Data Analytics Junkie

It’s been a while since my last post on my blog. I always liked writing blogs an I still do and I decided to put it back on my priorities.

Why? I always liked to share my experiences I made working together with inspiring people,  great teams and great customers. I’m a big fan of communities and I truly believe that great things can only be achieved with great teams,  communities and great environments. So here I am, back alive…

What happened in the last 2 years and what can you expect happening here?

My last post was from the PASS Business Analytics Conference in California, 2 years ago. I really enjoyed the trip and I got so many fantastic impressions from my visit at the Silicon Valley, San Francisco and Stanford University. Stanford and San Francisco are some of the best places I have ever been, I can really recommend them. The spirit and the energy that you can take from there is unbelievable.

Welcome in the Start-up space

So my adventure started right away after that conference. Together with 3 friends (Artus, Markus and Gernot) we decided to start a company in the area of Machine Learning and Data Science and we used the summer of 2015 to find another partner for that adventure. Artus was our Chief Data Scientist and already had some experience with his company Lytiq. Markus,  Gernot and me already worked together as a team since 2011, so we knew each other very well. We also had some experiences in the area of Data Science and Machine Learning with some really nice customers like Runtastic and TUIfly. And also inspired by the great team of Runtastic and their founders we decided to start our own company.

We made our homework, started with a plan for our business model and set some high level goals for the first 2 years. A good starting point for business model development are Blue Ocean Strategy and Business Model Canvas. I can really recommend these books.

Funding – not an easy game

After we had our business plan and a good team setup ready we needed to get some funding, which is not that easy for a consulting company. So we created our pitch deck and sent it around to different VCs, Accelerators and other founders and tried to get some funding for our start. We got a lot of “no thank you, we are not interested in consulting”, but still this was really an interesting and funny experience with no big expectations in the first step. We were a bit naïve in that game, but we still had very good meetings and opportunities. To keep the long story short and the end we choose pmOne (the company Gernot, Markus and I worked before) as our partner for our Start-up.

The start

At the 15th of September 2015 together with pmOne and Lytiq we founded pmOne Analytics in Paderborn (a small town in the middle of Germany) and started this company with 5 people (Artus, Markus, Gernot and me) and Euclides our first Data Scientist and employee.

Why Paderborn? Because Artus is also a professor at the University of Paderborn teaching Data Science, Machine Learning and Business Intelligence. This gave us a great opportunity the get more young talents in that area. So in the last two years I spent my time with the team to build a Data Science company in Germany and Austria and it was the best team I have ever worked with.

We already have a second office in Vienna and a team of around 20 people mixed with Data Scientist and Data Engineers and a lot of great projects and customers. We also created a product called Wundermailing, that was mainly invented and driven by me with nice customers like TUIfly, T3N or SHT.

So far, this was my far the best time in my career and I want to share my experiences we had in different areas:

• How do we build a team?
• How do we grow?
• How do we earn money?
• How do we lead a company with people much smart than us, most of them with a PhD?
• Which technology should we pick? Amazon, Google, Microsoft or Open Source?

What’s next?

As already mentioned this was by far the best time in my career and there are so many things I learned, that I want to give back and share with others.

I want to take the chance in my next blob posts to structure my experience in 3 different areas:

• Leadership and Team Building
• Business Growth
• Data Science and Technology

So thank you for reading and sorry for the long pause. But stay tuned…