Take us back to the year 2000, when the internet still was young. Why did you join what later became jobs.ch?
It all began when I talked to founder Thomas Sterchi. I was fascinated by the guy and his vision to create a job-related search engine. At that time, I was 27 and had just finished training as a sales manager. I had helped to grow a small local TV station from 15 to 60 employees and was ready for change. Eventually, Thomas Sterchi created a position for me that wasn’t even needed at the time: Head of Sales and Marketing.

You became CEO one year later. How do you remember this first phase of growing the company to a dozen employees?
It was chaotic (laughs). We were educated by the customers, did educate them and made a lot of mistakes. But this isn’t a bad thing. This happens when you just start out with an idea and some courage. After 2000, the big internet hype came to a crash, but luckily, we held up quite well.

What happened next?
Once we had found the right product-market fit we grew the company rapidly to around 50 people. This company size still allows you to lead directly without a layer of middle managers. I like being close to the team. We weren’t seeking publicity, didn’t attend all the startup events out there. We grew in the shadow of the big players and stayed focused. Staying focused is the most important lesson I learned. You always have many exciting ideas about what you could do next. Why not expand to Germany? To Italy? Why not do cars or real estate on the platform as well? But it is better not to pursue all these ideas. Instead of doing many things and spread ourselves out thin, we focused only on Switzerland and we focused only on jobs. That was how we built a strong market position. For our global competitor monster.com, Switzerland was just not important enough. But for us it was.

“Staying focused is the most important lesson I learned”

When you became the number 1 job marketplace in Switzerland, you started to get noticed by traditional media houses whose lunch you were eating. Interestingly enough they didn’t move: It was the American private equity firm Tiger Global who took a majority stake in jobs.ch in 2007. The sum was never disclosed but allegedly it was around CHF 100 million. How did this happen?
The time when exit considerations became important was very interesting. We started to hurt the newspapers because we took away their revenue from job advertisements, this is true. We talked to all of them, but at that time, they didn’t realize what value our digital job board had. They thought we were crazy. They told us that for this kind of money, they wouldn’t even buy other newspapers. Tiger Global, in contrast, understood very well what we were doing. They already had 7 portfolio firms in the jobs space and they asked exactly the right questions, the first being: Will the management stay on board?

Tiger’s investment paid off nicely. Jobs.ch was sold for CHF 390 million to Tamedia and Ringier in 2012. The media houses could no longer ignore what was happening. You stayed on board as CEO for 3 more years. Was that a period of triumph for you?
No, it was not always an easy time. I am an entrepreneur at heart, but I became more of a manager. I had to eliminate overlap and cut costs because Tamedia brought its own platform Jobup to the deal. We had grown to 140 people. There were established processes for everything. Managing is not what I want to do with my time. Eventually, I retired as a CEO and later also from the board.

You spent 15 years at Jobs.ch. I imagine that leaving a company you helped to grow from an idea to a big success story was a drastic step for you. How did you prepare for that?
I wrote my bucket list before I decided to leave. I estimated that it would take half a year to do most of the items on the list. I spent time with my kids, earned my golfing license and motorboat license, renovated my house and just relaxed. I spent 8 months doing all that. In the beginning, headhunters kept calling me. They couldn’t understand that I needed a break. They thought I had a burnout (laughs). But when you’re working at such a high pace for such a long time, you need a real break eventually.

Apparently, golfing didn’t keep you busy for the rest of your life.
I like having goals and being an entrepreneur too much for that. But it took me a while to find out what I wanted to become. There were many options: Working as a consultant to help companies? Or become a professional board member? A business angel?

To what conclusions did you come?
I’m not a business angel. I did some direct investments myself, looked at business plans and listened to pitches. But I think this is horrible work. I prefer that Verve Ventures does that work for me. But investing in startups is a learning process as well. I started to invest broadly, but I’ve realized that I prefer to concentrate on companies I’m really interested in. I am a board member of a few companies I believe in, including TestingTime, one of Verve Ventures’ portfolio companies. But in the end, I realized that I want to be an entrepreneur again. So that’s what I did.

