Meet Arne, Sourcefabric’s new Head of Business Development
Arne is our new business go-to person at Sourcefabric. Last week he had his first visit to our Prague HQ and we had a nice chat with him about his impressive professional experience. Before joining Sourcefabric, Arne worked for a number of multinational companies and big corporations, and has more than 10 years experience in working with companies co-founded by him focused on internet projects, business intelligence tools, ERP and content providing. He firmly believes that he invented the ‘Timeline’ long before Mark Zuckerberg nicked the idea from him in a regional internet community project back in 1999. While talking we found out he loves music and has an unusual hobby. See for yourself!
Q. Hello Arne and a warm welcome to the team! It must be hard to sum up more than 20 years of experience in business, but what is your background?
I studied Business Administration, but then started working as an accountant for one of the biggest FMCG companies within their chemical products division. I quickly found out that this was not my world and changed departments over to another division dealing with personal care products as a Sales Representative and became a Sales Manager. In 1992 I needed a change and started as a project manager for one of the leading global logistics companies within the sales and marketing department. My goal there was to coordinate the sales and marketing teams and make them work together. I achieved that translating marketing speak into sales and vice versa. It was not easy, as they were speaking totally different languages. When the company restructured, and since I was keen to work more in direct contact with clients, I became a key account manager for Germany responsible for multinational companies. At the time I worked with clients from all around the world, such as General Motors, Ford, Volkswagen etc. An exciting time as our Global Account Managers Team had just formed and we could win global multiyear deals with quite a few of them.
Q. Eventually, at the end of the 90s, you started your own company and then more. How did your entrepreneurial life go?
After a first experience setting up my business intelligence company - licensing software and consulting I became partner in a web agency. We were doing basic web-development stuff, such as hand-coded websites and storefronts for mid-sized businesses. Most interestingly, we were also providing a free service, what we would call now a sort of ‘mother of Facebook’. It was a very primitive regional community, integrating all the commercial life of the city we lived in, had 50 thousand inhabitants and its own social life. There we even had the concept of the now famous ‘Timeline’.
Q. Wow, we didn’t know we had hired the German Mark Zuckerberg! How successful was this project?
Mark’s? (laughing). It was a lot of fun to do, but we didn’t make any money with it. The idea behind it was to sell our web services, ISP and storefronts. There were even 2-3 other companies who tried copying us, but they also failed, at least commercially. Those were the days!
Q. Definitely those were the days! Tell us more about your relationship with IT and technology.
I always had a soft spot for IT. While studying, I wrote my dissertation about predicting revenues on a product level. In the company I was working in at the time, the product managers always had a hard time figuring out what were the revenues, by month, by product and where they were coming from geographically. We had a mainframe computer (well, a Nixdorf 8870) used for accounting. My goal was to find a way to extract the historical data of sales by product and then apply some statistical methods to analyse them and produce the forecasts for thousand or more products. I like to think of it as one of the first ‘big data’ projects then, with the help of some COBOL coding. It was another world back then, we didn’t have any word processing program on these computers, so I had to use a spreadsheet program to write the dissertation. As there was only one PC at the company, I had to book time in advance to work on it!
Q. So how did you learn about Sourcefabric?
While working for a charity based in the UK, I was also looking for software to enable someone to write a book and I came across Booktype. I thought that this was a very good idea, it’s open source, it’s web-based, people can write or edit the book together and produce print and electronic formats. That was exactly what I was looking for! In 2013, I was again in contact with Sava, Doug and Micz, but we didn’t agree on how we could possibly work together. It’s a little bit of an adventure when you come from the much-regulated corporate world and go back to the open source world. So, here I am.
Q. What are your expectations or plans as a Head of business development in Sourcefabric?
I can see a lot of potential in Superdesk. Once we have established this product on the market, it will be a no-brainer for the industry. It is extremely flexible, it’s free and open source. I can’t wait to start working on convincing more and more news organisations to become our partners in developing Superdesk as the codebase for journalism!
Q. One last question: when you’re not working, what do you like to do?
I like music. Things I listen to range really from rock, singer-songwriters (Texan!) through funk-rock to soul. I can even listen to jazz...! It’s really about the quality, and if the music reaches me emotionally rather than about style or genre. I also play the guitar myself. Occasionally, I do busking. It relaxes me: just setting up a show at a street corner and letting the music flow. I’m playing some of my own songs mixed with covers from the 60’s through today. For the younger ones, beware, I recently bought some DJ equipment, found the 120 bpm button and started sampling.
Would you like to become part of the Sourcefabric team and help us build open source tools for journalists? Then have a look at our open jobs.