Andreas Rainer

Background

About Andreas Rainer

When I went to primary school I had straight A´s in all subjects every single year. Back then I always thought that I deserve this, but when I grew up my mother destroyed that illusion for me in countless dinner tales where she would talk about my teacher who gave me an A grade in things like mathematics even though I clearly didn´t deserve it. My teacher apparently had justified this by telling my mother that "someone who can write that well won´t need mathematics in his life anyway". So now you know it: I suck at math. Good thing that my primary school teacher was right: my ability to write and communicate has done me well in all of my professional life. It managed to get me on a Fulbright scholarship to teach German in the US. It helped a lot during my year in Montreal where I was working at the Montreal Holocaust Centre and spending a lot of time with holocaust survivors. In the last six years of my life it helped me build up the review platform Yelp in Vienna from scratch and after my promotion to Marketing Director for Yelp´s largest international marketing team covering ten countries in Northern and Eastern Europe. While marketing and social media was my main profession during my time with Yelp, I went back to honouring the faith that my primary school teacher put in my writing: I published two books, both of which made the Austrian bestseller list. Furthermore, I am trying to bring Vienna's melánge de tristesse to the world through my page Wiener Alltagspoeten that has grown to followers on Instagram and has become what the professionals would call a social media phenomenon in Austria. In any case, I should definitely call my former teacher and tell her that she is on my linkedin profile.