Every top athlete gets up in the morning with the goal to be a better version of themselves by the end
of the day.
This mindset is our inspiration.
We are your partners. Together with you and your organisation we support you to build the Future of Sports.
Christian is a Founding Partner of Partners for Sports and one of its two Managing Directors.
He is a senior sports executive with 20+ years of experience in sports & entertainment. He held long-standing senior positions in sports marketing (Infront for 16 years) and strategic management consulting (McKinsey for 6 years). Recently he oversaw all digital businesses of Infront (Infront X) and all digital innovation (Infront Lab). Over the course of his career, Christian has worked with the largest sports organizations in the world such as the FIFA and UEFA, the IOC, the NFL and PGA Tour, FIS, the IIHF and World Rugby, numerous International and National Olympic Federations, and many international leagues and teams and clubs in various sports. He launched several in-house start-ups including a sports metaverse in 2006, and was a board member of several start-ups that Infront invested in.
Christian serves on on various boards and advisory boards of both for-profit organizations like Socios.com and Castello Coin, as well as numerous non-profit organizations, including the Business Administration Steering Committee of the University of Zurich, the Advisory Board for Sports Economy of the FFHS (Distant Learning University of Switzerland), and ThinkSport.
He is a lecturer and Senior Researcher for sports economy at the FFHS and regularly holds lectures and seminars at other academic institutions. He is a sought-after speaker and podium participant for conferences on the subject of sport and technology.
Christian holds a PhD in Technical Chemistry and a degree in Chemical Engineering from the Swiss Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH Zurich). Furthermore, he holds a continuing education degree in Data Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MITx). He prefers to develop in Python but is versatile in other programming environments.
He is married and has four teenage children that ensure he’s always up-to-date with the latest technological and social phenomena. He practices various sports, including cycling, but is also a self-confessed gamer.
Mike is a Founding Partner of Partners for Sports and one of its two Managing Directors.
He has been a high-performance athlete (Canoe Slalom) for more than 20 years competing at three Olympic Games (Athens 2004, Beijing 2008 and London 2012). Mike was the first Swiss athlete to be ranked in the top 3 of the official world ranking and the overall World Cup.
He is also the founder and former CEO of the world’s leading crowdfunding platform for athletes (I Believe in You). Founded in 2012, the company quickly became a success story with subsidiaries in four countries and more than 20 employees. Mike successful sold his shares in 2020. He is also the founder of Switzerland’s most successful Crowdfunding-Platform for social projects («I care for you» ) and has recently supported various innovation projects and SportsTech-Startups.
In 2016 he got elected as a member of the Executive Board of Swiss Olympic and in 2018 he became the President of Swiss University Sports (3rd biggest Sports Federation in Switzerland). Furthermore, he is a lecturer for Innovation and Sports Management and an Advisory Board Member at FFHS (Distance Learning University of Switzerland). He is also a board member of ThinkSport and the founder and President of «Short Track - Swiss Ice Movement», which is a national support program to promote Ice Skating.
He is married and lives in Solothurn. Mike has a degree in Business Administration, still is a passionate white-water canoeist and loves to travel.
Valentin is a passionate software engineer with over 20 years of experience in building sustainable IT solutions.
After his degree in computer science, he started to develop innovative live streaming solutions and became active as a service provider. He brought numerous medium and large projects to life in the areas of web and app development, machine learning and computer vision.
In 2019, he migrated from Germany to Switzerland to build the sports tech startup Asport inside Swisscom. As the CTO he was responsible for the development and people management of internal and external engineers. In doing so, he enabled highly innovative technology and AI solutions to help well-known customers in the Swiss sports scene to increase their market value by a much more attractive digital sports presence.
Valentin has two children and lives with his family in Zurich. He actively plays volleyball and loves to spend his free time mountaineering, running, cycling, climbing and ski touring.
Elad is a self-taught programmer, developed his first projects in Junior High School. Was hands on for almost 10 years, mainly as a software developer and then R&D manager developing complex video projects. After which he stopped coding and focused on product design, operations and CEO positions.
Following his master's education Elad took the entrepreneurial path and co-founded several successful startups in the EdTech, fintech and SportsTech spaces.
In the last couple of years Elad mentors companies in two global accelerators – Techstars and HYPE (focus on fintech and SportsTech). He consults those mainly on product market fit, unit economics, storytelling, lean development and go-to-market.
Elad holds a B.Sc (Computer Science), an M.A (Philosophy, Information and Digital Culture) from Tel Aviv University in Israel. His focus in the past few years is Game Theory and Collaborative platforms. He is a keynote lecturer in organizations and conferences, in Israel and abroad. He is also a guest lecturer in Haifa’s University (p2p production courses) and is now working on a PhD paper researching the role a mentor plays in the success of a business.
Elad holds an Austrian and Israeli passports and currently lives is Mishmeret Israel, He’s married with 4 kids (+1 coming up as his wife is 39 weeks pregnant at the time of writing those lines).
Book a free 30 minute call with one of our experts to identify how we can help to boost your sports project.
