TL;DR:
- Born in 🇮🇹
- Mother tongue is 🇩🇪
- Other languages I speak are 🇮🇹 🇬🇧 and a tiny bit of 🇪🇸
- I studied in 🇦🇹
- Worked at Wire, co-founded Wellsome
- Currently, I live in 🇩🇪 and work for Phoenix R&D
- ❤ 🇪🇺
Long version
Hi there! I am Julian 👋
During the day I work at Phoenix R&D, sometimes also in the evenings and at night. Originally I come from South Tyrol, the northernmost part of Italy. Things are a bit different there than in the rest of the country – most people speak German (before World War I, the country was still part of Austria), there are insanely good dumplings at alpine huts, and for the most part, people are less hectic. However, the love for Macchiato and Cappuccino is just as pronounced in our region.
In October 2014 I started studying Management, Communication & IT at MCI Management Center Innsbruck in Innsbruck, Austria, spent the winter semester of 2016/2017 in Copenhagen at CBS Copenhagen Business School, and graduated in October 2017.
Before my studies and my time at Wire, I ran the Hotel Tirolerhof in Bruneck together with my brother, often went on motorcycle tours with guests, and presented our hotel at dozens of trade fairs in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and the Netherlands.
From February 2017 to March 2021, I worked at Wire – a secure messenger for personal and professional communication. There I built up the sales team, won the first customers, and shaped the sales direction. Within 2 years I managed to secure Wire more than 2.5m of recurring revenue and win more than 30 ministries and authorities in the federal German Administration as customers for restricted communications.
After my time at Wire, I co-founded Wellsome, a mental health startup. Over the course of two years we built several digital health products with different focus areas. The overall goal was to make therapy more accessible for individuals. Unfortunately, we haven’t been successful at finding a product-market-fit. Nevertheless, the time was a complete success in terms of experience and learning.
In December 2022 I joined Phoenix R&D to support the team around Raphael Robert and Konrad Kohbrok with running operations & project development. After working on my own startup in the mental health space, this feels like coming home and working on something that creates an impact for everyone. Ever since writing my thesis on mass surveillance at the Management Center Innsbruck, I am a big privacy advocate. I strongly believe everyone should have free access to private and secure communication. Previously, I worked at Wire on bringing privacy & security to consumers, NGOs, and enterprises. In this new role, I will continue to work on unsolved problems in the space, around open source, privacy, and security but also federation, decentralization, and interoperability.
At Phoenix R&D, we work in close cooperation with academia to provide state-of-the-art messaging technology that is designed to be efficient, practical, private, and secure.
From time to time, I also do small investments into innovative startups, ideally tackling our most critical issues. In the past, I invested into startups like PaketConcierge, aumio, and SIRPLUS or Tomorrow.