A brief history of how I got here and do what I do

After finishing college in one of the first privately held colleges in Germany (ebs, European Business School, Oestrich-Winkel) I held a degree in Business Data Processing with majors in AI (Artificial Intelligence, C-Shell Programming and International Marketing. In these 4 years I spent time in Germany, London (Regence College) and San Diego (SDSU - go Aztechs). Because I had the attention span of a squirrel I didn’t listen to the way US college classes are structured (and yes, any joke referencing ‘101 of xyz’ passed right by me) I accidentally attended 5-series class in AI, a post graduate class, where I was not only the youngest but also the most clueless … Made for a great catch up semester!

Out of college I joined the German equivalent of Sears Roebucks, a mailorder company with brick and mortar stores called Quelle, near Nuernberg in Germany. There I started as Corporate Trainee and very quickly was handed an assignment to support the opening of our offices in Poland. After another quick assignment in Russia (‘We have found your trucks and drivers and - against a finders fee would love to release them to you again’) I turned into one of the main people for the Eastern European Expansion strategy, covering the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania … and after 1+ year started to support our Chief Catalog Officer for Textiles, the main segment at Quelle. 2 years in I took over as Catalog Manager the responsibility of the Design and Sourcing teams at Quelle’s subsidy, ‘Elegance - Rolf Offergelt’, where we took haute couture and made it compatible for the slightly more mature and conservative ladies’ segment. Two years in, I joined a start up, inTouch, essentially an interactive agency (that term didn’t exist in 1997) and we quickly built out a focus on eCommerce, turning into one of the most advanced partners of (Eastern)German eCommerce software vendor, Intershop. As we grew, we merged with French ‘Integra’, a highly secure managed hosting company with huge e-commerce and high security focus, that was traded on publicly. Integra got taken over by US Genuity - and they filed Chapter 11 (due to some not so smart statements from the then CEO - but I digress) which allowed me to do a Management Buy Out of the original German interactive agency portion. And we thrived. Probably one of the best teams i’ve ever worked with. I sold that company and started a new company as co-founder, smartcon, with a Professor of Statistics. Initially, we worked exclusively for Philip Morris, doing package and price design strategies for their various cigarette brands. We were guilty of removing cigarettes but keeping prices stable. Sorry.

But I wasn’t a statistic person - I loved software, data, internet, e-commerce, etc. and hence I joined another partner I used to work with in commerce times: Informatica, who helped us connecting ERP systems to eCommerce systems - and yes, we were dramatically ahead of our time! At Informatica I initially built out an inside sales organization and quickly thereafter took over their Alliances organization. That was in 2006. We rebuilt the D-A-CH Channel and were crazy successful and - as these things frequently happen - I got the question I always wanted to hear: ‘Would you care to work for Informatica in the US at HQ?’ - 4 months later I had moved from Wiesbaden, Germany to Burlingame, California, running all non-managed GSIs for Informatica.