Robert Reiz

Background

About Robert Reiz

I’m Robert Reiz and my passion is to invent & build digital products! After studying 5 years of computer science at FH Mannheim, I graduated successfully with a Diploma in 2005. In 2007 I founded my first company, the Mannheim-based Java consultancy agency PLOIN GmbH. The company did consultancy work for big clients in the region, based on time & material. As I had to collect timesheets from my employees and experts and manage multiple hourly rates to do the invoicing, I did build my own time tracking system for my expert pool. Somehow the REUTAX AG became aware of my time tracking solution and was interested in a white-label solution. The whole thing ended with them buying my company completely, in 2010. I then took different positions within different subsidiary companies of REUTAX AG. First I was Chief Architect Officer at ZEITGEIST at Work and then later I became Managing Director at WildGigs. 2012 I had a new idea which I wanted to implement. I left REUTAX AG and founded the VersionEye GmbH in Berlin. VersionEye is a tool which keeps an eye on your open source dependencies. It shows you which of your dependencies are outdated, which OS licenses they have and which of your dependencies are vulnerable. Originally it was built for B2C and for that use case I raised a little seed investment from Hasso Plattner Ventures. Unfortunately it didn’t work out and in 2014 the company was almost bankrupt. I relocated back to Mannheim, where I met an Angel investor who helped me to pivot the product towards B2B. With VersionEye Enterprise we won some big customers like SAP, Deutsche Bahn, XING, and Seeburger. However, growth was very slow and the competition was rising. So we decided to open source the whole product and end the business. End of 2017 I joined LivePerson as an R&D Group Lead. Back then the LP Mannheim office counted only 15 people. I kickstarted the LP FaaS project and was also heavily involved in recruiting. 2 years later I was leading 4 teams (FaaS, Accelerator, Houston, API Gateway) and the Mannheim office counted more than 60 people. As the LivePerson CTO was coming from Amazon, I had the pleasure to learn a lot about Amazon Leadership Principles. In 2020 I left LivePerson to work again on my own product(s). End of 2020 I started to build a time tracking system again. Because I recognised that there are still no good solutions for agencies who invoice by time & material and need to deal with multiple rates per expert & project. And now ZEIT.IO is much more than just time tracking. It’s a complete solution for a consulting business.