness-campaigns we created also new viral campaigns online. The result: Election participation went up by 13%! I also continued speaking about Zebra Startups at major conferences (e.g. Misfit Festival, GenoVATION). The 2019 International Business & Leadership Retreat at Plum Village confirmed my mission to further drive compassionate Startups, Innovation and Disruption! My plan is to write a book about this theme and to give workshops. I also started THE ONLINE DESIGN SPRINT for smaller teams and people to run Design Sprints on their own without being alone. At sipgate, I moved on to support our analytics team to gain competitive intelligence skills.
2020 - Unfuck Düsseldorf, JECKathon, Online-Trainers.de,
2021 - Deutscher Gründerpreis für Schülerinnen und Schüler - Gründerpreis Experience, Social Innovation Journey for a big Insurance
2022 - Ecogood Business Canvas, Gemeinwohl-Kompass, Positionspapier zur NRW-Landtagswahl, Wir Bauen Zukunft eG
PS: I am currently looking for a topic for my Master Thesis in the field of Intra- & Entrepreneurship (drop me a line if you have a suggestion).
1993 - My first entrepreneurial attempt: when I was seven I got into the boutique waffle business. I turned the family garage into an improvised kitchen for a day or two where I would prepare waffles, which I then deliver for a dollar to the neighbors. I made over 30 Deutschmark on Day 1.
1996 - With ten, I finally proved to be an extrovert: I was playing a small side-role as a fish in the school play "The Fishermen and his Wife" for new elementary students and their nervous parents. I hated it.
1997 - With a group of friends, we started a local "police" to fight “crime”. We put reflective stickers on our bikes, prepared document templates, crafted fake Police-IDs and hurried up the road to chase speeders. We soon became the Sherifs in Town.
1999 - Verba volant, scripta manent: Started a School Newspaper named "Gehirn", published every 6 months luckily not in Latin. The production yammed my Dad's copy machine often. Two years later the School Newspaper with 6 editions in total got awarded by the cities’ biggest bank. One edition was raising money for Mozambique.
2003 - Started a school company named "clip it". We "sold" shares (100 x 10 Euro) to friends in order to produce, design and sell name badges to local businesses. I held the position of chief salesman and CEO. The company with the duration of one school class was a success and remaining budget (6 Euro per Share) was donated to the Red Cross. During that time I also ramped up the local Red Cross Youth and interned at ART CONCERTS, one of Germany’s most innovative producers and event management agencies for international music events at that time. I also raised money with a "sponsored Walk" for Chernobyl-Relief. As a reward for the highest amount raised I was invited to visit Minsk, Belarus. It was also my chance to drink vodka in the morning.
2004 - To improve my English, my parents sent me to the United States for an exchange year. During my junior year in New Mexico I firstly got my driving licence, shrewd business decision, and then used my welding skills to completely makeover an 1985 Chevrolet Pickup. Later, I launched an initiative among the high school students at my school. "Change Drive" encouraged over 300 students to donate their pennies - surprisingly 1,50 US-Dollar on average per kid - to the Red Cross and its Tsunami relief.
2005 - Pay it forward: New students arrived at Norwich University to get familiar to the US-Culture. I guided them for three weeks thru the on-boarding process. I received my first hypnosis and we have dressed up like Britney Spears and rocked the stage at the last evening. Then I returned back to Germany in the Age of 18.
2006 - My first book "The Best Year of my Life" got published - it's a mix of an entertaining diary of my High School Year in the US and a guide book. About third of all outgoing exchange students from Germany have read my story the following years in order to get prepared for an studying abroad. I was also summer intern at Johnson & Johnson, creating user manuals for prostheses and joints. My creativity peaked in Vienna and I made an ad with Shakira titled “Hips don’t lie”. We started also the Rurdesign Web Agency to build real websites for the first time after abusing Microsoft Frontpage for so long.
2007 - Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose: My High School for Economics joined the regional school competition of the national youth radio... and lost. But things were going well at our school club during my time as the president. I became also board member of the local Red Cross until 2015. Within the Red Cross I became a certified Leader for Disaster Control.
2008 - Received my high school diploma in Business and Economics. We partied hard and carbon neutral as we were organising the first carbon neutral graduation party in Germany, neutralizing over 9.000 kg CO2. I wanted to study something that has to do with ‘serving people’. I moved to Stuttgart in order to join the Cooperative University with IBM for a Bachelor of Arts in Business Studies and Service Management, IT-Consulting and Services.
