Skip to main content

On Mission, Markets, and Moving Forward

This is my personal blog (again). Perhaps it feels a bit antiquated in 2026, posting on Blogger while the world moves to Substack, but I’m returning to the open web because I value the lack of walled gardens. I want to write, to think, and to have conversations without conditions.

The last two decades—living and working between London and Köln—have been a long exercise in intentionality. Since leaving the USA in 2006 to complete my doctorate in medical physics, I have tried to live at the intersection of deep science and human impact. My stories from this journey will live here, under #StoriesITellMyself.

For the past six years, my primary focus has been Project Singfinger. Alongside my wife, Meike, we built a platform to help not-yet-speaking children—like our son—communicate through German Sign Language. We successfully navigated the complexities of design thinking, AI integration, and hardware/software deployment, building a YouTube community of 6,000+ subscribers, producing inclusive films for the German public broadcaster, publishing songbooks and launching apps on both the Apple and Google Play stores. We were proud to secure funding from the RheinEnergie Stiftung and the Kämpgen Stiftung to make this a reality.

Recently, we attempted something much harder than the technology itself: with the help of InClub e.V., we tried to transition Singfinger from a charity into a self-sustaining social enterprise. We wanted to build a model that could support both the mission and our family, and we launched a community on Circle that brings the best of everything and everybody we've touched together in one online community of parents, teachers and therapists.

I have to be honest: we didn't solve that problem.

Despite our best efforts, we couldn't find the bridge between deep social impact and commercial sustainability in the way we envisioned. It was a hard, humbling lesson in the friction that exists between mission-driven work and market mechanics. It was a massive undertaking, and while the business model didn't take hold, the mission did. To ensure Singfinger continues to serve the community, we are transitioning the operational leadership back to our partner, Bundesverband Down Syndrom e.V.

I will continue to support Singfinger as a volunteer, but this chapter has also clarified my own path. I have realized that my highest and most effective contribution lies in the technical architecture behind the impact.

I am now looking for my next professional chapter in creative technology and engineering.

I am looking for roles in health-tech or med-tech—places where complex engineering meets human necessity. I am particularly interested in solving problems at the liminal spaces where two distinct worlds collide and intersect—the human and machine, design and science, our stories and the facts that underpin them. If you are running a funded startup and need someone who has been in the trenches of building, scaling, and even failing at the intersection of tech and humanity, I would love to have a chat.

In the meantime, I'll be sharing more observations on design, AI, and the reality of social entrepreneurship under #FieldStories.

Thanks for reading, for being curious, and for wanting to make the world a little better.

Comments