Marten
Rauschenberg
Founder
CEO / CTO
Marten
Rauschenberg
Founder
CEO / CTO
Tech-driven entrepreneur passionate to create value focused workflows and companies
Founded Companies
Berlin, GER
Sept 2018 — Dec 2019
Stage: open for pre-seed funding
Shitcoingraveyard is a community driven rating engine for crypto currency assets built on a mix of data-analytics and decentralized expert rating in early
stage.
My Responsibilities:
Berlin, GER
July 2016 — Dec 2019
Stage: privately funded,
operational through revenue
SOOOM is a 3D-animation production-house managing teams throughout all time-zones with main client-base in USA, Europe and China. SOOOM's core business is project management
for photo-realistic product-advertising in the industrial B2B sector. Our own custom-made project management software allows for entirely distributed work without any fixed office. This allows to scale the amount of parallel running
productions and the production size flexibly up and down and disrupted the legacy setup of operating with central teams that always had the problem that they had either too less or too much employees for this kind of project work.
My Responsibilities:
Shanghai, CN
Jan 2007 — Jan 2015
Stage: Sold
The Looop CGI was the 3D-production house of The Looop Network. Developed as a 3D/CGI department within The Looop Studios from 2007. From 2011 added a motion picture department and became the most advanced brand in CG-productions
in China's automotive and advertising industry.
My Responsibilities:
Shanghai, CN
March 2003 — Aug 2009
Stage: Studio closed in 2011, Business sold to The Looop CGI
The Looop Studios were a setup of advertising photo/film studios in an ex-military airport hangar with 1000sqm shooting space. Specialization on automobile with clients like VW, General Motors, SIAC and others.
Additionally in
2005, setup a marketing-agency that sold German car photographers services to Chinese car manufacturers and advertising agencies.
My Responsibilities:
Shanghai, CN
Feb 2005 — Aug 2012
The Looop Productions was a strong production team focused on helping international clients to produce large scale photo-shootings in China.
I helped with leveraging knowledge over Chinese markets plus strong networks to Europe’s
advertising agencies.
Clients included BMW (5-series long), Volvo (S80), Siemens (4 different departments), Apple, Morgan Stanley, Roland Berger and many more.
My Responsibilities:
Vision, Mission & Strategy
Long before a product market fit can be found, i encourage my co-founder to develop a Vision of the new venture, together. We bounce values and ideas for the future of the company and nail it into a "Company Culture". This later
on helps to steer the startup through tough decisions, give employees a guide to make decisions that they where not trained on, and gives us the opportunity to define a Strategy and Tactics to reach our Mission.
I believe,
this is a critical step in the birth of any new company.
Leadership Style
I believe that the methods, steps and processes of leadership are all
obtained with and through people.
To generate a trustful and self-empowering office environment i tend to
employ "Coach" or "Transformational"
leadership methods on team level,
and "Strategic" and "Visionary" leadership styles towards the overall
startup.
As culture, vision and strategy is different for every startup, i mix
wherever necessary. For
example in sales-teams for certain products i
would rather go with a "Transactional" style focused on performance with
some amount of mentorship.
I tend to build teams where each employee has an expertise or
skill set in
something different. In the long-run, this creates strong teams that can
communicate well and embrace each other's unique skill sets in order to
get work done.
Product Market Fit
Weather a startup or product flies or not is essentially determined by product-market-fit. Iterations of design-thinking and agile pivoting in development processes help me to fail fast and advance product and company.
Before
this process starts i break down the idea to it's most important core and focus efforts on developing this to an MVP. Usually, i produce rapid digital prototypes through low-coding tools to get the idea off the ground and test
for tangible results. Based on those i iterate the process until a product-market-fit is reached and the idea can go to market.
My Key Assets
Leadership
Experience
16 years leadership experience as founder, CEO and CTO in Start-ups
Asia
Network
strong business network, investor relations and cultural understanding in Asia through 13 years company building out of Shanghai and deep ties to the SEA-region
System
Engineering
8 years experience as low-coding system architect with tech- experiences in blockchain, 3D-rendering, VR/AR/MR, big data, platform economy and ML.
Cration of integrated workflows between IT-processes, employee-tasks
and outsourcing.
