The following interview is a conversation we had with Hanns Aderhold, Founder & CEO of Cobrainer, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $21M Raised to Build the Future of Skills Data Platforms

Hanns Aderhold
Hey Brett, thanks so much for having me. I’m really excited to talk to you and to get deeper into the category of skills and talk about Cobrainer, I’m. 

Brett Stapper
Super excited as well, and I’d love to just kick off with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background. 

Hanns Aderhold
Great. So, yeah, I’m Hans. I’m the Founder and CEO of Cobrainer. Where do I come from? Actually, way back I studied architecture. So something completely outside the scope of my current business. And during architecture studies, what basically happened is studied in Munich, Germany. And were basically working on big projects every semester. We were building aircraft cabins. We were building plus energy houses in Japan, doing a slum resettling India. And it was always about bringing together people from different faculties to execute these projects. 

Hanns Aderhold
And at some point in time, way back in 2012, 2013, my technical Co-Founder and I thought, can we build a system that actually facilitates the coming together in project teams at university on a skills basis and basically creating a machine that explains to me what skills do I need for my new project and where at university are those skills? And that was the starting point for Cobrainer. 

Brett Stapper
What year was that? 

Hanns Aderhold
That was 2013, actually. So ten years ago, what did your. 

Brett Stapper
Friends and family say when they first heard about you, this idea? What did your colleagues think about this idea? What were those early conversations like? 

Hanns Aderhold
To be honest, quite discouraging, actually. So when this kind of idea came up, basically also just coming out of architecture studies, going into software, going into building a company, there was lots of discouragement in the sense of, hey, you should get your experience with a large company first. Don’t start off founding a company and just like learning by doing and building a company. So, yeah, but to be honest, that kind of actually got me more excited because I kind of tend to always go against, like, common knowledge and to what the general kind of outside kind of forcing function points me towards, I kind of go, tend to go against that. So, yeah, then that made me actually even more excited about getting into that startup adventure. And, yeah, 2013 basically was started. 

Hanns Aderhold
We were a university project initially, basically building a platform for students. And then really right at the beginning of our journey, a large enterprise company here from Germany, where we’re based, approached us and said, hey, we actually want to work exactly the way you’re advocating for, with your platform. We want to work exactly that way inside our organization. So the way you’re kind of staffing student teams across faculty, we as a large organization, want to work more project based, and we want to staff project teams in a kind of functional, cross departmental way. And can you build your platform, your university platform, can you build that for us as an enterprise? And that was kind of like a very initial pivot in terms of us building a prototype for a university and then immediately jumping into the enterprise world. 

Hanns Aderhold
And that was also the point in time where we actually incorporated the company. 

Brett Stapper
What were the first six to twelve months, like, what was going on? 

Hanns Aderhold
I mean, it was the first six to twelve months basically ended out and basically prolonging being the first six years of our, like, the last ten year journey. And it was, were really kind of more of a consultancy rather than a startup. So you can imagine, I was just coming out of university, I was an engineer, studied architecture, was basically designing houses and large buildings and calculating them, and then suddenly building a startup for staffing for project staffing for people management. So what we basically did, were learning on the job in the sense of getting our first customers, them telling us, hey, how we want this skills based platform, this skills based staffing platform to work. And so were basically doing consulting project after consulting project, and our first customer basically said, hey, what you guys are doing for your university? 

Hanns Aderhold
We want to do that in the organization and just build that for us, and we’ll give you €100,000. And were like just young students, and €100,000 was quite a lot of money for us, roughly the equivalent in dollars right back then. So $100,000. And we just started building based on their initial inquiry, and then we just relied on word of mouth and this first customer kind of referring us to another customer. And then we’re super lucky because the next customer didn’t pay €100,000. They actually offered to pay €2 million, and they’re like we suddenly noticed, okay, something’s here. And we basically, just, for six years in a row, did consulting projects one after the other. 

