Marco Börries (born 1 August 1968) is a German IT entrepreneur. He is best known as the founder of

Star Division The German software company Star Division (also written Star-Division) was founded in 1985 by the 16-year-old Marco Börries in Lüneburg as a garage company. After a neighbour denounced the operation of a business in a residential area to the ...

, who developed

StarOffice StarOffice is a discontinued proprietary software, proprietary office suite, intended to compete with the marketing-leading Microsoft Office. It served as the basis for open-source suites OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice. StarOffice supported the ...

, which later became

OpenOffice.org OpenOffice.org (OOo), commonly known as OpenOffice, is a discontinued open-source office suite. Active successor projects include LibreOffice (the most actively developed), Apache OpenOffice, Collabora Online (enterprise ready LibreOffice) a ...

Career

Inspired by a student exchange program to

Silicon Valley Silicon Valley is a region in Northern California that serves as a global center for high technology and innovation. Located in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area, it corresponds roughly to the geographical areas San Mateo County ...

while he attended a Gymnasium in

Lüneburg Lüneburg (officially the ''Hanseatic City of Lüneburg'', German: ''Hansestadt Lüneburg'', , Low German ''Lümborg'', Latin ''Luneburgum'' or ''Lunaburgum'', Old High German ''Luneburc'', Old Saxon ''Hliuni'', Polabian ''Glain''), also calle ...

, Marco Börries founded

as a garage company at the age of 16. As its first product the company distributed StarWriter, a

word processor A word processor (WP) is a device or computer program that provides for input, editing, formatting, and output of text, often with some additional features. Word processor (electronic device), Early word processors were stand-alone devices ded ...

application developed by friends, as an alternative to

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washing ...

's office package. StarWriter later became

(and thereby was the foundation to

OpenOffice OpenOffice or open office may refer to: Computing Software * OpenOffice.org (OOo), a discontinued open-source office software suite, originally based on StarOffice * Apache OpenOffice (AOO), a derivative of OOo by the Apache Software Foundation, w ...

and

LibreOffice LibreOffice () is a free and open-source productivity software, office productivity software suite, a project of The Document Foundation (TDF). It was fork (software development), forked in 2010 from OpenOffice.org, an open-sourced version of t ...

). StarOffice was sold over 25 million times. On 5 August 1999 Börries sold Star Division to

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Sun for short) was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, the ...

, where Börries was subsequently briefly employed. In parallel to Star Division Börries also founded the Hamburg-based company Star Finanz as a

joint venture A joint venture (JV) is a business entity created by two or more parties, generally characterized by shared ownership, shared returns and risks, and shared governance. Companies typically pursue joint ventures for one of four reasons: to acces ...

with Deutsche Sparkassen-Organisation, a German savings bank. With StarMoney the company grew to become a significant provider of

home banking Online banking, also known as internet banking, web banking or home banking, is an electronic payment system that enables customers of a bank or other financial institution to conduct a range of financial transactions through the financial insti ...

software in the years following. In early 2001, Börries sold his shares in this company as well. In August 2001, Börries founded VerdiSoft and served as its CEO. The company developed the

Yahoo! Go Yahoo! Go was a Java-based phone application provided by Yahoo! for users to access the company's products and services via their mobile phones or PDAs. Up till its closure, Yahoo! considered Go as Beta software. Services include sending/receiving ...

technology to enable

mobile phone A mobile phone, cellular phone, cell phone, cellphone, handphone, hand phone or pocket phone, sometimes shortened to simply mobile, cell, or just phone, is a portable telephone that can make and receive calls over a radio frequency link whil ...

s to have screen-optimized access to emails, photos, messages and other web content. VerdiSoft including its technology know-how was sold to

Yahoo Yahoo! (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web services provider. It is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California and operated by the namesake company Yahoo! Inc. (2017–present), Yahoo Inc., which is 90% owned by investment funds ma ...

in February 2005, where Börries worked as an Executive Vice President in the ''Connected Life'' division until April 2009. Until 2008 Börries lived with his wife and three children in California, but then moved to Hamburg and Berlin in Germany. On 1 September 2009, Marco Börries launched his latest business idea, NumberFour AG, based in Berlin. The company developed an open software platform (

PaaS Platform as a service (PaaS) or application platform as a service (aPaaS) or platform-based service is a category of cloud computing services that allows customers to provision, instantiate, run, and manage a modular bundle comprising a computing ...

) for the development, distribution and marketing of

vertical solution A vertical market is a Market (economics), market in which vendor (supply chain), vendors offer goods (economics), goods and service (economics), services ''specific'' to an Industry (economics), industry, trade (occupation), trade, profession, o ...

s for

small business Small businesses are types of corporations, partnerships, or sole proprietorships which have fewer employees and/or less annual revenue than a regular-sized business or corporation. Businesses are defined as "small" in terms of being able to ap ...

es. After four years of development, Börries gathered 38 million USDs from financial investors in mid 2013. Renamed AG, the company launched a platform for small business in March 2017 connecting online services, software and hardware ( PoS terminals). Other entrepreneurial activities that did not lead to market entries were Adhoc Mobile GmbH, founded in 2009, and Mag10 GmbH, founded in 2010. This was a company to develop a solution for tablet publishing, but was shelved at the end of 2011.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Borries, Marco Businesspeople from Lower Saxony 1968 births Living people People from Lüneburg

Career

References

Further reading

External links