30 years advising the companies that shape markets — automotive, financial services, FMCG, luxury, pharma, and category-defining startups. I was operating, not observing, through three structural shifts in how business gets done. Now I help owners navigate the fourth.
I didn't arrive at these from a framework. I arrived at them from client work — enough of it, across enough disruption cycles, to know which patterns actually hold.
Most digital problems are business model problems wearing a technology mask. Most AI problems will be the same. I don't sell technology — I help you see what business question the technology is there to answer.
I founded my first digital strategy consultancy in 1996 — early enough that "e-business" was a novel category. I was trained when strategy meant thinking in decades; I practiced when it meant weeks. That dual fluency is what mid-market owners actually need right now.
Companies that treat AI as a transformation project will struggle. Companies that treat it as structural capability — infrastructure for decision-making, not a shiny feature — will build moats. I work on the second kind of engagement.
Careers aren't timelines. They're arcs. Three arcs, in my case — each one taught the next what it couldn't have learned alone.
Leaving the familiar world.
Vienna-born in 1970. The first decisive departure came at sixteen: an exchange year in Arizona that turned a European kid into someone who could move between cultures as a native skill — not a learned one.
At WU Vienna: International Business Administration with Japanese as elective language, studying the grammar of the country rewriting global commerce in the 1990s. In parallel, already consulting for Unisys across Vienna and Zurich. By graduation, fluent in analog business thinking, digital possibility, and three cultures.
A 2001 E-Business Management certificate at Donau-Universität Krems sealed the preparation — early enough that "e-business" was still a novel category. The departure was complete; what followed was the journey.
Trials of the journey.
1996, Vienna. At 26, founding D2. Strategic Communication — one of Europe's first boutique digital strategy consultancies. Over eleven years, offices in Vienna and Paris, pioneering digital transformation for IBM, Philips, and Austrian Telekom long before "digital strategy" was a market category.
2008, Hamburg. The network agency world: Director of Strategy at deepblue networks, then Head of Planning and Managing Director of Geometry Intelligence at Geometry Group Germany (WPP). Tripled the practice over seven years. Clients including Maserati, Vodafone, GSK, REWE, Leica, BAT. In parallel, co-founding Geometry Intelligence — a 15-person strategy consultancy inside WPP, Hamburg and London — developing a global customer journey methodology deployed across the network.
2019, Managing Director at Donkey Communication, leading a 30-person design agency for premium beauty, fashion, and hospitality brands.
And during the pandemic, the chapter the CV won't tell you about: a Berlin fintech I co-founded that didn't survive the market collapse. The kind of lesson only building and losing can teach. The initiation wasn't complete until I'd felt that too.
Bringing the gift home.
From 2022: independent strategy advisor — the Golden Mentor phase. Senior mandates on AI-driven business model evolution, digital transformation, customer journey strategy. Current engagements include BeOne Medicines (formerly Biogen) on stakeholder architecture, and Darktools on an end-to-end digital transformation from legacy stack to PIM-centred ecosystem.
And a refusal to stop learning. Data Science at Bertelsmann Academy, 2018. MBA in Brand Marketing at Brand University Hamburg in 2025, grade 1.4. Scrum SFC. Currently enrolled in MBAI at leadersofai.com — because the master class I need now is the one I haven't yet taken.
This is the phase where the earlier chapters become leverage. Not a destination. An operating model.
Most digital problems are business model problems wearing a technology mask.
Most challenges in life are a state of mind.
Three Ironman finishes. Jazz standards on the piano. PADI Rescue Diver. The rides, the music, the depth — that's what keeps the practice honest.
But I could tell you anything. Get the facts here.
60 minutes. No agenda required. You'll know by the end whether this is useful.