Hanns Aderhold
And then in 2020, we actually then decided to actually pivot because we then had enough knowledge of what the industry, especially the HR industry, was looking for in terms of skills management, skills platform, skills data management. And then we built basically a software as a service product from that knowledge and pivoted the company in 2020 to being what I call a single product, SaaS company, rather than a consultancy. 

Brett Stapper
Was that decision heavily debated to move from a consultancy to a venture scale startup? 

Hanns Aderhold
Oh, for sure. So basically, timing was crazy for us. The decision to kind of make that transition from consultancy to software as a service was 2019, where we basically came together and we had kind of two things. We noticed that after six years of doing this consulting approach, it was still work, right. It was still a little bit frustrating. We had kind of this skills data core. So we have this very unique skills engine that hasn’t changed for the last ten years. And during this consulting time in the first six years, we always were using the skills data engine as a core. But the products that were building were always one offs. They were basically always different shells for different use cases for enterprise clients. 

Hanns Aderhold
And that was kind of frustrating because even though these shells were quite simple, they still had to be maintained, it was still effort. So it was not really kind of a scalable solution. And that was the kind of main point of frustration that basically made us say, can we not build a replicable version of that shell that always stays the same and addresses a use case that we see quite often? And then we did actually see that use case quite often, or where we found that use case that was replicable, which was the situation of internal career transparency for employees, meaning a system that understands your skill profile as an employee of a large organization and then gives you smart recommendations in terms of what is your next most relevant role, what is the next open job vacancy? 

Hanns Aderhold
Or what is that next course, or that next very interesting skill that is really relevant for you and for your very unique skill profile. And we did that. We built a solution for that. We built, we decided to do it in March of 2019. We launched it with our first customer in October of 2019 within 30 days of, like, that customer, which had 60,000 employees. In total, 20,000 employees were on our platform within 30 days. So, like, it was adopted very well. And that was basically that kind of initial reaction to our product in October of 2019 that made us decide to just basically discontinue all the retainers and all those consulting contracts. All those contracts were basically also one offs, discontinued all of them and just went full in on that one product, which, yeah, basically ended up being the company now. 

Hanns Aderhold
And obviously 2020 COVID hit. So that kind of felt very dumb. We just discontinued lots of contracts and then, like COVID hit, the economy tanked. But COVID actually turned out to be an accelerant for us because with COVID lots of people had a hiring free, lots of companies had a hiring freeze. And actually that made them turn to more their internal talent management, which was exactly our platform. So it all turned out to be quite well. 

Brett Stapper
And just for our listeners to understand, based on some other guests we brought on, we interviewed another german company called High People. I know about Tessgra. In the skills based hiring industry, what does it look like at a market map level? Just to kind of plot how you compare to them and what categories they’re in and you’re in. 

Hanns Aderhold
So basically what these companies more tend to do is they tend to focus a lot on basically recruiting itself, hiring really great, let’s say engineering talent, and being able to quickly assess new talent that comes into the company on a skills basis. What we do is really build that platform for the existing internal employees and giving every single employee. So in terms of car companies, the seamstress that sews the car seats has a skilled profile with Cobrainer, the CEO has a skilled profile, the controller and the software engineer. Everybody has a skilled profile and everybody gets personalized career recommendations, which in turn enables the HR function to actually get all these skill profiles of their employees and then do internal staffing, strategic workforce management, meaning like recommending new roles to groups of employees or upskilling. 

Hanns Aderhold
So we are much more kind of the existing internal talent management on a skills basis platform. The other platforms that you mentioned are more in terms of assessing relevant new joiners or actually doing external skills based recruiting. Does that make sense? 

Brett Stapper
That makes perfect sense, and that’s super helpful. And just kind of understanding that the differences there. When it comes to your market category, how do you think about your market category? What is the market category? 

