Steffen Schebesta's Linkedin Analytics

I'm a 39-year-old serial entrepreneur, advisor and investor born and raised in Berlin, now living in Toronto. I am passionate about business and technology and always open to new ideas, and meeting interesting people. Book an introductory call here: https://meet.brevo.com/steffen-schebesta/15-minute-meeting My Story I was 12 when my dad brought home our first computer - an Intel 486 with a CRT screen - bare bone, not even a graphic or sound card. Still, I was mesmerized by this new piece of tech in our house from day one. My dad started teaching me the fundamentals of programming. First Turbo Pascal, later Delphi, PHP, MySQL. So, I started coding. First, some games on my own. Later, after graduating from high school more complex applications and websites with my friend Christoph. Our hobby turned into a small web agency and sparked my interest in entrepreneurship. I went on to study electrical engineering and business at the University of Technology in Berlin. One month before I had to submit a business plan as part of my entrepreneurship class, Christoph and I had finished a small project for a customer: A (really shitty) desktop software to send email newsletters. While brainstorming an idea for the business plan, we realized that building a web-based software as a service based on this product might actually have some potential. Fast forward 7 years - after a lot of hard work, a bit of luck, and almost giving up - we had bootstrapped an email marketing software named Newsletter2Go to a market leader in the DACH region employing 80 talented people from all over the world. At that point, we were trying to internationalize but realized that it would be difficult on our own. Europe was fragmented and at the same time, there were big, well-funded US players competing for market shares. We decided to join forces with our French competitor Sendinblue (now Brevo). In January 2019, Newsletter2Go was acquired and we now formed the European market leader in our category. Over the course of the next years, my role changed and I moved to Toronto to lead our North American operations and our M&A activities. Over 3 years, we quadrupled our NAM footprint, raised $160M, grew Brevo to a Centaur with 800 employees worldwide, and acquired 6 companies. On the side, I co-founded and invested in a few start-ups with exceptional teams. Jurafuchs, Germany's #1 e-learning app for law students and legal professionals, RFQ2GO, the future aerospace estimation software, Livebuy.io, live video online shopping, and Vespucci Analytics, AI-driven mobile analytics. ✌️