I am a mathematician and engineering leader, 37 years into my career of shipping software products. Werkfreude* gets me going.
since 2023, Chair since March 2025
Foxconn (Hon Hai) and Stellantis joint venture
Brought the consumer electronics excellence of Foxconn, the largest iPhone assembler, together with automotive quality processes. Foxconn became a top supplier of in car connectivity antenna systems to Stellantis, and was a nominee at the Stellantis 2025 Supplier of the Year awards. Completed the refocus of the business.
since Aug 2022
10,000 people and EUR 1B+ budget at peak, 5,000 today
Transformed an organisation of 10,000 people in the Software Reset, to deliver one software and electronics stack for 14 car brands. Took the backend and mobile app to more than 15M connected cars, with an app start of 2 seconds and onboarding in about 5 minutes. Took Vehicle OS and SmartCockpit to their Manufacturing Readiness Milestone in May 2026, ahead of customer launch in 2027. Built L2+ in house and reached its Technology Readiness Milestone in February 2026. Built L2++ with Wayve, from handshake to first prototype in under two months, for launch in 2028. Cut development cycles from 4 years to under 2 with Applied Intuition. Raised hands on keyboard from 22 percent to 91 percent by retraining and hiring internal engineers. Cut handoffs by 50 percent and cockpit complexity by 40 percent. Put more than 1,300 engineers on AI tools, achieved a 10 percent efficiency gain and stayed on target for 30 percent by March 2027.
Mar 2020 to Aug 2022
Luxembourg, 1,500 people, EUR 200M budget
Led the team that took Amazon into new countries. Met 100 times the normal demand during COVID across more than 40 essential goods categories, so people who could not leave home still got what they needed. Launched 4 new country marketplaces, Saudi Arabia, Sweden, Poland and Egypt, and prepared the launches of Belgium and Ireland. Doubled the number of supported languages to 27. Made new store launches 2 to 3 times faster and new language launches 10 times faster. Quadrupled the team while working fully remotely, and raised productivity.
Jan 2007 to Feb 2020
Amsterdam, 500 people, EUR 45M budget
Designed, built and shipped the routing for 130M drivers, which made TomTom world leading in routing benchmarks. Took automotive from zero to 10 percent market share with more than 50 in car programmes, and built a profitable navigation software business. Created a hiring process that picked the top 1 percent of 15,000 applications a year in under 6 weeks, which TomTom adopted company wide. Hired about 800 people. Appointed by the Management Board as one of the first 5 Fellows among 5,500 people. Protected arc flags on a device, time dependent routing and on time arrival with 10 US patents. The field's standard survey says that TomTom uses a variant of arc flags. The papers on contraction hierarchies and Microsoft CRP, the methods behind OSRM and Bing Maps, cite this work. Engineers at Google, Apple and Uber have said that these papers are the foundation of their routing.
2003 to 2006
under 10 people
Solved a 3SAT problem that unblocked the launch of the BMW 5 Series.
1999 to 2001
about 10 people
Helped Deutsche Telekom through Y2K with a rollout to 3,000 PCs. Fixed and maintained the server landscape and network of the Deutsche Rentenversicherung, with 36,000 servers for 80,000 staff.
1989 to 1995
under 5 people
Sold an online bookshop system to more than 80 bookshops across Germany, Austria and Switzerland before the web existed. Sold the company to Schweitzer Fachinformationen in 1995.
Sat on the Technology Advisory Board of Gousto from 2018 to 2022, and Gousto became a unicorn in 2022. Served as a Non Executive Director at Greater Than in Stockholm in 2022 and on the NAVA Advisory Board from 2017 to 2021.
PhD in algorithms, TU Berlin, 2006, with about a year at ETH Zürich, nominated for two dissertation awards. Executive MBA, Cambridge, 2016. Diplom in Mathematics with Computer Science, Göttingen, 2000, with a year at Oxford. German and English.
Cut the operating costs of the Swiss Federal Railways Cargo Express service by 30 percent, or EUR 3M a year, through research. Published 12 academic works with more than 1,200 citations on Google Scholar.
Build AI agents for my own work. Let Claude predict 104 World Cup games, and my son nearly beat it.