Marco Boerries

BIO

Marco Boerries is a German entrepreneur with a passion for making ideas work. Inspired by a Silicon Valley school exchange back in 1984, he founded his first company Star Division, as a 16-year-old in 1985. The company created the popular office suite StarOffice and later OpenOffice.org. Marco sold Star Division to Sun Microsystems in 1999 and stayed on as Vice President of Desktop & Webtop Software until 2001. In parallel to Star Division he started his second company Star Finanz as a joint-venture with the Deutsche Sparkassen Organisation in 1996, to re-invent online banking with StarMoney – that became the leading product in Germany. Marco sold his share in StarFinanz to his joint venture partners in 2001. After leaving Sun Microsystems and selling Star Finanz, Marco started his third company Verdisoft in the summer of 2001 based in Palo Alto, California and Hamburg, Germany. At Verdisoft Marco and his team developed the Connected Life platform for connected devices like computers, smart phones and connected TVs. Starting in 2003 Verdisoft was able to showcase solutions on the ConnectedLife platform, that resemble what we know from services like iCloud today. Marco sold Verdisoft to Yahoo in early 2005 and stayed on to lead the ConnectedLife division until early 2009 - driving Yahoo’s Broadband, Mobile and TV efforts, globally. Returning back to Germany in 2009 Marco started his fourth company NumberFour in Berlin to re-imagine the way small businesses are run, and later established offices in Hamburg, Germany and Palo Alto, California. Together with his team he is working extremely hard to develop and design a business platform to fulfill NumberFour’s Mission “Helping 200 Million+ Run Their Business”.