Entrepreneur
Driven by dreams
I am a child of the 80s and the first in our family to study. And even if it may look like it here on this website: I am anything but an “high flyer”. I consider myself neither overly intelligent nor outstandingly groundbraking. I admire founders and entrepreneurs who have already found their passion in their early 20s. I am definitely not one of them. I don’t wear titles like “30 under 30”, nor have I belonged to the TOP X of a certain category in public life.
However, that doesn’t matter to me. My past is what drives me. I dream of a better world. I dream of changing things. And I have never stopped at dreaming. I am neither a philosopher nor a theorist. I am a pragmatist. And I ask myself: What will remain of me when I am no longer alive? Will I have contributed to making the world a little bit better? Or have I filled my time with pointless stuff and thrown my money away on useless consumption?
Entrepreneurship
I like to create something new where nothing existed before. I like to start from scratch.
Startup Mentoring
My path has been anything but a walk in the park. It makes me happy when I can help others.
Design + Marketing
I enjoy thinking about what messages and look and feel will best reach my target audience.
Entrepreneur by heart
I earned money during my studies by building logos, brochures and websites for small companies. But I wasn’t brave enough to continue with self-employment after graduation. However, I kept getting to the point in my jobs where I was very frustrated and felt restricted by hierarchical structures and political games. That’s why I decided in 2017 to start my own company, called Panista, which was fully acquired by our investor in 2021. Together with my wife Lilian, I then started to build up a small consulting company called
Gehrke & Vetterkind Consultants, which is now mainly managed by my wife. Because during the Corona pandemic I discovered my passion for climate protection. It increasingly frightens me how we humans deal with our earth. And it scares me that we have only little time left to save the planet by keeping the 1.5 degree target of the Paris Agreement. That’s why, together with my co-founder Anton Güthe, I founded a company that works to remove CO2 from the atmosphere in order to limit global warming.
