The long way round

I didn’t take the straight path. That turned out to be the point.

Beginnings

I was wired for this early. I grew up as the internet was exploding, a teenager around the dot-com era who found the whole frontier of technology genuinely thrilling. I was also a serious science-fiction reader back then, an enthusiasm I owe to an older brother, and that same brother, who went on to KPMG, gave me an early window into how large companies actually operate, grow, and try to innovate. The pull toward entrepreneurship was there from the start.

Formally, I started out studying law, comparative and European law, in Germany and the UK. It did not fit. I switched to economics and international business and finished that across Germany and Indonesia. But the real education was happening on the side: around 2009, when social-media marketing was still brand new, I started taking on freelance gigs. By 2011 that had become my own consulting practice.

Some of that practice came from an unusual classroom. Friends of mine were throwing events, and I rode their coattails as they scaled, leaning hard on digital and Facebook advertising to grow from small Cologne clubs of a couple hundred people to filling Amsterdam’s AFAS Live with 5,000. It layered modern digital marketing onto my economics background in real time. But what genuinely drew me in, underneath all of it, was digitising and innovating companies, especially the big ones. That mix of fascination and hands-on experience is what eventually pulled me toward building my own. I have always been a product and company-strategy person first.

Learning to build

Marketing made me curious about the products I was marketing. That curiosity pulled me into how software actually gets made — and then into how you organise the people who make it. By 2014 I was shipping web and app projects and shaping product strategy for SaaS companies. I stopped being the person who described what should be built and became the person who built it.

Building companies

In 2017 I co-founded two companies. Leafworks — an IT and strategy consultancy and official Zendesk partner in the DACH region — still operates today. And Xpertify, a marketing-automation startup that won Sage as its first pilot client and was deep in talks with SAP for a DACH pilot. Pre-LLM, but pointed squarely at where AI was heading.

Across those years I also worked, directly and through partnerships and European research projects, with companies most people only read about — in automotive, aerospace, telecommunications, and semiconductors. That taught me something a startup can’t: how serious organisations actually evaluate and adopt new technology, and how long real trust takes to earn.

Why food, why now

I’ve come to believe the next generation of great consumer products won’t be guessed into existence — they’ll be discovered. Food and beverage is one of the largest, slowest, most expensive innovation cycles on earth, and it’s finally meeting tools that can model formulation and demand together. That’s Alchemyst: AI for the hardest part of the cycle, turning an idea into a product worth shipping.

Beyond the work

This part is personal. I care a lot about nutrition and exercise, not in an obsessive way, but as a deliberate, sustainable habit. What I am really after is healthspan, or as Dr. Rhonda Patrick frames it, extending the “peakspan” of life: staying mobile, active, and clear-headed for as many years as possible, for myself and the people I love, while genuinely enjoying the years I am in. It is a healthy-body, healthy-mind philosophy I have come to sincerely believe in.

Some of this goes back further than Alchemyst. While I was studying, I worked as an instructor at a local gym, writing programs for members and coaching them one on one. It was a family gym, so many of the people I worked with were coming back from injury or rehab, or were simply older and determined to stay healthy. Training was rarely the hard part. Again and again, the real obstacle to their goals was nutrition.

That taught me something I still believe: people deserve good options, not lectures. No matter how perfect a meal plan looks on paper, for most people building their life around shopping lists is not realistic, and having genuinely healthier foods, including better processed foods, within easy reach makes an enormous difference. You have to meet people where they are. That conviction is a big part of why Alchemyst exists. It is not a market I picked off a slide; it sits where the thing I am best at, building, meets something I genuinely care about: making better food easier to reach, and understanding how what we eat shapes the way we feel, perform, and age.

The rest of my time goes to training, reading widely, and the steady tinkering that started this whole path in the first place.

If you’re an investor who backs operators over decks, or an executive who owns a real problem and a real timeline — I’d rather show you the work than pitch you on it.