Stephan Stubner

Stephans' entrepreneurial career began in the late 1990s, coinciding with the first New Economy hype in Europe.As co-founder of ciao.com he helped build the company to IPO-readiness. The IPO did not realize due to the market crash in 2001, but ciao lived to be later sold to Microsoft. After ciao, he co-founded several other startups, including trivago, which became one of the first German unicorns to go public on the NASDQ in 2016. By then, Stephan had already left the company to pursue an academic career as a professor at the AACSB-accredited HHL Leipzig Graduate School of Management, a top 20 global business school (according to Financial Times) with a strong focus on entrepreneurship. He later became Dean and President of HHL, helping to strengthen its entrepreneurship focus (HHL alumni have founded over 500 start-ups in the last 30 years, including several unicorns). As Full Professor he holds the PORSCHE AG Chair of Strategic Management and Digital Entrepreneurship. Stephan is an active investor as a partner at Monkfish Equity and selectively as a business angel. He is or has been a board member of CODE University Berlin, TGFS (the public investor of Saxony in Germany), VNG (top 3 natural gas company in Germany) and the SPINLAB accelerator, recently named one of the top 30 accelerators worldwide.