Building things that last

I have been making music since 1993, first on a single keyboard, later at night in a proper studio. Back then it was a battle of equipment. Without the machines you had no chance of building anything anyone wanted to hear.

The owner of the studio produced a lot for Europa-Park. One day he came in and said, you are always sitting in here for free, now I need you.

There was none. We had little time and no desire at all. We made a short riff with a bit of boom boom underneath. That was it.

The riff turned into a whole record. From 1997 Lift Off! carries the Euro-Mir rollercoaster at Europa-Park, and seven of the ten tracks on the soundtrack album are by me and Ben Klug.

We released under pseudonyms. Mine is Hell Bopp, after the comet Hale-Bopp, visible to the naked eye in 1997. A play on words from spaceflight, fitting the theme of the ride.

From those same years come two tracks, Will You Catch Me and No Fear, on four releases in the Café del Mar series: Vol. 8, Vol. 11, the Ibiza edition Volumen Siete Y Ocho and The Very Best Of. All together that is 23 records of my own and tracks on more than 150 further releases.

When I am at the park today I sometimes stand in the ride and see people in the queue moving to it. On 9 January 2027 the park retires the Euro-Mir after thirty seasons. The melody stays, the park has confirmed that.

You never know while building what will last. The job I wanted least is the only thing from that time that has held for thirty years.

In 2006 Google bought YouTube. Video on the internet was settled. Live was not. Anyone who wanted to show something live needed a broadcaster, a licence and money.

But here is the honest part. I did not start with the problem. I started with the technology. It took me years to see that.

In the job I had at the time, I was going nowhere.

„I was screwing myself deeper and deeper into something negative, like a corkscrew, not into something positive.“

Then someone came to me with an idea. In 2008 I founded Zaplive Media GmbH.

Everyone should be able to run their own live channel. No broadcaster, no licence, a camera is enough. Three years before Twitch existed.

Technically it worked. We broadcast live from the bush in South Africa. Someone crossed an ocean and transmitted along the way. Sound was a huge problem, the devices were playful and far too much in love with the technology.

The real problem was a different one. We needed people who broadcast and people who watch, and neither group comes without the other.

The answer was in the house the whole time. A few people were streaming their computer games. That is the simplest case there is, sound and picture are already there, you only have to pass them on.

„I did not recognise that this was the easiest thing to transmit and had a huge base of people watching.“

Justin.tv recognised it and in 2011 spun the gaming segment out as a platform of its own. It is called Twitch.

In the end MyVideo was interested, the video portal of ProSiebenSat.1. They wanted to buy parts out. It did not happen, we could not get it big enough. In 2010 we ended it. No insolvency, no sale. We stopped.

„It is great that it works, but if nobody needs it, it is of no use.“

Being too early is a particular form of failure. It teaches timing.

And it teaches something else. We had the right observation in our own house and did not see it, because we were looking at the technology and not at the people using it.

I returned to Haufe Group in 2010. The company had already tried a lot to bring new things into the organisation. It did not work. New business rarely grows where the existing business is being defended.

The CEO at the time gave me a carte blanche. He did not call it that, but that is what it was. I did not have to take anyone on, I had my own budget, and I was allowed to deliberately sit outside the house.

I named the unit Blue Ocean, after the book that divides the market into a red and a blue ocean. The red one is where everyone fights over the same customers. The name was meant to open the pictures in people’s heads immediately, and that is exactly what happened. Whoever moved across was suddenly Blue Ocean.

We built our own approach in three waves. Scout means understanding what someone really needs. Proof means testing whether it holds up technically and commercially. Deliver means building it. Alongside that, design thinking, the ME310 programme at Stanford together with the University of St. Gallen, and teams that choose their own path.

Until 2019 I led more than 150 people as head of innovation and new products. Several businesses came out of the unit. One of them is Lexware Office.

A separate unit helps. I would do that the same way again today.

The danger comes afterwards, and we walked straight into it. One group gets to try everything, the other feels like it is shovelling coal. Yet the two depend on each other. Without the business that makes a profit today there is nothing to invest.

Self-employed people spend their evenings on receipts, invoices and questions that have nothing to do with their profession. Bookkeeping is the heart of every business. It is underrated.

I sketched it on a sheet of paper in the canteen in 2010. Back then everyone said: accounting from the cloud? Nobody wants that.

I started anyway, at the end of 2010. Internally the whole thing was called Greenland. I was employee number zero.

„I deliberately say zero, because one would sound as if I were counting myself in.“

The first phase took almost nine months. We talked to nearly 800 entrepreneurs and asked nothing but what they needed.

