Why did you decide to become a mentor?
My wife, who is a scientist, completed an entrepreneurship crash course at the Stanford Graduate School of Business during her postdoctoral fellowship. I assisted her with a few aspects of her team's pitch. After their presentation, Professor Yossi Feinberg asked me if I would be interested in mentoring future cohorts. Since 2014, I've been helping passionate founders navigate the exciting yet challenging journey of entrepreneurship. Having launched my own ventures, I truly understand the pressures they face. It brings me great joy to guide these dedicated individuals, helping them tackle their myriad tasks with confidence and find a clearer path to success!
How did you get your career start?
In the early 1990s, I interned at Daimler-Benz, where I helped build their first intranet. We began with just two people. Over the next year, our team expanded to 80 members across Germany, including locations in Hamburg, Berlin, and Stuttgart. We needed a way to share and coordinate documents, project plans, tasks, and timelines, but at that time, there were no dedicated tools for this purpose—our only resource was Lotus Notes.
In my spare time, I started developing a browser-based tool that allowed us to store and exchange project documents across different sites and communicate effectively. I hosted it on a spare server at Daimler-Benz. The login screen included a "Create New Account" button. After a few weeks, I noticed that new accounts were being created by users outside our intranet team. Those accounts belonged to people working on the merger between Daimler-Benz and Chrysler in Stuttgart and Auburn Hills.
As I developed this tool on my own, I retained the intellectual property. I approached DaimlerChrysler to see if they would support me in spinning this project out as a SaaS software company. They agreed to help me with a generous arrangement, so I started my first company.
What do mentees usually come to you for?
With a proven track record of running startups and growing engineering teams to 200 FTE and revenues from 0 to $100M, I am in a strong position to guide founders from pre-seed to Series B stages. Approximately half of my mentees have successfully funded startups, seeking advice on product/market fit, raising the next round, scaling, and launching their go-to-market strategies. The other half, primarily first-time founders, are at the early stages of idea validation and business model identification, and I assist them in preparing pre-seed pitch decks.
What's been your favourite mentorship success story so far?
Having worked with hundreds of startups over the last decade, it’s tough to single out just one favorite success story. Every founder's journey is unique, each with its own version of success. A few companies I had the opportunity to work with had $100M+ exits.
If there’s one pattern I’ve noticed among the most successful founders I’ve mentored, it’s their wholehearted embrace of feedback. They pivot quickly when needed and constantly refine their vision based on real-world data. I’ve seen multiple companies evolve from rough concepts into sustainable businesses because their founders were open-minded, adaptable, and resilient. Many founders struggle to articulate their product's value when they first come to me. Through consistent feedback sessions and pitch practice, they refined both their messaging and business model. Helping them refine and chisel out that value proposition and then watching them get funding or grow is a big reward for me.
What are you getting out of being a mentor?
What I love most about mentoring is seeing the transformation firsthand. My role is to offer perspective, ask the tough questions, and provide the right connections at the right time. And when founders take those insights and truly run with them, that’s the best part of mentorship for me. Mentoring is also deeply rewarding because it’s a two-way street. On the one hand, I get to share my hard-earned lessons I’ve gathered over the years to help founders grow faster and avoid costly missteps.
On the other hand, I’m constantly learning from their fresh perspectives, innovative thinking, creative use of emerging technologies, and sheer drive—so it keeps me inspired and up-to-date. Ultimately, seeing someone evolve from an uncertain founder into a confident leader is incredibly fulfilling. But what truly drives me is the role mentorship plays in shaping the next generation of great entrepreneurs and innovators while continuing to learn and grow myself.