Hanns Aderhold
So what we’re seeing right now, or what we’re experiencing is really a customers getting back to kind of verticalization of certain functions within a use case. What I mean by that, what you typically had, for example, for people management, you had these large HR platforms that did kind of your vacation management and your salary and comp and bend management, et cetera. And they all did that under one hood. And now customers are more and more looking for individual kind of solutions for each part of that value chain. And what we’re basically focusing on really is on the vertical of skills data, injecting skills data into all aspects of the HR lifecycle. So basically, if you license a course from Udemy or Udacity or coursera, you basically get that course content. 

Hanns Aderhold
Our system then basically takes those courses and maps them all to a unified, basically skills dictionary. The same way all your employees that are exist within another software, that they all use that same unified skill dictionary. All your job vacancies and all your job roles all use that same skills dictionary. So in terms of category, I really like to compare us to the Google Maps for skills, meaning. So Google Maps is kind of the source of truth for navigating to your grocery store or your restaurant. You don’t enter street names anymore when you use Google Maps, you enter the grocery store, the restaurant, and the same way we want to act as you define your next job role that you want to get to. And we take care of what are the exact skills that you navigate towards that job role. 

Hanns Aderhold
So we’re basically the skills data provider. And the same way Google Maps provides its maps data as an API to Uber and a Lyft and Uber Eats, we would deliver our skills API to all those HR services that have courses or roles or recruiting use cases. 

Brett Stapper
What’s the category called then? Or what would be like the general name of that category? 

Hanns Aderhold
So we call this the skills data platform. So basically providing that one platform that ensures that everything talks the same skill language. So it’s the skill data platform category. 

Brett Stapper
One thing that I see a lot with companies is they say they’re going to create a category, they just throw out a name, and then that’s kind of it. One thing that I really love about your approach that you’re taking is it really looks like you’ve developed a whole methodology around what it means to be a skills driven organization. So when I was playing around on your site earlier, I saw this awesome chart that kind of went across maturity and value and compared them and had, you know, five kind of stuff that they go through for that you talk through about how you develop this methodology and other things that you’ve developed, not just making up a category name, just for the sake of making up a category name. You’re really building an entire new discipline here, it sounds like. 

Hanns Aderhold
Yeah, exactly. So this was really building from this six year experience in this like consulting approach where went really deep into the HR world. So in HR, you have really hardcore kind of legal requirements in terms of defining jobs, defining a job architecture, defining skill architecture. These really also have like compliance related relevance. So for the certain certifications, securities safety certificate certifications, you are required to, for example, define job roles and job architectures. And this also is of course reflected when these large organizations have a big HR suite or they implement an HR suite. They have very strict requirements in terms of what is the structure that they need to feed in there. 

Hanns Aderhold
And like the basis is always this skills and job architecture, which basically just defines kind of the structure and the organizational design of the company and translates that into individual roles and profiles for each individual employee. That, that then in turn translates into all these HR processes like performance management, succession planning, recruiting, re and upskilling. These are all kind of based on the skills and job architecture. And we learned this basically by interacting with kind of multiple players within the space. Like very important for us in this learning journey was obviously working with and interacting with customers and the HR departments of our customers, but also really deeply engaging with lots of different HR consultancies. So were really working with and partnering with, and we still are with the big name, kind of big four HR consultancies. 

Hanns Aderhold
They all have kind of HR practices, but also very kind of boutique consultancies in the HR space and basically aggregating all that knowledge from them. And obviously, like the third player in that kind of equation are the big HR vendors. We like right from the start have been very much engaging with like the big vendors like SAP, workday, Oracle, but also kind of smaller HR vendors who are also, of course, interested in partnering for these very kind of detailed aspects, what I call these vertical aspects in terms of feeding, for example, our skills data into their HR platform. 

Brett Stapper
How would you describe your marketing philosophy? 

