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 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 OpenOffice.org XML fi ...

, which later became OpenOffice.org.

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 Count ...

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 corporation, multinational technology company, technology corporation producing Software, computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at th ...

'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, ...

and

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

). 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, ...

, 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 acce ...

with Deutsche Sparkassen-Organisation, a German savings bank. With StarMoney the company grew to become a significant provider of home banking 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 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 telephone call, calls over a radio freq ...

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 solutions for small businesses. 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 POS, Pos or PoS may refer to: Linguistics * Part of speech, the role that a word or phrase plays in a sentence * Poverty of the stimulus, a linguistic term used in language acquisition and development * Sayula Popoluca (ISO 639-3), an indigenous l ...

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