A tech nerd since before that was a thing to be. Entrepreneur, investor and mentor for 30+ years. Thorsten started his computer science career in the early 80s. He got in touch with PARC (Palo Alto Research Center, formerly Xerox PARC) and fell in love with Smalltalk – the first object-oriented programming language and the base of all graphical user interfaces.The first company Thorsten founded was a one man consulting firm which quickly grew into a profitable business with offices in several countries. He had always been blessed with a good instinct about what technologies will be useful, and hired smart minds to work on those projects, like Kent Beck, one of the initiators of the agile project management methodology. Through projects in this company, Thorsten supported pioneers of the tech industry, working on the first wiki, unit testing and software design patterns. After his first exit, he moved to the “dark side” of the startup world and became an investor in 100+ early stage businesses. In parallel, he was working as an executive consultant in digital transformation with C-level executives at various European Fortune 500 companies and was acting as interim CTO for several growth stage startups. In early 2019, Thorsten founded his latest venture polypoly.eu, that aims to give each individual back the sovereignty over their digital data, and in this way, supporting the flow of European data capital back into the local markets.
