I came through chemistry, IT, marketing, project management, aviation, electrification, public funding, two hardware companies and a fair amount of sport. The throughline is systems: understanding them, building them, pushing them, and occasionally rebuilding myself through them.
People like a clean origin story. Mine isn't one. I've been a chemistry-lab apprentice, a materials researcher, an IT intern, a two-time founder and CEO, and, lately, someone learning to (kite)surf. What connects it all is a stubborn interest in how systems work, and a hunch that most "impossible" things are simply unbuilt.
My first real training was in a chemistry lab. I did an apprenticeship as a chemical laboratory worker at Schlenk while starting a degree in sustainable chemical engineering, quality control and effect-pigment R&D on one side, reaction engineering and process design on the other. My master's thesis on liquid-repellent surface coatings later became a peer-reviewed paper in the Journal of Materials Chemistry A.
I liked chemistry for the same reason I later liked hardware: it's a system that doesn't care how clever your idea sounds until it actually works.
Two detours pointed me somewhere I hadn't planned. At adidas I spent an internship rebuilding how a materials library was run, a small database with a QR scanner and automated ordering, my first taste of turning a messy real-world process into a working system.
Then a semester abroad at QUT in Brisbane, where a project-management module asked us to plan a real project. I chose "build an aircraft prototype," mostly because my brother Maximilian was already sketching one. I didn't realise it yet, but I had just written the business case for my first company.
The same trip turned into a 10,000 km loop around Australia in a beat-up Ford Falcon, past termite mounds taller than me and down the corrugated Plenty "Highway". That is where the travel bug properly bit.
Back in Germany, thesis nearly finished, I had the safe options: consulting, a well-paid engineering job. Instead I jumped into the cold water. Maximilian had the aircraft; I took everything else, funding, strategy, and the public story, and we founded Atlas Aero together.
Three years and one full-scale eVTOL prototype at IAA Mobility later, I had learned how to turn an audacious idea into something fundable, buildable and real on almost no money. It was also my first company to fail, which taught me at least as much.
When Atlas wound down, I did not jump straight into the next thing. I spent a few months travelling solo through Peru, Guatemala and Mexico, my first real contact with Latin America. Part decompression, part reset, it quietly rearranged what I wanted to build next. It is also the reason a certain volcano later got into my head.
When I came back, friends who had been working on electrical components asked whether I would help turn them into a company. Not the plan. I did it anyway, because regret tends to be worse than the risk of failure.
As CEO of Neomium, I helped grow a team of eleven and bring real hardware to market: a motor controller, a patent-pending magnetic battery, and a 500 kg cargo-drone concept, funded by public innovation programs. This time, the products shipped.
In early 2026 I handed Neomium to its founding team and did the thing I'd been putting off for years: I stopped. After two intense founder chapters, I'm taking a deliberate one to rebuild capacity, travel, water sports, strength and yoga, writing, and a growing obsession with AI and the systems I can run myself.
Somewhere in there, I climbed the highest volcano on Earth. Field Notes is where I keep the log, less lifestyle content, more a record of what travelling, training and thinking actually teach me.
I don't have a five-year plan, and I've stopped pretending to. What I do know: I'll keep building things that move, keep pushing body and mind, and stay open, to advisory work, board and grant-strategy roles, the occasional founder sparring, and, eventually, probably another company worth being unreasonable about.
Some chapters end. Curiosity doesn't.