Hanns Aderhold
To be honest, right now we’re still in the early stages of our marketing philosophy, but we’re really banking on our partners. So just yesterday we had a really great event working with a very renowned industry advisor here in Germany. So we basically partner with consultancies. They help us create events, they help us spread word through their network. And then basically that’s for us, let’s say, very highly qualified participants in these events that just kind of short track, kind of the noise in the sense of not having to do like big marketing on LinkedIn or X, but rather using these kind of industry specific events driven by our partners to actually get exposure to the people that really have that need that we’re addressing. So partners are kind of pre selecting our marketing qualified leads, so to speak. 

Brett Stapper
What have you learned about building partnerships? 

Hanns Aderhold
I think the most important part about building partnerships is being very specific about having real cases very fast. So we had multiple approaches where we had really great talks with, let’s say, a consultancy or some kind of important industry player. And it was always kind of on high level talks and it kind of like then stayed that way. But in those cases where partners approached us and said, we have a very urgent customer need. We’ve heard of you, Cobrainer. We believe you can fit perfectly. Can you execute it within the next ten days, two weeks on that project that we have, and like us accepting that, like, those were always the starting points for really great partnerships. 

Hanns Aderhold
So, like, really having very concrete, very urgent lighthouse cases very early on is, I think for us, that was always the best starting point, and it still is to this day for really great partnerships. Those where you kind of have like talks and rough idea sketches in the beginning, they never tend to really materialize. 

Brett Stapper
This show is brought to you by Front Lines Media podcast production studio that helps B2B founders launch, manage, and grow their own podcast. Now, if you’re a Founder, you may be thinking, I don’t have time to host a podcast. I’ve got a company to build. Well, that’s exactly what we built our service to do. You show up and host, and we handle literally everything else. To set up a call to discuss launching your own podcast, visit frontlines.io podcast. Now back today’s episode. Something else I wanted to ask about, and it’s very tactical. When I was playing around on the website last night, I noticed that the main call to action is not book a demo with our sales team or, you know, request a demo. It’s talk to Hans. And your calendar is right there. 

Brett Stapper
They can book and they can speak directly to you. I feel like for venture backed startups, that’s not common, that’s not normal. So I love the idea. I think it’s a brilliant approach. Really put yourself out there. But is that really your calendar or are they booking and talking with you every day? 

Hanns Aderhold
No, that’s really me. So, yeah, that’s my calendar. You book calls exactly with me. So, yeah, I’m on a very full schedule right now. So, yeah, you know, for us, exactly. This initial talk, I think like this very first talk, those for us are always the most important qualification steps. So I am the best judge in is this a really urgent need and can we really address that need and doing that as early as the very first call really helped us sanitize our whole sales funnel. We don’t have leads in our sales or opportunities in our sales funnel anymore that are kind of exploratory. We only have very spot on fit opportunities that really fit to us, and that was kind of the thinking, and it’s really working for us. 

Brett Stapper
I love the approach. What’s a typical day look like for you? Lots of sales calls. 

Hanns Aderhold
What do you call these? 

Brett Stapper
I guess they’re not sales calls, they’re introductory calls or discovery calls. Is that what your day is filled with, or what’s a typical day like for you? 

Hanns Aderhold
So, yeah, I do work quite a lot. So I clock in probably like 16 to sometimes 17, 18 hours or even more. And basically, yeah, 75% of that is sales. Yeah, definitely. 

Brett Stapper
You’re eleven years into this journey. What’s powering you besides coffee? I’m sure there has to be some coffee involved there. But what motivates you, what allows you to maintain that momentum for such a long period of time? What I’ve seen with other founders and really even experienced myself is it’s kind of this like five year mark, five years in, you start to experience a little bit of burnout. It can be hard to push past that. What have you done to just plow right through that burnout that you may have been feeling and maintain this level of motivation and drive to continue working at the pace that you are? 

