The path
From 1973 to today, with one look ahead
- 1973Born in Freiburg im Breisgau. The city is still where he lives and works.
- 1993His first own keyboard. The beginning of the music, slowly, with whatever the technology of the day allowed.
- 1995Studies computer science, graduating in 1999 as Dipl. Inform. (FH). At night, in the studio, the music takes shape.
- 1997Europa-Park opens the Euro-Mir rollercoaster. Lift Off !, the track that carries the ride, is entirely his and Ben Klug’s, along with seven of the ten tracks on the soundtrack album. The same year brings his first own record.
The soundtrack album, Calren Records 1997. Artwork by comprende, design by lasse. - 1999Joins the Haufe media group at the height of the new economy. He goes on to lead eCommerce and later programme and project management.
- 2008Founds Zaplive Media GmbH, a platform for live streaming and web TV, three years before Twitch exists. By 2010 it is over. Being too early is a particular kind of failure, and it teaches timing.
In the Zaplive office, 19 September 2008. The flip-out monitor already shows the picture going out. Own photograph. - 2010Back at Haufe, tasked with building the Blue Ocean division from zero. Alongside it design thinking at Stanford, programme ME310 with the University of St. Gallen. At the end of the year lexoffice begins, with him as employee number zero.
With the design thinking team at Stanford, 21 October 2010. - 2012lexoffice goes to market and wins 5,000 customers in its first year. Until 2019 he heads innovation and new products at the Haufe Group, with more than 150 people.
At the lexoffice Beach Camp in Hamburg, 23 June 2016. - 2019Managing Director of Lexware. The mission in three words: making entrepreneurship simple. Alongside it Tell Your Story, the initiative that gives the self-employed a stage.
Taking office as Managing Director, July 2019. Picture: Haufe Group. - 2025The Lena Principle reaches the stage for the first time, in October at the Business Creator Summit and at Black Forest Space. In December DIE ZEIT picks it up.
- 2026The Lena Principle is published on das-lena-prinzip.de. Handelsblatt and Badische Zeitung report on it. Lexware becomes main shirt sponsor of SC Freiburg.
- 2027On 9 January Europa-Park retires the Euro-Mir after thirty seasons. The melody stays, the park has confirmed that.
The full curriculum vitae is at Lexware, the personal version at das-lena-prinzip.de, the music in full at urban-listening.com. Those pages are in German.
Off duty
What holds him outside the work
One sentence by Charles Eames hangs over everything he likes, and over much of what he does for a living: “The details are not the details. They make the design.”
Design and furnitureUSM and Vitra above all, plus Gufram and lighting by Hue. The Lounge Chair by Charles and Ray Eames, the clocks by George Nelson, the cork bowls by Jasper Morrison, the birds by Kay Bojesen, the Haller system by USM. The look, yes. But just as much the story of every single piece: who designed it, why it looks the way it does, where it comes from, and that it lasts for decades. The same idea as in software.
What individual people have madeHe is drawn to work with a person behind it who thought it through to the end. A piece of furniture, an album, a program. The books of Taschen are his shelf for that: architecture, design, photography, at the length the subject deserves.
Star WarsSince childhood. A story that began in 1977 and became a universe, built by people who glued models, sewed costumes and invented sounds. Again: details that make the whole.
FreiburgBorn there, stayed there, never seriously away. The city is the constant behind all of it: the studio, the company, the rollercoaster half an hour north, the club in the stadium.