Skills
Projects
Berlin, GER
March 2018 — present
Responsibilities:
Berlin, GER
Jan 2018 — July 2018
Responsibilities:
different places
2016 — present
Speak on conferences, public events and workshops.
Some recordings:
Futurism
Besides my professional engagement, every year, I chose one future-tech research topic that I study to keep up with technology, theories and thought processes.
2019 - Brain Computer Interfaces
Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI) or Brain-Machine Interfaces (BMI) build a direct bridge between brains and external devices. This technology has been researched in university labs for decades and now humanity arrives at a point where
high-bandwith communication between human brains and any computer is technically possible. CEO's getting ready to sell us the first consumer-market devices. This will change the the humans psyche, altern our realities
and give users new cognitive abilities. The impact on society will be huge, yet i see almost no public discussion about the topic.
That's why i created Uploadme.org, an open-source
information platform with a journalistic approach for easy access to the idea of connecting brains to computers. The Vision is to bring this topic into more people's presence, foster discussion and nurture public knowledge
in the field.
2018 - DAO
Smart contracts are programs that sit on the blockchain and that can be executed by anyone at any time without anyone can ever altern the code of the program nor the result of execution after the code is initially deployed on the chain.
Decentralized Autonomous Organisations (DAO) are organisations that run entirely on smart contracts. To imagine how this works one can picture a company with it's business logic. For example when a company makes profit, then the
company must pay a certain amount of taxes. Or at the end of the month employees must be paid. In the case of a DAO this business logic is coded into smart contracts. With this, an organisation can function without a C-level or
any leader.
My research in this field was around the problem how DAO's could evolve themselves over time. I designed governance models where investors of a DAO would be able to vote on changes of the code of the smart
contracts to make the DAO agile and functional in a modern dynamic economy.
The DAO i designed got the purpose of a decentralized rating market for crypto currencies. A whitepaper is downloadable on BlockRate.org.
I also helt several publich speeches about other DAO-related topics like "The Future of Work".
2017 - Singularity
I studied in depth Ray Kurzweils theories about law of accelerating returns which
predicts an exponential increase in technologies like computers, genetics, nanotechnology,
robotics and artificial intelligence. Once the Singularity has been reached, Kurzweil says that machine intelligence will be infinitely more powerful
than all human intelligence combined. The Singularity is also the point at which machines intelligence and humans would merge.
10 years after Kurzweil published his theories, i reviewed them, made adjustments and developed
own adaptations which found place in several publich speeches that year. Here one talk in English that i held in Shanghai and here one
in German that i helt in front of people from the German Senate of Economy and Energy at SAP Berlin.
2016 - Quantum Computing
I studied into the world of quantum entaglement, Q-bits, Superposition, Quantum Gates and other fascinating defaults that seem very wired from our perspective.
This study only resulted in a higher understanding in modern computition
and physics but so far no output.
My Most Epic Fails
You win: you party.
You lose: you learn!
I had to learn the hard way that companies doesn't scale by simply hiring more people: In 2010, in our company "The Looop CGI", based in Shanghai's competitive advertising market,
we had built a nice and robust tech solution for rendering photo-realistic CGI-images from client CAD-data. Over 2 years, I had focused on getting the tech ready, so that when customers would show demand we can quickly roll-out.
And sure enough: in 2010 suddenly China's advertising market shifted to 3D and we were selling hot cakes. I had to scale the company from 2 to 15 people within a year and miserably failed in building employee structure, visions,
guidelines and was unable to delegate tasks.
In the following spring i took a month off and viewed the company from a distance, dove into vision and structure, developed tools and guides and focused on employee mentorship. The
result was that the team thankfully embraced the changes and within 2011 we rolled out an entire motion-picture department with great efficiency.
Another fail came along just last year within our company SOOOM. We had
worked hard to establish our services within a giant corporate in the aerospace sector in the US. For years we were one of their top vendors and through this position we acquired additionally their customers and their suppliers
trust. A great business was spinning out.
However, suddenly, the planes from this corporate fell from the sky and got grounded by the FAA. Their supplier started dying and their customers moved on to other manufacturers.
Within
one summer we had lost over 70% of our business.
I learned that simple customer diversification doesn't cut it when shit hits the fan. Diversification has to also happen across industries, entire markets and continents.