2009 - Within my IBM internships my first stop was at HR to create a Portfolio for personnel measures and run data analysis for the German CFO. I later designed a Guideline for the internal Top-Talent Program. The second internship was at IBM's Sales & Distribution – Dynamic Infrastructure and I was responsible for Target Accounts and wrote a paper about roll-outs of Innovations. My boss Prof. Dr. Gunter Dueck (aka "Wild Duck") had a great influence on how I see Corporate Innovation today. At University, my professor in Business Modeling let me run his course and I taught my Students the brand-new Business Model Canvas. That year was also my peak year of certifications: ITILv3, PMI CAPM and Lean Sigma Green Belt.
2010 - Being an consultant: Another two internships were part of my curriculum: First I was part project management assistance für strategic outsourcing of SAP services at Henkel Düsseldorf. Then I did some Consulting in Business Optimization with Social Media Analytics. I wrote a thesis on Web-Monitoring for Re-Insurances and how the Loveparade Tragedy was forespoken online and could have been altered by the power of the crowd. In Fall that I attended the very first Startup Weekend here in Germany and we won it with the idea of "myPad" - mass-customization of coffee pads and nespresso capsules. Early experimenting proved the very promising concept unrealistic.
2011 - Ideas are easy. Implementation is hard: I wrote my Thesis about "Startups as an Customer Segment for IBM Cloud Computing". After receiving my Bachelor Degree more ideas failed; e.g. a Groupon clone named "FairDeals" that donates to charity partners with every Deal. I left IBM and joined the Startup Autonetzer.de, a P2P-Carsharing Startup. We were three passionate first-time entrepreneurs and I was responsible for online marketing and analytics, the year after for product development and customer service.
2012 - Moved to Berlin for six months and "studied" Design Thinking part-time at the Hasso Plattner Institute. We were creative problem-solving for three clients, including a rental-system of high-end dresses for the OTTO group. In desperate search for a German Term for Collaborative Consumption, Michael and me came up with the german term "KoKonsum". We have built a German-speaking community and blog around the Sharing Economy Trend, that has still some traffic on its subject. I experimented with different startup event formats, including "UX Pizza" and "Business Innovation Hackathon". I have also initiated a Partnership with Airbnb and the famous Agency Jung von Matt.
2013 - Having learned more and more about Lean Startup, I started believing that traditional Business School Knowledge can't be applied to either Innovation nor Startups. This made me leave Autonetzer at it's peak with eleven employees and 25.000 active members. The company closed down and was sold two years later. From that day I promised to always focus on the customer first.
I became a freelancer and Ebay was among my first clients, redesigning the communication experience for one of their subsidiaries. I begun speaking on topics like Share Economy, e.g. at the CeBIT Conference and a dozen of others. For Alexander Osterwalders' Company Strategyzer I was building the international Customer Support and joined all his business design workshops and master classes for the next two years. Startup Weekend (a non-profit acquired by Techstars) has led me to Iran twice, Switzerland and Japan in order to facilitate their events. I also joined the European Innovation Academy in Tallin for and my team worked on Snapbike, a P2P-Bikesharing platform. That year I became member of the German Startup Association and represented the State of Baden-Württemberg.
2014 - NEXT Stuttgart, an intensive 5-week Pre-Accelerator Program run by Benjamin, Nina and me, became very successful: Out of 5 startups, 3 are still existing today: Agenturmatching, WeTrack and MAPT. I traveled to Silicon Valley twice that year - once for attending an Educator-Seminar by Serial Founder Steve Blank and later scouting different Coworking Concepts for a Space that I thought about building up in Stuttgart. Back there I published the german translation of Steve Blanks book "Startup Owner's Manual". Meanwhile, Bosch became a client among a few others for guiding a handful of Corporate Startups. We have founded Startup Stuttgart e.V. in order to catalyse the local startup ecosystem. But I'm lucky to be invited to Incubators and Accelerators around the world like Avatech, Startup Pirates and HugeThings.
2015 - Together with my friends Adam and Benjamin I have founded Strive. The ideas was an SaaS for growth metrics and traction. Since my workshops are mostly about qualitative validation, this platform was about quantifying growth. Later I became an active Investor to this Startup that unfortunately hasn’t launched two years later. Meanwhile I continued consulting clients like BOSCH and MAK3it to validate ideas on the market. As I'm passionate about connecting thought leaders I organized a yearly un-conference called Leancamp Stuttgart and this year was already its 5th edition. I had the pleasure to facilitate the MedTech Startup School in Tübingen including it's Demo Day that was based on Steve Blank's LeanLaunchpad curriculum. I have done that also successfully for the following year. New Years Eve Kamil and me have published a free ebook called "Mit Customer Development durchstarten" to make Lean Entrepreneurship available to everyone speaking German. One side-project I created was "Nie mehr tanken" - a concierge refuel service for car owners. I brought the Team behind Startup Campus Stuttgart (now Pioniergeist) together. That year, I have also started moderating Google Design Sprints, and I love it until today!
