The leadership team

His fondness for programming helped Sascha land his first job at the age of 15, working as a webmaster for a VC-funded hardware startup Vircinity. In 2005, Sascha joined Hewlett-Packard where he was quickly recognized for spotting promising technologies and taking an entrepreneurial approach to day-to-day projects. After leaving HP in 2008, Sascha travelled extensively and founded Tagcrumbs, a geo-location based bookmarking service. In 2011, he started working on a publishing platform which went on to become Contentful. Sascha holds a degree in Business Information Technology from the University of Cooperative Education in Stuttgart.

In 2006, Paolo left native Milan for London to be a part of the cloud revolution. He led the bid management development team at Forward, one of the fastest growing companies in the UK at the time, and later helped to scale the website of Autoscout24, the largest European car search engine. In 2010, Paolo joined the social gaming company Wooga, where he resolved Wooga's massive scaling issues and oversaw a 10X traffic growth spurt over his 2-year tenure. In 2012, Paolo met Sascha and founded Contentful. Paolo holds an Engineering Management degree from the Polytechnic University of Milan.

Chris started his entrepreneurial journey as a founder and CEO of Mundwerk, a voice-activated application startup later acquired by Excelsis. Then he joined Verisign and brought its mobile content acquisition Jamba to the US market. Returning to Germany in 2006, he founded and led marketing service agency Linklift and was a member of the founding team at Wooga, the social gaming company behind Futurama, Perl's Peril, and Jelly Splash. Chris holds an MBA degree from WHU Otto-Beisheim School of Management.

Ed started his career in commercial insurance working on financial service products and transitioned into SaaS technology sales. Before joining Contentful, he worked for Salesforce, Jive, Box, and Databricks. In the decade of selling SaaS products, Ed has overseen all aspects of B2B sales and comes to Contentful with a track record for identifying, implementing, and expanding new revenue channels. Ed holds a degree in Finance from Santa Clara University. Rumoured to be a track and field champion, he has also won the title of the fastest Contentfulero in 2017.

Since moving from Colorado to San Francisco, Nicholas has spent more than ten years working for B2B enterprise software startups, in addition to working for a venture capital fund and an economic consultancy. At eSignature leader DocuSign and mobile-payments company Boku, Nicholas helped build and lead customer success teams, with the concepts of customer adoption and value becoming part of his DNA. At enterprise knowledge management software provider InQuira, he helped establish and nurture strategic relationships as a member of the partner development team. Nicholas has a degree with majors in Computer Science and Economics from Dartmouth College.

During his student days, Markus channeled his love for tech by founding an IT consultancy. Passionate about data, hard problems and finance, he then went into investment banking with Morgan Stanley. After taking time off to obtain a PhD at Cambridge's Judge Business School, he continued honing his management skills at Zalando, where he has built up the UK business, was MD for Zalando Ltd, and later became the CFO of Zalando's operations entities. Before joining Contentful, Markus was a VP of Finance and IT at SoundCloud, the world’s leading audio platform. Markus holds a PhD from the University of Cambridge and an MBA from WHU Otto-Beisheim School of Management.

As a software developer working at a number of Swedish consulting agencies, Peter has executed several enterprise CMS projects. In 2008, he joined EPiServer, where for five years he worked as the Product Manager for EPiServer CMS. During this time, he drove the redesign of the new platform that was launched in 2012. In his career, Peter has built a strong reputation for adopting innovative technologies and overseeing strategic product development. Peter holds a degree in Computer Science from Umeå University.

Jennifer began her career in talent acquisition where she saw first-hand the power of organizations that enabled smart people to do what they loved every day. In her current role as Head of HR at Contentful, she enjoys promoting a culture of innovation, agility and empowerment. Jennifer graduated Summa Cum Laude from the University of Richmond with a BA in Human Resource Management, and is certified through both the HR Certification Institute (SCP) and the Society for Human Resource Management (SPHR). In her spare time, she enjoys exploring her new hometown of Berlin and practicing her German language skills.