Hanns Aderhold
Well, actually, for me, it’s. I kind of feel almost like a serial entrepreneur because the consultancy was really different company and we almost like, I think two people remain from that time. So, like, the company we have now, we have 50 employees, so we’re not all too big, but like, since 2020, we’re just basically a new company. And the 2020 mark was basically us just coming out of a consultancy. And this product that we built, that we launched with the first customer, were these 20,000 people signed up with our very first customer. That was a very finicky, very kind of roughly built together, kind of scrapped together, kind of like an MVP type of prototype. And we actually survived on that MVP prototype right up until last year. So from 2020 to 2023, were basically on a not very well built system. 

Hanns Aderhold
And in 2023, we actually rebuilt the entire product from scratch in just kind of a good way, a modern way, like completely using platform technologies, super service based, modern code base. So it’s just like very well maintainable. And we have this new product just since November of last year. So just for like four months now or not even. So again, this is now a new company for me. So I kind of always have these moments in time where I kind of redefine the company. And this just gives me so much energy because I also see, and like, as I see this new company, this gives me new energy and it kind of translates into lots of new energy for the team. 

Hanns Aderhold
And I just see the entire team is so stoked to have this new product, which is now basically being updated multiple times per day, rather than just a handful of times per year in the time between 2020 and 2023. And so this is for us since November of last year, we’re again a new company. And this is kind of what keeps me really motivated and excited. 

Brett Stapper
Something that happens in the US, and I’m not sure if it happens in Germany, but here being a startup Founder and tech is glamorized. Like, you read all the cool stories, it just sounds like the coolest job ever. The reality is it sucks sometimes. And there’s a lot of points. There’s a lot of lows. Can you talk us through a low point that you experienced and how you managed to work through and navigate that low point? 

Hanns Aderhold
There’s so many low points. I feel there are these points, I tend to say, like, I failed over a dozen of times where basically I thought, like, on that day, I thought, like, everything’s over and it’s all gone. I mean, the early days when large customer contracts didn’t come through like we had right in the beginning stages, when we just developed this product, we have this first customer, like, where lots of people signed up and we had a second customer, which went great, and a third customer, and this was a huge contract and that didn’t come through. Like just when actually a contract signature was due, they said, no, we’re not going to do it. That was really bad because we just canceled. We just terminated all those consulting contracts. 

Hanns Aderhold
And then were kind of banking those initial customers and those big deals in the beginning, they’re always kind of make or break, but we somehow survived through that. There were other situations where I, we had probably the same experience. Like many companies, we had this very large funding round for european standards, quite large funding round, and then we really hired a lot of headcount. So went up to like 70, I believe even more than 70 people, just, we had eight people in marketing alone, and that was 2021. And it turned out for us, like 2022 was when, like, things got a little bit sour in the startup communities, I think in the US as well, definitely in Europe. 

Hanns Aderhold
And that was kind of the realization moment where we noticed, oh, my God, were building an organization when were actually still needed to be a team, like one team. We were already building, like, a marketing organization, a sales organization, or a product organization. So were creating, like, this artificial hierarchical structure, and we had to wind all of that back, so we had to let go of the entire marketing team, basically, except for one person. And those decisions were definitely super hard. Also, like, communicating that and kind of that was completely on me. Just trying to build the company based on, like, a blueprint company should look like, rather than what we actually needed to build. Just because I felt like, yeah, we have this money now we have to just be this big organization, which was just wrong. 

Hanns Aderhold
And what helped me there was just actually also our investors, I have really great investors who kind of said, hey, Hans, those were wrong decisions, but the way you made those very hard decisions very fast and very radically, that gave them confidence that I’m able to make hard decisions. And that actually built confidence. So for me, that was quite a horrible time. Also last year still, where we just noticed, hey, we just were building the company in the wrong way, and we had to kind of retract lots of these decisions. So, yeah, that was hard, but just making those decisions, actually, then build confidence with the investors, and the investors basically then gave back my confidence, and that’s how I came through. Right. 

