"I don’t understand the value you are bringing to the project?!"

Those words from a Fortune 500 Senior VP during a meeting in Hong Kong changed the trajectory of my career forever.

The Beginning: A Marketing Graduate with Big Dreams

I started my career as a marketing graduate with two master's degrees - an MBA from Germany and a Marketing degree from Australia. My ambition? I wanted to become a strategy consultant and work for McKinsey or BCG.

Becoming a data professional wasn’t on my radar at all.

In fact, I actively avoided everything technical during my studies.

Through a chance encounter at a career fair in Australia, I found myself co-founding a marketing analytics consulting firm in Singapore. Young, inexperienced, and completely out of my depth, I was trying to sell marketing analytics services across Asia without any basic tech skills and without the seniority you need to sell consulting projects to large companies.

During one fateful morning I went on a breakfast meeting together with an experienced management consultant who I had formed a Joint Venture with. We were meeting a Fortune 500 Senior Executive for a breakfast meeting to close a project. During the meeting, the Executive looks at my Joint Venture partner and goes: “Looking at your 25 years experience, I totally understand the value you are bringing to the project.”

And then he looks at me: "But I don’t understand the value YOU are bringing to the project! Why do we need to pay for you?"

I ended up getting fired from my very first job.

This humiliation taught me the hard lesson: I needed a foundation of tech skills to build the career I wanted.

That moment of failure sparked a transformation that would span 17 years across four distinct phases:

→ Phase 1: Mastering technical skills 

→ Phase 2: Learning to build and lead teams 

→ Phase 3: Creating impactful data teams 

→ Phase 4: Becoming a datapreneur

Phase 1: The Transformation Begins

After getting fired, I landed a role as a consultant at a data analytics consulting firm in Munich during the 2008 financial crisis. Despite my initial resistance, I was thrown into the deep end of a data warehouse project at Telefonica O2.

At first, I hated the project as it was just TOO technical.

But what seemed like a setback became my foundation. Working with mentors who are still friends today, I went on to work on a variety of projects for fantastic clients and I learned:

• Data modeling best practices
• SQL and Data Warehousing (DWH) fundamentals
• The art of building predictive models
• How to translate technical insights into business strategies

Phase 2: Learning to be a data leader

This mix of technical expertise and business acumen led me to Rocket Internet - the world’s largest venture builder -, where I faced my next challenge: building data teams across seven companies in 15 countries.

The pace was relentless - 80-hour weeks were normal.

Over the next 3 years, I would make every mistake you can make as a data leader.

My biggest failure was to not understand stakeholder needs, desires and (data) skills deeply enough which led me to build a solution that was technically superior but didn’t meet user demand.

This failure taught me that building impactful data teams requires more than just technical expertise - it demands deep understanding of business context and human dynamics.

Phase 3: Building IMPACTFUL data teams and the Pivot Point

My real transformation began during my time at Locafox, one of Berlin’s hottest startups aiming to build Europe's largest omnichannel marketplace.

For the first time, I had built a truly impactful data team that was close to the business users and was loved by everyone.

When Locafox’s grand vision failed to materialize, I hit rock bottom.

I questioned everything.

• I didn’t want to be in Germany anymore
• I didn’t want to be in the data space anymore
• I didn’t want to build VC backed startups anymore

After a short stint as Chief Product Officer for a company builder in Taiwan, I came to an important realization:

I didn’t lose my passion for the data space. I was just in the wrong environment.

→ No more being an employee in a VC backed startup → instead build my own thing without investors

→ No more being stuck in cold Germany and losing 50% of my income to the tax office → instead become a digital nomad with a home base in Taiwan

→ No more building data teams with a solution-first approach → Instead build data teams with a user-centric approach

The moment I stopped trying to escape the data space and instead embraced my unique skillset as my superpower, everything changed.

Phase 4: The Final Evolution

Today, I've evolved from a solo-consultant to a datapreneur, helping fast-growing companies and future data leaders create business impact through:

• Productized consulting services
• A growing newsletter
• Digital products and masterclasses
• A paid community for future data leaders

The Bottom Line

My journey taught me that you need technical skills, business acumen and a user-centric approach to be successful in data. The real value comes from bridging the gap between technical capabilities and business impact. For future data leaders, this means:

→ Build on your technical foundation but don’t stop there 

→ Learn from failures - they're your best teachers 

→ Focus on business impact, not just technical excellence 

→ Build teams that solve real problems, not just technical challenges 

→ Never stop evolving - the field demands continuous growth

Final Thought: Your greatest professional transformation often begins with your biggest professional humiliation - embrace it, learn from it, and let it guide you to where you truly need to be.

Cheers,

Sebastian