How I became
what I do today.

My professional story begins at McDonald’s France — originally to fund an immersive school semester in Paris and live out my passion for the French language on the ground. I unloaded trucks at five in the morning, worked my way peu à peu through the kitchen, and at 18 was promoted to shift supervisor and trainer.

What I took away above all is a precise sense of how efficient processes, quality management, and the person at the register have to mesh — so that someone with only a forty-five-minute lunch break doesn’t just get their warm meal, but can look forward to it.

Back in Berlin I worked my way through many smaller jobs before becoming a project assistant for the Senate Administration — on initiatives between Berlin and Warsaw. A first stage for public administration as a field of work and for the particularities of international collaboration.

At Université Paul Sabatier I studied software engineering — and in a real agile software project with other students experienced for the first time that software development in a team is its own discipline. With its own rituals, its own communication culture, and its own form of shared responsibility.

At the Zürcher Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften I built content-management systems and research websites at what was then the Center for New Learning, and — new at the time — developed mobile applications for direct interaction between students and lecturers in the lecture hall.

Since Switzerland connects business and academia more openly than Germany does, I also got to co-lead external projects in parallel. Particularly formative: a mobile application for officer training at the Basel-Stadt police — an honest investigation of the question of how smartphones can be used in professional continuing education without turning into a gimmick.

At OMQ GmbH — today known for AI-powered tools in first-level support, back then still in its founding years — I automated customer acquisition and got my first deep look at Natural Language Processing: teaching computers how to look at language — a question that’s more relevant today than ever. When needed I also went directly on-site to customers, installed software on their servers, and handled remote maintenance.

I wrote my bachelor’s thesis there on indexing texts via Reflections — a concept that lets program code see and modify itself. Exactly the precondition for code not needing a human at the keyboard for every adjustment.

In 2016, a year after the association was founded, I started as a developer at Mein Grundeinkommen e.V. There I began building an IT team that works with the communications team and the rest of the organization in a way that lets technology serve the organization’s impact to the maximum — and carry the growth instead of slowing it down.

Over the years I grew into broader responsibility there: into the managing director role and into the position of Board Chair.

At the College for Continuing Education of California State University Sacramento I took deeper courses in Intercultural Communication and Entrepreneurship across two stays in 2023 and 2025.

The two topics sit closer together than they first sound: both turn around the question of how people with different contexts, assumptions, and incentives build viable cooperation — a discipline called on every day in consulting for NGOs and in building purpose organizations.

At the management consultancy in-stability I’ve shared my experience from my own board and managing-director practice with other executive directors and board members on the NGO side — particularly in the field of inclusion and integration. The questions in the foreground there were ones of efficiency and professionalization in leadership and work organization — against the backdrop of a shrinking state funding landscape.

In parallel I ran leadership development programs as a trainer for corporate leadership teams. The focus was on how leaders deal with far-reaching changes — the introduction of AI, outplacement to third countries — and how they carry their teams steadily through such phases.

Today I support people and organizations who want more than just growth: real impact. My focus sits where all of these stations come together — at the intersection of strategy, culture, funding, and technology. Exactly where purpose organizations have their biggest leverage and their biggest sources of friction.