On Monday, January 14, 2019, Dr. Andreas Böhm visited the IEEE Student Branch. Under the slogan "Data Science from Garage to Production", the founder and managing director of the company ONE LOGIC talked about the success story of his former Start-Up. In just five years he managed to acquire many customers and recruit 130 employees.
Dr. Andreas Böhm studied at the University of Passau and earned his doctorate in the area of data science. He founded his first company at the age of 23. At this time, he was already fascinated by the idea of filtering relevant information from big piles of data to gather new insights and improve existing processes. As a freelancing consultant at a large company in the automotive sector, he was able to improve the purchasing processes in a way that saves the company huge amounts of money.
The goal of ONE LOGIC is to bring transparency into big data collections and generating real value for their customers. Since the beginning, founder Andreas Böhm considers it important for his company to be solution-oriented. He achieves short waiting times and quick solutions by delivering minimal viable products (MVPs) to the customers. Based on the insights, which ONE LOGIC gathers using MVPs their main product ONE DATA is continuously refined and becomes even more valuable for their customers. This approach made it possible for the company to finance itself right from the beginning without the need of large investors or other funding.
Besides hard work, having good advisers with different backgrounds and much expertise is a key success factor. Specialists who can give you different perspectives on upcoming challenges are indispensable for a founder. Andreas Böhm was lucky in finding Prof. Dr. Andreas Pfeifer who already had over 20 years of experience in that sector at that time. Meanwhile, the management team around Böhm grew: the additional managing director Dr. Stefan Roskos, chief data scientist Dr. Sebastian Wernicke and chief developer Adrian Berndl help him to make informed decisions as well as to manage all employees. Andreas Böhm stresses to surround yourself with experts as a founder. The more work you can delegate, the better for your company - there is always a person, which is more experienced than yourself!
In reply to a question about the necessary mindset and skills of a founder, Böhm mentioned several: you shouldn't avoid (necessary) risks and have the ability to think out of the box (there's no such thing as impossible). Another requirement is to work significantly longer than normal employees (at least in the start-up phase of your company) as well as the ability to go for pragmatic solutions rather than the over-engineere one. The most important one however is to work in an area where you really have fun.
At the end of the talk, Andreas Böhm has some more advises for a successful Start-Up. He suggests to concentrate on finding solutions rather than problems, finding errors early, and admitting mistakes. Furthermore, it is important to find people who also love to work on the same idea and help you moving your product forward. Especially a sales person can help to make your company profitable. Of course, you need a little bit luck on your side as well.
The IEEE Student Branch wishes this luck to Dr. Andreas Böhm and his company ONE LOGIC, as well as to all other founders who were inspired by this talk.
