Jon Schröder

Where were you born, where were you raised?

I was born in the beautiful harbor city of Hamburg and grew up in the Northern German countryside.

What is the area you are from famous for?

The area & county I am from takes a lot of pride in being one of the few counties in Europe that was never ruled by outsiders and maintained autonomy & independence, giving us the humbling identity of being a Free Peasant Republic. My home county Dithmarschen is bordered by the North Sea and similar to the Netherlands, my people have reclaimed through centuries of ingenious coastal engineering the majority of our todays very fertile land. And what are a bunch of German peasants doing with fertile land? Exactly - grow cabbage! And a lot of it. We are known to be Germany’s cabbage capital. However, in the past 2 decades our savvy cabbage farmers realized that they can not only farm the land, but also the wind. Dithmarschen was home to the first new-generation windmill in Germany and is to this day the county that produces the most green energy in Germany. I guess we are still striving for independence and autonomy in 21st century terms. If you want to experience the Energiewende - come and visit us in the Green Energy Valley!

What did/do your parents do?

My parents met in Hamburg during their studies. After, my mom went on to do a trainee in the clothing retail company Peek & Cloppenburg (think Karstadt), and got trained to be a professional buyer for fabrics for the supply chain of P&C. To this day, she still talks about the exciting times when the company sent her to Hong Kong, Morocco, and Singapore in the 80s to scout and search for new fabrics and patterns. After, she got pregnant with me and that marked the end of her career. My dad on the other hand joined multiple SMEs in Southern Germany to be trained as a manager after university. He spent some years in Southern Germany before he came back to Northern Germany when my mother got pregnant. He has worked across a few domains like B2B distribution, retail, and manufacturing.

Any siblings when you grew up?

I grew up with two younger sisters - making my childhood primarily about the great Lego / Playmobil / Barbie wars.

What are the two things (outside of school) that you spent the most time on when you were a kid or teenager?

The first thing I obsessed about in my early teens was honestly as nerdy as it gets. I was a die hard fan of Warhammer and spent countless hours building, painting, creating, forming and ideating a physical miniature fantasy world. All while listening to either Limb Bizkit or Linkin Park. As concerned as my parents were back then about me, it actually does me good to this day because I believe I acquired a skill to get into a deep focus fairly fast and over very long periods of time. Just my taste in music has changed drastically - thanks Berlin!

The second thing I spent a lot of time on throughout my teenage years, was technology. I wasn’t a programmer per se, but I had deep interests for hardware and pushing it to its limits. This had a weird transformative take on my life because I quickly realized that some of the computationally hardest things back then was high resolution video & photo editing. So I went on to get a camera and a GoPro to start playing around with the hardware first but then also push the software & hardware to the max when editing the footage. Since I wasn’t particularly interested in storytelling, I started filming primarily my friends or myself in sports or nature. That sparked the next interest in doing water & winter sports, which I to this day practice as frequently as time allows. Thank you technology!

What are you missing from your younger years?

For sure spending a lot of time with my family and bantering over school and weekend shenanigans with my sisters. Otherwise, I am someone that is pretty comfortable in the here and now, and excited for tomorrow!

Did you have a side job during school?

I had multiple actually. My first one was probably the worst one I ever had and in retrospect nothing short of child labor. I was helping out a friend of my dad, who had a small meat distribution operation. My tasks ranged from cleaning the room-sized freezer (while freezing), to carrying fully frozen piglets over my shoulder to the distribution van, and repackaging raw intestines. I was 12.

I went on to help out in a local DIY store, which was a lot of fun actually. I primarily was tasked to either replenish shelves or clean up, but every now and then I got the opportunity to build and assemble garden houses, playground equipment, or lawn mowers. It was awesome.

Last but not least, during my second last year in school, I worked as a cashier at a local supermarket. This, however, ended with a small incident, where I was working the late shift on a Saturday until 9PM and then went straight afterwards to a party. I stayed on the party until very late, had a lot of drinks and got home basically wasted. The next morning - Sunday breakfast is a holy thing in my family - I got to the breakfast table still half drunk, took the cereals carton and pulled it over my plate, like I was at a cashier trying to scan the cereals box. My family looked at me shocked and decided it was time to quit.

What did you study, and where?

I was a bit of a restless student to be honest. I went to 4 different universities in 3 years during my bachelors degree. I started with Business Administration at the Humboldt University in Berlin - didn’t like it - and switched after 2 semesters to the Free University in Berlin, continuing my studies. Once again, I didn’t like it at all - so after 2 semesters I went on to study abroad and chose Stellenbosch in South Africa. This was a transformative moment for me and a time I really like to look back to. I stayed for almost a year, studying finance, M&A, and innovation but with an African perspective. Still in Africa, I figured out a way to study in the States and played my freshly acquired African perspective on economics to my favor, applied to a few universities with a paper about the broken tax system in South Africa, and got accepted for a term abroad in Stanford, the academic heart of Silicon Valley. I wrote my thesis while in Stanford and took a few classes outside my usual business scope and focused more on computer science, design thinking and psychology.

I came back to Europe and got a Management & Technology degree at the Copenhagen Business School in Denmark, where I continued to live and work for another 3 years after school.

Summarize your work after university and before Foundamental.

I joined a publicly traded ConTech SaaS company in Sweden called BIMobject. It is to this day the biggest manufacturer-specific 3D asset database with the largest AEC user community in the world. It was an amazing time - it felt like I did an AEC industry trainee because I was frequently in contact with basically every stakeholder under the sun in construction. It taught me how to utilize data at scale in a global context, gave me the opportunity to travel the world and connect with AEC firms across geographies (primarily DACH, NORDICS, UK, Spain, Australia, USA, Canada), and truly understand some core principles and issues of our industry. The CEO of the company took me under his wings and put me on a variety of projects, which started with M&A projects, be his sounding board for some industry & product matters, to become his not formally but as a matter of fact chief of staff. We jointly prepared for the strategy day 2024, which was intense but also exciting at the same time. Afterwards, he moved me onto one of his strategic bets and tasked me to build, grow and manage a newly formed venture within the company while simultaneously preparing the global expansion of our refined business model & product portfolio. It was a messy but amazingly insightful time I do not want to miss in my career.

What is your story of getting into Foundamental?

This is a very long one actually. Happy to share the full story over a beer if you are interested. But to put the process of getting into Foundamental shortly: you need persistency, patience, and coach ability until the stars are aligning!

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