I grew up in Germany and co-founded my first web consulting and hosting company at 15. I studied Information and Communication Technology at the Technische Universität München (TUM), earning a B.Sc. and a Dipl.-Ing. Univ. (equivalent to M.Sc.). Along the way I attended the International Graduate Seminar on Smart Homes at the American University of Beirut (AUB) and returned to spend a full semester there. My graduate thesis used Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing to analyze sentiment in movie reviews, which led to continued research and several publications, including a paper in IEEE Intelligent Systems. My Bachelor’s thesis built an Augmented Reality video conferencing system.
After graduating in 2009 I moved to San Francisco. I joined Pingsta as Lead Software Architect, then moved to Airbnb as Tech Lead during the company’s hypergrowth years. I designed Airbnb’s search and fraud detection services and architected the infrastructure for global scale.
In April 2013 I co-founded Mesosphere/D2iQ, one of the first Cloud Native Computing companies. D2iQ provided an enterprise Kubernetes platform for operating infrastructure at scale. In 2023, D2iQ was acquired by Nutanix where I served as General Manager of Cloud Native until 2025.
Today I work as an angel investor and advisor to early-stage startups, with a focus on AI, infrastructure, and developer tools. I’ve distilled what I learned building Mesosphere/D2iQ into the Rocketship Howto, a guide for founders covering fundraising, hiring, product, engineering leadership, and more.
Outside of work I make music, mix cocktails (see my recipes), ski, mountain bike, and backpack. I spend a lot of time in Tahoe and the Eastern Sierra.