You’re back in the game as CEO of Picstars, a Zurich-based software platform for influencer marketing. How did you learn about Picstars?
It was a colleague who sent me a pitch deck from the company. I didn’t understand a thing but was curious. So I met this guy, Henrik Kammermann, who explained to me what he wanted to do. Again, I didn’t understand what he was talking about. But the combination of sports and social media sounded exciting and it was in the field of digital media I felt comfortable with. So I did some consulting work first and then became an investor before deciding to join Picstars as CEO. That’s how it works: If you’re a founder, you’ll have to attract people with your interesting idea. It’s the reason they’ll join you.

How much of that initial pitch deck is still valid today?
Since 2016 we changed our core service at least three times. It is less about sports and events now, for instance, and more about lifestyle, fashion, and beauty. Picstars today is a digital service platform for brands and agencies to create creative influencer marketing campaigns. Our software takes care of the whole process from influencer search and selection to payments, drastically reducing the time spent on these things. We have a large and growing pool of influencers we’ve reviewed and approved. Picstars works with top brands, creative agencies and media houses in the DACH region. We’re busy expanding our footprint in Germany now.

Is changing the focus of a startup a good or a bad thing?
The world of social media is changing very fast. You have to be able to run at the same speed and adapt to what is coming next. We’ll adapt our offering constantly to keep up with trends. Today, Instagram is the channel of choice for influencers and brands. But soon we’ll add Twitch as a channel, for instance, because e-sports is a huge and growing market. Brands want to be represented where the attention of the young generation is.

Many people don’t realize the extent to which media usage is changing. How do you explain to them what influencer marketing is?
Word-of-mouth-recommendations are as old as humanity. For buying decisions, we rely on what our friends tell us. Now, this includes digital friends. Our generation knew that Michael Jackson drank Pepsi because we got bombarded with this message by the offline media. Influencer marketing is a new name for an old concept. What has changed is that you don’t need billboards anymore, you need to be on the digital channels. When I was a teenager I dreamt of becoming a football star. Teenagers today dream of becoming a Youtuber. They don’t read print newspapers anymore and they don’t watch linear TV. This is a massive shift and a big threat to traditional media houses. For us, it is a fascinating opportunity.

“Teenagers today dream of becoming a Youtuber”

How much of this do the people that control the advertising spending understand?
A few of them are very far ahead of the pack. Take L’Oréal, for example, they have been doing influencer marketing for 8 years already. But the majority still needs an explanation of the benefits. Take, for instance, the creativity of influencers. They all have their own way of taking photos and videos and approaching a topic. If you work with a dozen of them, you’ll get a dozen different creative implementations of your idea instead of just one.

Coming back to your role at Picstars: Is being Mark Sandmeier helpful for fundraising?
We did the seed financing for Picstars with friends and family and were able to raise quite some money. Many of those who invested told me: Mark, I don’t understand it all but I believe in you. In the beginning, that felt amazing. But later I realized that taking money from friends increases the pressure substantially. In a later stage, my reputation certainly helped to assure strategic investors. The management of Tamedia, for example, knew me and was convinced that I could pull it off.

How big will Picstars be in 5 years?
I didn’t speculate about growth perspectives as CEO of Jobs.ch and I won’t start to do it now. More important than fast growth is the right positioning of our product in the market. This is how we beat the competition of Jobs.ch, by developing a product perfectly suited for the customer, and this is what we want to do now. Growth will come as a consequence of this.

Suppose it does: What will you do with your time when Picstars eventually gets sold?
Work on my bucket list again (laughs). I don’t have a grand vision that keeps me busy my whole life, I’m just fascinated by the possibilities of digital media. And I enjoy working on an exciting product together with a great team at Picstars. I’m not worried about exit considerations now, there will be the right time with the right price.