Lars Hinrichs

Lars Hinrichs ( born December 18, 1976 in Hamburg ) is a German entrepreneur and founder of the global Internet network for private and business contacts, XING (formerly openBC ) (2003 ).

Life

The son of a Hamburg business family - his great-grandfather founded the town bakery at the goose market - began his entrepreneurship with the website policy - digital.de, which won many awards. Then Lars Hinrichs developed with his business partner Peer -Arne Böttcher a virtual presidential candidate ( "Jackie Strike ") for the U.S. election campaign in 2000. Their Founded in 1999, Hooper Hinrichs AG, a PR and communications agency for all kinds of Internet startup companies became insolvent in 2001.

In 2003 he founded the " Open Business Club GmbH ", today the Xing AG, an international network of contacts in the business both as employees, self-employed as well as many individuals as students, students and job seekers are represented. In its IPO in December 2006 its portal was the market leader in the German-speaking area, with over 1.7 million members.

On 15 January 2009 he resigned his post as CEO of Xing and joined the Supervisory Board. In November 2009, Hinrichs sold the majority of its stake in Xing to the Burda Digital GmbH, a 100 percent subsidiary of Hubert Burda Media, which thus became the main shareholder. Accordingly, he gave in January 2010 from his directorships at Xing. He scored from the sale proceeds of 48 million euros.

After much speculation about his new job, he announced on 8 June 2010, the new business idea HackFwd on Twitter. It was a network-based approach to the allocation of venture capital.

Hinrichs wanted to animate with HackFwd at the forefront of people to start their own. To give them the financial freedom to implement their ideas in the form of own company, he wanted to " Europe, the best programmers from their day jobs free " by their previous salary continues to pay them for about a year. Hinrichs regretted that although there are equally good programmers are in Germany, as everywhere else in the world, but that these rarely laid founding spirit of the day. To those who still take the plunge, it would, however, often lack in Europe on the ability to " think big enough." Often products would therefore fail at marketing. The only city in Europe, which he trusted the potential of a European Silicon Valley, Berlin was. Three years after the founding Hinrichs announced the end of HackFwd. At this time, was involved in a total of 16 companies Lars Hinrichs or HackFwd; of these could no shares are sold, what Lars Hinrichs led as a reason for hiring HackFwd.

Lars Hinrichs is an active member of the Young Global Leader ( YGL ) of the World Economic Forum and the Young Presidents ' Organization. Since October 1, 2013 Hinrichs is on the Supervisory Board of Deutsche Telekom AG.

He is married and has two children.

Awards

• The portal XING founded by Lars Hinrichs received the 2007 Media Award Lead Award and the German Internet Award 2004 of the German Federal Ministry of Economics.

• In August 2008, he was chosen by German startups, an online magazine for entrepreneurs and investors, as " the most important German Web - founder " of a jury.

• Also in 2008 was awarded Lars Hinrichs as a " Young Global Leader" ( YGL ) by the World Economic Forum.