Brett Stapper
I had to do layoffs last year as well. Every company that I work with had to do layoffs, or I would say 95% of them had to do layoffs. And probably representative, like, all of tech, everyone had to do layoffs. So that helps. But it kind of helped me, knowing that there were a lot of other founders who were going through something very similar. I wasn’t alone. Everyone was kind of dealing with this shared pain at a very similar time. And, like, that helped a little bit. 

Hanns Aderhold
Yeah, true. 

Brett Stapper
But it helped a little bit. 

Hanns Aderhold
Yeah. 

Brett Stapper
Now, can you tease us with growth numbers? I know you’re a private company, so you don’t have to share this. Are there any metrics or numbers you can share that just highlight the growth traction and adoption that you’re seeing today? 

Hanns Aderhold
Well, let me say, like, I think for european standards, we’re doing quite well. So we’re growing ARR. So, on an average of 252% year over year, we’re basically closing in on, like, 10 million arrows currently with this product that we’ve been building since 2020. And what’s now getting us really excited is so we have kind of this direct sales approach, which is very much banking on partners. And we have a very small direct sales force. Small meaning we have four basically enterprise sales executives. And what we’re now seeing is suddenly lots of very small companies on the order of 50, 3100, 150 employees, which for us is really tiny. We were only working with like 5000 plus headcount companies. And now we’re being approached by like 30 5100 headcount companies. 

Hanns Aderhold
We’re saying, hey, we also need skills management for our customers, excuse me, for our employees. We also want to kind of help them in navigating their career. What are the skills they need to focus on what courses they need to take, and we need a platform for doing so. So we’re now ideating a completely different target audience, the SMB audience, as kind of like a second wave, so to speak, which we’re going to be piloting this year. And it’s looking like that’s going to be like an additional kind of revenue stream which will just be completely on top of that 252% year over year growth and large enterprise space. That’s getting us really excited in terms of accelerating growth. 

Brett Stapper
What do you think you’ve gotten right to achieve that level of growth? I think any Founder listening in would say, yeah, I want that. I want to grow like that too. 

Hanns Aderhold
What have you gotten? 

Brett Stapper
Right. 

Hanns Aderhold
I think were lucky with the right partners. So we had partners that are really pushing us. We were very lucky in terms of early on understanding the relevance of the technology partnership with the player, like SAP here in Germany, but also like internationally. Right. Is a very big player. They have a big HR suite, very leading edge HR suite called successfactors. Same thing with workday. So working with these big HR players and actually working with their sales organization, pushing us, pushing our solution really helped us a lot. So that kind of just scaled, that just made us very efficient as a sales organization because were able to talk to the salesforce of say, SAP. And they helped us in like, navigating who to talk to with these large enterprise players. 

Hanns Aderhold
And they also kind of helped us in saying like, hey guys, we heard you’re talking to this and this company. Just stop talking to them. They have other priorities right now. Don’t focus on them, focus on other companies. Right. This helped us segregate which kind of opportunities to double down on and which ones who were kind of seemingly going in the right direction, but were probably then, like taking longer than expected. And so we really kind of did this partner job really well. I believe in the past few years. 

Brett Stapper
When it comes to fundraising, as I mentioned there in the intro, you’ve raised 21 million today. What did you learned about fundraising throughout this journey? 

Hanns Aderhold
I think, yeah, for me, really, I somehow intuitively, I think, learned this also from formerly Twitter. Back then it was still called Twitter, now X. So all these kind of posts from like big us founders really being selective about the investors in terms of like not going for the money, but going for the smart money. So this town’s kind of counterintuitive, but for us it was just the right strategy. Not really going for the classic VC’s, but more going for like very large business angels whom we’re just very operationally experienced in building companies themselves. And so that was for me the perfect strategy. So we have much more large business angel type of people in our cap table rather than these classic venture capitalists. 

Brett Stapper
Let’s imagine I come to you and I say, Hans, I want to start an HR tech startup. Based on everything that you’ve learned, everything you know about the market, what would be the number one piece of advice. 

