Jan Marquardt

Jan Marquardt is a founder through and through. At the age of 12, he taught himself how to program on his home PC in order to develop his own computer game for Harry Potter. At 15, he founded his first company, an online shop for casino accessories, which he sold a few years later. This was followed by a brief stint at university before he dropped out and, at 21, founded the B2B SaaS startup “Haiilo,” which specialized in software for intranet and internal communication. Over the next 10 years, he bootstrapped the startup to €20 million in revenue with customers such as Google, Amazon, Salesforce, and Deutsche Telekom. At the end of 2020, he sold a majority stake to a US private equity fund and subsequently led the company through two acquisitions before moving to the supervisory board in 2022. Even while building Haiilo, Jan co-founded the bootcamp startup “Neue Fische” with Dalia Das to enable people to switch careers into digital professions. From 2021 to 2024, Jan was also president of the international entrepreneurial network EYES – Emerging Young Entrepreneurs Society, which has over 500 members. In 2023, Jan founded the AI startup Zive to completely rethink how modern companies work with AI in the future. He continues to serve on several boards as an expert or supervisory board member for B2B SaaS, AI, and the future of work."