Meet the Team (February 2012)

Von Protonet Team. Veröffentlicht 1. Februar 2012.

As of today the protonet core team consists of six employees. We gratefully received an innovation grant from the State Of Germany.

Now it’s time to give you a quick introduction to “who’s who” of the people behind protonet:

Ali Jelveh, Co-Founder & Chief Revolutionary Officer

Ali has been a developer since back when he dropped out of university and needed the money. He started with building minimal billing solutions and grew to build teams and create ERPs for mid-size companies. With the rise of the web he moved from building first small webstores to designing and creating JavaScript architectures for one of the first big social networks. He joined the XING AG as a RoR developer early on where he had the opportunity to meet and work with truly amazing people. This is also where he finally decided to start working on an idea that was simmering in his head for quite some time. He told Christopher about it and the rest is history. When he isn’t working on protonet he spends his time thinking, planning and simulating (cue manic laughter here).

Contact him via XING, LinkedIn or Twitter.

Christopher Blum, Co-Founder & Intergalactic President

At the age of 16 Christopher founded his own little company, PackYourFiles.com (a one-click share hoster, similar to megaupload, with file compression technology). After finishing school he studied communication design and started working as a freelancer in an online marketing agency. Later he got hired by the largest european social business network, XING.com, where he was mainly responsible for the JavaScript architecture and the integration of a third party app eco system. During that time he met Ali, who also worked at XING. Ali convinced Christopher from the first day on to work with him on protonet. Since then the first prototype was developed after work and on the weekends. Apart from that Christopher is the owner of SpellBoy.com, an online spell checker, that had in its best days more than 100,000 unique visitors per day. In his free time he enjoys playing football or having a cold beer with friends.

Contact him via XING, LinkedIn or Twitter.

Wolfgang Peters, Serious Business Officer

Early during schooldays Wolfgang developed websites for small local businesses for small money, later he finished commercial high school and studied Business Administration at the University of Kiel in Germany and the University of Tromso in Norway. During his studies Wolfgang worked on several consulting and startup projects. After finishing university in 2011 he started working as Business Analyst for the startup incubator Hanse Ventures in Hamburg. He earned major insights in the startup and venture capital industry and got prepared for founding and administrating an own business. During founder workshops at the betahaus Hamburg he met protonet who were looking for a business guy. After getting to know the product and team members the decision to work together was made. Wolfgang now is in charge of the business stuff, looking at numbers and cash, taking care of marketing and sales, doing everything he can to let the developers develop. Serious business so to speak.

Contact him via XING, LinkedIn or Facebook.

Henning Thies, Senior Interactive Developer

On the i486 of his parents Henning made his first foot steps on his programming career with Turbo Pascal. In school he got even more interested in the whole computer science, that he decided to study IT and Design in Lübeck. Next to the studies he worked in a small local agency and learned programming for the web. After he returned from a semester at the Universtitat Politècnica de Valencia he went to Hamburg. He started to use Ruby on Rails at Ubilabs and earned a Google Qualified Developer certificate. To finish his diploma Henning went to Kiel an started to develop various web-projects at empuxa. Once done he moved back to Hamburg and continued to work for empuxa out of the Betahaus. There he met Ali, Christopher and protonet. After being under observation for some time, they decided to ask him to join their team to make it even more awesome.  Now he tries to to implement new backend and frontend features. And of course support Ali and Christopher to maintain their growing bug collection. To get rid of all the messy weather-sites he co-founded the website wetterwolke.com.

Contact him via XING, LinkedIn or Twitter.

Johannes von Bargen, Dynamic Research Scientist

Johannes studied Architecture and Urban Development at HfbK and HCU Hamburg and graduated in late 2008. Additionally he’s very interested in information technology of all kind. Especially when making ones life easier and more fun with its help. Since highschool and througout his university studies he provided Web/Email/Backup-hosting services for small companies and did custom software development. He’s really unhappy with the current situation: People give away even their most private information and data unmindfully and put themselves into the hands of big companies that would sell their mothers soul to increase their profit. By putting his power behind protonet he wants to enable even the not so tech-savvy people to use the power of open source to get in charge of their own data and disburden them from the dependency on third party services.

Contact him via XING.

David Burkhardt, Senior Craft Meister

David had a knack for designing early on: with 17 he won the “Landeswettbewerb Jugend Forscht” with his passively cooled mini-computer. He then went on to design and build his own line of speciality cooling solution for custom PC hardware. While doing that, he started his design studies at the HfbK in Hamburg where he studied under Prof. Löw who incidentally connected him with the protonet project. Since then he turned the mere idea of an enclosure for our unique hard- and software combination into an actual physical thing, designed, built and assembled here in Hamburg. He spends the rest of his time either on his house boat thinking about artsy things, or at the university crafting even more artsy things. Oh and, he’s not only good at design, he’s also a great engineer, perfect combination if you ask us.

And that’s it! Six people to change the world, and now that we’ve finally solved the tough problem of naming our positions, it’s time to get some work done! Expect great things!