Hanns Aderhold
That you’d give me? That’s a hard one. Couple of pieces of advice. I think right now it really makes sense to be very niche in HR. So people are really opening up their portfolio of solutions. The trend is going away from centralization into one big platform, and the trend is really going towards distinct solutions for like even just parts of use cases, appointment setting and applicants and application processes, the setting of appointments. Companies are looking for dedicated solutions for that conversational AI in terms of the talent acquisition process. So be very niche is number one. 

Hanns Aderhold
And I cannot stress enough, at least in Europe, the need for working with these partners, for working with both the large and the small consultancies, but also working with the technology, the tech partners, so the big HR platforms, working with them early on and going to customers through their platform. So through the SAP App Store, through the workday App Store, through the Personio App Store, going customers or approaching customers through the App Store really makes sense. It brings you on the radar of these large tech partners. They will start delivering kind of leads to you and you will just learn much faster in terms of also comparing yourself to other applications that are referenced on the App Store and basically being able to kind of distinguish yourself in a way from the other apps in the App Store. So that really helps a lot. 

Hanns Aderhold
So, yeah, being very niche and really focusing on partnering early on. 

Brett Stapper
Final question for you before we wrap up here, let’s zoom out three to five years into the future. What’s this big picture vision that you’re building. 

Hanns Aderhold
So I really believe in this world of abundance. I really believe that the trajectory that humanity are on is really going to that world of abundance where we have infinite free energy, we have Tesla bots or robotic assistants basically doing all the blue color work. We have huge, like, insane levels of AI augmentation, which means that I really also see this world where we’re getting towards this universal income that everybody will get, and then everybody will basically not need to work for money anymore, but rather be even more focused on their personal, their purpose, what actually want in life, and, like, be focused on achieving their true calling. And I think profession, like, working in a sense, is kind of ingrained in us. So we will be looking for, like, truly meaningful work. 

Hanns Aderhold
And that’s kind of what I see in, like, five to ten years. That’s probably very optimistic, but nevertheless, and I want to be able to enable that world where everybody can have this full transparency on what interesting skills technologies are out there that I can contribute to with my unique skillset, where people can, like, really go, as I did, from architecture into software into HR, really do this kind of cross functional jumping and applying their skills in very different domains. And I want to be that navigation platform, that mapping platform for skills that enables this kind of transparency, but also this navigating of skills in this world where actually everybody can really follow their true calling and kind of their passion. Yeah. And I also believe in doing so for organizations today. 

Hanns Aderhold
We’re actually contributing to that world, coming to be sooner because we’re actually helping all these companies developing really interesting new technologies by helping them put the talent on the right project, faster identifying talent that they already have without needing to recruit externally. So we’re actually contributing towards building new products and services and achieving that big kind of utopian vision and ultimately, hopefully getting there. 

Brett Stapper
Amazing. I love the vision. I’ve loved this conversation, and you’ve turned me into a huge fan of everything that you’re building. So thanks so much for taking the time. Before we wrap up here, if there’s any founders that are listening in and they’re inspired, they want to follow along with your journey, where should they go? 

Hanns Aderhold
So, yeah, definitely visit my LinkedIn profile. I’m Hans. Hanns with two n, so HANNS Bertin, and the last name is Aderhold. Look me up on LinkedIn. 

Brett Stapper
Awesome, Hans, thanks so much for taking the time. It’s been a lot of fun. 

Hanns Aderhold
Brett, thanks so much. 

Brett Stapper
No problem. This episode of Category Visionaries is brought to you by Front Lines Media, Silicon Valley’s leading podcast production studio. If you’re a B2B Founder looking for help launching and growing your own podcast, visit frontlines.io podcast. And for the latest episode, search for Category Visionaries on your podcast platform of choice. Thanks for listening, and we’ll catch you on the next episode.