2016 - Hanging around at startup conferences like the Pirate Summit, I have met Rob Fitzpatrick, an awesome Author of the book "The Mom Test", that deals with Customer Interviews. This was the second book I have published a German Translation a few months later - this time together with Anastasia Podolean. I left Stuttgart and came back to the Rheinland and joined MAK3it as a managing partner, designing and creating new services and trainings for Intrapreneurs. We have successfully run an innovation program at Daimler Financial Services, (Google) Design Sprints at FRANKE and an adapted Adobe Kickbox program for more than 120 employees at Dräger and Bosch. We fell in love with systematic invention and therefore Kamil and me supported the translation of the Book "Startup mit System", originally from MIT Professor Bill Aulet. As a hobby, I invalidated one idea called Whats-Guru, a micro-learning service on Whatsapp.
2017 - At peak we had 20 startup mentors guiding 80 international teams simultaneously from three major corporations on our 12-week corporate innovation program. Over 100 entrepreneurs have joined MAK3it's Corporate Startup Mentoring program. Our Team is expanding so Leadership and Awareness became a bigger topic for me. I still travel occasionally to Stuttgart for Strive (they have become a digital team of tech-talents), my Masters in Intra- & Entrepreneurship and facilitating Events like Social Startup in 54h. I became mentor for the Ignition program Düsseldorf and at ProjectTogether, focussing on social entrepreneurship. That will be fun! My interest shifted even more to Impact / Social Startups as well as Social Entrepreneurship. Ah, and I moved to Düsseldorf even the fact that Berlin was still my favourite place to visit. I failed investing in bitcoin.
2018 - I started my year with Seth Godin's intense altMBA program and professional changes are coming up. Our Innovation Kickbox has empowered over 500 employees from 20+ different countries. This year we supported e.g. Jägermeister. As tech become more and more impactful, Kamil and me did a Meetup on "Humane Tech Rheinland", raising awareness for ethical design and beneficial business models. I funded various social projects over the last years and my kickstarter funding budget maxed out this year. I also became a mentor for the CEO of Worldbrain.io. In order to experience a "New Work"-Environment, I joined sipgate as a Wayfinder part-time from October. sipgate is a Voice-over-IP SaaS from Düsseldorf with over 170 employees. As New Work, Agile & Lean is overhyped today, they decided to shift towards this new way of organising already in 2006! More than 10.000 visitors stop by every year in order to learn about our way of running lean. My role, similar to an intrapreneur, is to bring sipgate closer to archiving its winning aspiration in the B2B market. Therefore, I switch teams every two to three months. I started in the Sales-Department and moved on to our corporate startup CLINQ in order to foster lean b2b-thinking and traction. We have shifted the team-focus towards marketing and doubled the user base.
2019 - The European Parliament Elections gave me the chance to volunteer in Berlin for ProjectTogether. Since anti-democratic tendencies are growing, #Europawahl19 was our 5 week long attempt to motivate non-voters to vote on May 26! Participations was at an all-time low and only one-third of young adults went to vote in 2014. We organised a one-day Boostcamp four weeks before the elections to bring 10 existing campaigns together with 30 creatives and 20 top online influencers, in order to motivate at least one million young adults to go and vote! Together with a lot of other awareness-campaigns we created also new viral campaigns online. The result: Election participation went up by 13%! I also continued speaking about Zebra Startups at major conferences (e.g. Misfit Festival, GenoVATION). The 2019 International Business & Leadership Retreat at Plum Village confirmed my mission to further drive compassionate Startups, Innovation and Disruption! My plan is to write a book about this theme and to give workshops. I also started THE ONLINE DESIGN SPRINT for smaller teams and people to run Design Sprints on their own without being alone. At sipgate, I moved on to support our analytics team to gain competitive intelligence skills.
2020 - Unfuck Düsseldorf, JECKathon, Online-Trainers.de,
2021 - Deutscher Gründerpreis für Schülerinnen und Schüler - Gründerpreis Experience, Social Innovation Journey for a big Insurance
2022 - Ecogood Business Canvas, Gemeinwohl-Kompass, Positionspapier zur NRW-Landtagswahl, Wir Bauen Zukunft eG
PS: I am currently looking for a topic for my Master Thesis in the field of Intra- & Entrepreneurship (drop me a line if you have a suggestion).