About
Twenty years of building the unglamorous parts of technology.
I started a company in my early twenties and never went back to working for anyone else. What I do now — operating IT infrastructure, buying profitable software businesses, backing founders early — is the same instinct in three forms: find something durable, get close to it, and stay.
The long version.
I read business administration and mechanical engineering at the Technical University of Munich, with a period at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, and finished as Diplom-Kaufmann. The combination turned out to matter more than either half: I have spent my career in businesses where the commercial argument and the engineering reality have to be reconciled by the same person.
In 2005 I founded CMS Haider, the holding through which I have built and acquired companies ever since. In 2008 I co-founded ZeyOS, a cloud-based ERP and business operating system, and led it as chief executive — a genuinely hard product built for companies that need their operations to work rather than to look modern. From 2012 I ran CMS IT-Consulting, which builds, maintains and secures network infrastructure for companies, public authorities and critical infrastructure operators.
Those businesses now sit inside Digital Foundations, where I am Managing Director. It bundles CMS IT-Consulting, Bell Computer-Netzwerke and ZeyOS into one group delivering secure infrastructure, cybersecurity and cloud business software across Germany. Running infrastructure that public authorities and critical infrastructure operators depend on is a particular discipline. You learn quickly that the interesting failure modes are never the ones in the vendor's slide deck.
Alongside the operating work I am a founding partner of STRONGER Business Partners, where we acquire profitable IT and software companies and hold them. Not a fund, no exit clock — the opposite of the structure most sellers are offered.
And since roughly 2019 I have invested privately in more than thirty startups: fusion energy, semiconductors, gene editing, autonomous robotics, space communications, indoor agriculture. Small cheques, long horizons, mostly alongside people who know a field far better than I do. It keeps me honest about how fast the ground moves under an incumbent.
I am Swiss-based and German-speaking, and I work across both. If you want the short version: I like businesses that still exist in twenty years, and I am sceptical of anything that only works if the next round closes.
How I think about this work.
-
The work horse, not the unicorn.
A business doing eight million in revenue at a twenty percent margin, with customers who renew for a decade, is a better thing to own than most of what gets celebrated.
-
Operators make better owners.
Having had to make payroll, migrate a customer at 3am and fire someone I liked changes what I look for and what I promise.
-
Boring infrastructure is where the risk actually lives.
The systems nobody presents at the board meeting are usually the ones that determine whether the company survives a bad week.
-
Permanence is a feature.
Every structure I build is designed to still make sense in fifteen years. It rules out a lot of deals, which is the point.
Where this might be useful to you.
Selling a profitable software or IT business, filling a gap on a board, or raising early capital.