Entrepreneurship and the next phase

A dream comes true! I decided to leave eBay in order to run my own businesses. I will become a member of the managing board of the newly found consulting company "4sxs Implementierungs-Consulting GmbH" (www.4sxs.de) from 15th Febuary 2007 on. This company will also be the basis to fund and support new ventures and software projects. The first one I started together with one of my business partners Chris is www.hiogi.com, which will shortly go into Beta mode.

Just yesterday I had my three year anniversary with eBay and what an incredible time it has been. Some highlights that I will keep remembering:

• the smart colleagues and very constructive and happy athmosphere!
• the old couple that came into the eBay Lobby and asked where our huge warehouse was!
• the first postage we printed from within my eBay on 16th Feb 2005 at night around 11 PM, the day our "Integrated Shipping Online Solution" came to life!
• the first SMS alert that was processed by the sms service on 13th Dec 2005 at 0:23 AM!
• the new canteen, that changed the eBay campus for ever and that people stopped driving to the nearest mall...
• the opening of the basketball and volleyball courts and the execs shooting hoops in their business gear!
• the famous x-mas parties...
• my boss swimming through the stinky little lake in front of the eBay building, because he lost a bet about the number of developers that would attend the developers day ;-)
• the announcement of the free API on 14th November 2005!
• the launch of the ZLA program, the new schema migration and much much more...

I am sending out a big THANK YOU to everyone I worked with during these three years. But since I will keep working in systems integrations and consulting for big companies that want to explorer eBay and e-Commerce, I am sure that I will see many familiar faces in the future.