Nico Lumma

Summary

Ever since I clicked on Mosaic in 1995, I got hooked on the internet. This first browser was truly amazing and I just loved the idea of having access to seemingly endless information at my fingertips. I played around with all the hot stuff at that time, like ftp, gopher, email and what not. It was a crazy time back then and most stuff was still black and white. I spent 95/96 in Berkeley, California, and just across the bay in the Silicon Valley was on fire with the World Wide Web. I just loved all the innovation that happened all of a sudden, like Firefly, one of the first recommendation websites for music. So I started to learn how to do this newfangled HTML thingy and build websites, homepages as we called them back then. After I came back to Göttingen I teamed up with some friends and built a network infrastructure for the university's student housing. This was fun and I learned all the nitty gritty stuff about CAT6, Linux, routing protocols and what not. I started my first job as CTO at orangemedia, a digital advertising network which is now called Ströer Digital and one of the market leaders in Germany. This position gave me an opportunity to work with new technology, explore new ideas and build new products - as well as learning leadership skills and managing a growing team of developers. Also I build my first startup called Blogg.de, which was a very early blog platform. After moving to the holding company and building new products there and also starting two of my own startups (Mabber and Shoppero), I got the opportunity to scout startups and do due diligence on them before we made a final investment decision. The Web 2.0 was in full bloom and I enjoyed it tremendously as more innovation than before was possible. We basically built a company builder before the term existed. Right when Social Media took off, I joined the renowned advertising group Scholz & Friends as Director Social Media and got to work with clients like Vodafone, Opel, Credit Suisse, Commerzbank, Sunrise and TUI. After S&F I briefly ran an incubator, but figured that the model was not right for me and I was looking into starting an accelerator. That opportunity came in 2015 when I started the next media accelerator together with the German Press Agency dpa to provide accelerator services to the media industry in Germany and Austria. In 2021 my partner Christoph and I did a management buy.out to revamp the model and offer startup-driven innovation to more industries. To sum it all up: I'm deeply interested in how tech changes everything and I'm always looking for innovation.