We decided against bookkeeping as the cut and for the whole business process, from beginning to end, with tax advisers and banks built in from the start.

In 2012 it went to market as lexoffice and won 5,000 customers in the first year. Today it is called Lexware Office. More than 650,000 companies work with the Lexware solutions.

Shortly after the launch we asked customers for the first time how likely they were to recommend us. The answers turn into a number between minus one hundred and one hundred.

It came back at 16. I had been so convinced, we had built exactly what people told us. It really knocked me off balance. It took me a week to deal with it. Today the number is above 55.

Building what customers say is not the same as understanding what they need.

People talk a lot about the self-employed and rarely with them. The attention goes to startups. Yet around 97 per cent of all German companies have fewer than fifty employees.

Give them a stage they speak on themselves. We are not the main character, the people we work for are.

It starts on 1 March 2019. Since then we tell the stories of self-employed people, as written stories, in the magazine, in clips and at events. In June 2025 the podcast I host joins them, 19 episodes so far. Guests tell how they started, what went wrong and what they do differently today.

Tell Your Story now counts more than 200 stories, more than 5,000 applications and more than a billion contacts a year.

The biggest stage is SC Freiburg, and it has grown. The partnership begins in 1999 with the player escorts. Since 2021 we have been renovating local football pitches with the city of Freiburg, since the 2023/24 season Lexware has been exclusive partner and sleeve sponsor, since 2024/25 main sponsor of the Freiburger Fußballschule. Since the 2026/27 season Lexware has been on the shirt.

„Who actually sponsors clubs? The micro and small businesses: the master painter, the larger bakery. Those are our customers.“

That is why the stage in the stadium belongs to the self-employed too. For the start of the season we swap the new shirt for their work aprons. For the season opening on 15 August 2026, 450 tickets go to self-employed people, and 22 of their children walk out with the players.

Our job is to have their back. That applies here too. The story belongs to whoever lived it, not to whoever built the stage.

Alongside their actual profession, the self-employed deal with quotes, invoices and a hundred small decisions. Even with AI the work stays with them: they have to trigger every step and check every result.

Do not prompt AI, mandate it. A mandate is not a single task, it has five building blocks: goal, frame, values, escalation and control. Out of that comes an AI co-CEO for the self-employed that has their back instead of working through a to-do list.

The name comes from a colleague in my early days. Lena, five or six years older. She taught me not only how to do something, but what to watch for behind what is being said. Two of the books that shaped me came from her as well: Marshall Rosenberg on non-violent communication and René Egli on the LOLA principle.

Not an acronym. The thought behind it: perhaps the digital world can give everyone the luck I had, someone who shows you other paths.

In 2025 it was on stage for the first time, in October at the Business Creator Summit and at Black Forest Space.

In 2026 it was published in full and freely available at das-lena-prinzip.de. Handelsblatt and Badische Zeitung picked it up.

This is the part that is not finished. What I believe today: whatever can be copied will be copied. What stays is what someone stands for.

At Lexware AI changes every area: how we build software, how we go to market, how support and service work. We are no longer talking about efficiency. It is a paradigm shift.

And with the technology comes fear. Some already talk about agents, others do not know how to start at all, or whether they are allowed to.

We have worked in an agile way for 16 years, in short loops, to learn fast. Now we apply that to ourselves.

My promise to the team: the jobs should stay. The condition I call job readiness. Roles change radically, some are no longer needed. That does not mean the job is gone, but everyone has to find their new role, and we shape it together.

„Whoever clings to the old role, that is where it gets difficult.“

I explain it with an arcade game. Everyone starts at level 0, at some point the final boss arrives. With AI everyone suddenly starts at level 4, and for everyone it is about getting further.

Since spring 2026 we have had the frAItag, a pun on Freitag, Friday. On Fridays anyone can step away from their regular work into an open space and work on AI with others. There people meet on the same level, and that takes away the fear.

On top of that come enable teams that take the technology off other people’s hands, and pioneer groups that show it works. People in assistant roles who had little to do with technology now build finished solutions.

And for the first time we start teams of two people. That used to be strictly forbidden, our golden rule was five plus or minus two. I expect them to achieve considerably more than the big teams.

Leading by example cannot be delegated. I am a bit of a geek about it and sometimes annoy people with it, I admit. But that way it is not management talk.

Creating spaces is not enough, you also have to ask for it. I took one sentence from Eric Demuth in my podcast, and it applies outside and inside:

„We do not wait for people.“

That does not mean we leave anyone behind. It means the market is running. How much the change brings in the end remains to be seen, the teams of two are only just starting.