Keynote Speaker
I am a keynote speaker focused on growth, marketing, and leadership, drawing from my experience as a founder, CEO, and global marketing leader. Over the past decade, I have built and scaled companies, led large international teams, and managed billions in marketing investments. My talks translate real-world operator experience into practical, strategic insights for ambitious leaders.
I have spoken to audiences ranging from intimate rooms of 30 senior executives to stages with more than 2,000 attendants like the one below.
Featured Talks
The ROI of Brand: If Everyone has AI, How do you win at Growth?
In this keynote I gave at The Times Center in New York, I argue that in a world where AI is cheap, accessible, and rapidly becoming the baseline, brand is the only sustainable competitive advantage. AI can optimize campaigns and replicate tactics, but it cannot create conviction, loyalty, or emotional connection. The companies that win will be those that invest in building brands, not just running performance marketing.
I explain the measurable ROI of brand through what I call the three M’s: Moat, Margin, and Multiplier. A strong brand increases retention and loyalty, supports premium pricing, and improves conversion rates and inbound demand. Brand is not a soft metric. It is a financial asset.
The talk then explores the five internal “monsters” that prevent companies from building great brands: lack of strategic clarity, false trade-offs between brand and performance, organizational silos, risk aversion, and short-term pressure. Through practical examples and operator experience, I show how to defeat them with clear positioning, full-funnel alignment, disciplined experimentation, and holistic measurement.
I conclude with a simple thesis: in the age of AI, the most human brands will win.
The CMO’s Crossroads
In this keynote I gave in Amsterdam for McKinsey and for 30 senior marketing executives, I address the existential crisis facing today’s CMO and argue that the traditional, brand-focused marketing leader is becoming obsolete. In an era defined by data and AI, storytelling alone is no longer enough.
I introduce the concept of the CMO as a Value Engineer - a leader who aligns marketing directly with shareholder value and speaks the language of the CFO. Drawing on my experience scaling high-growth companies, I show how scale-ups operate with financial rigor, operational closeness, and full ownership of data and execution.
The session concludes with practical steps to redesign the role: flatten organizations, reduce agency dependency, bring digital competence in-house, and make marketing a true driver of enterprise value.
Triangulation: How to master Marketing Measurement and Maximize ROI
In this masterclass I gave at OMR in Hamburg, I address one of the biggest challenges facing modern marketers: how to measure performance in a privacy-first world where third-party cookies are disappearing and no single “source of truth” can be trusted.
I break down the strengths and limitations of three core methodologies - Lift Testing, Marketing Mix Modeling, and Multi-Touch Attribution - showing why each produces different ROI answers when used in isolation. Lift tests establish causal truth but are hard to scale. MMM offers a holistic, top-down view but relies on correlation. MTA provides granular, real-time optimization insights but is biased and incomplete.
The core thesis is Triangulation: orchestrating all three models together. Lift tests establish ground truth, MMM translates that into a financially coherent, company-wide view, and MTA adds the granularity needed for daily media optimization. The result is a unified measurement architecture that aligns marketing decisions with real incremental impact and sustainable ROI.
Result-Driven Execution
In this talk I gave in Milan, I share the methodology I learned during seven years as an executive at Rocket Internet: Result-Driven Execution - a practical framework for launching and scaling startups with speed and discipline.
Rather than focusing on ideas alone, I argue that success comes from execution built on three pillars: Vision, Value, and Velocity. Vision means choosing the right initiatives by understanding opportunity cost and avoiding low-impact distractions. Value means applying the Pareto principle to focus resources on the small set of actions that drive the majority of results. Velocity means testing ideas quickly through minimum viable experiments instead of overbuilding before validation.
Drawing on real examples from scaling businesses across markets, I show how disciplined prioritization, data skepticism, and rapid iteration turn uncertainty into structured progress. The session concludes with a behind-the-scenes look at how Rocket Internet operationalized these principles to launch companies in 100 days and build a repeatable execution machine.