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May 03, 2006
Connecting The Dots On Marco Börries Connected Life
We were wondering whatever happened to Marco Börries, the young German entrepreneur that sold his office software company, StarDivision to Sun Microsystems back in 1999.
He was a bit of a legend in our part of Europe for his vision of creating a complete office suite meant to compete head on with Microsoft, and for using what was in 1999 a novel business model for productivity software applications, it was free for personal use. (The reason we were thinking along this line is an interview we did with the founders of Sproutit in Prague, whose business software and vision reminded us a little of Boerries'.)
Turns out, he's at Yahoo, heading its Connected Life division (mobile, TV and video business) as we found out from an archived post on MocoNews.
We knew he had raised venture capital and formed Verdisoft in 2001, and had operations in Hamburg and Silicon Valley, but the a:c euro missed Yahoo acquiring it back in early 2005.
MocoNews excerpt:
At 16, he dropped out of high school in Germany to establish StarOffice, the Microsoft office suite alternative; he sold that company to Sun Microsystems in 1999, joining Sun where he continued open desktop efforts Solaris and evangelized open source through GNOME.In 2001, he founded VerdiSoft to enable his vision of the connected life between PC, TV and cell phone. Yahoo bought VerdiSoft last February, bringing Boerries in as a top executive; the results started to unfold publicly at CES. Boerries’ responsibilities: mobile, digital home, PC client, broadband relationships — “pretty much everything beyond the browser.”
There are not too many European entrepreneurs that have sold not one but two startups to Silicon Valley giants, so we're asking how long will it be until an enterprising VC convinces him to leave when his contract is up and start another venture, maybe one that will make it to IPO this time.
Read - CES 2006: Interview: Marco Boerries, SVP-Connected Life, Yahoo
Posted on May 3, 2006 09:55 PM | Posted to Interactive TV | Where are they now | Wireless | entrepreneurship | Permalink
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