Marco Börries (born 1 August 1968) is a German IT entrepreneur. He is best known as the founder of

Star Division Star Division (also written as Star-Division) was a German software company best known for developing the now discontinued StarOffice suite. It was founded in 1985 by 16-year-old Marco Börries in Lüneburg as a garage company. After a neighbou ...

, who developed

StarOffice StarOffice is a discontinued proprietary software, proprietary office suite. Its source code continues today in derived open-source office suites Collabora Online and LibreOffice. StarOffice supported the OpenOffice.org XML file format, as well ...

, which later became

OpenOffice.org OpenOffice.org (OOo), commonly known as OpenOffice, is a discontinued open-source office suite. Active successor projects include LibreOffice (the most actively developed) and Collabora Online, with Apache OpenOffice being considered mostly d ...

. Börries founded Star Division at 16, launching the word processor StarWriter, which later became StarOffice, the foundation of OpenOffice and LibreOffice. He also founded Star Finanz, a home banking software provider, and later founded VerdiSoft, which developed Yahoo! Go technology. After selling VerdiSoft to Yahoo, Börries founded NumberFour AG, providing an open software platform for small businesses under the brand name Enfore. He was also involved in other ventures like Adhoc Mobile GmbH and Mag10 GmbH, which did not reach market entry.

Career

Inspired by a student exchange program to

Silicon Valley Silicon Valley is a region in Northern California that is a global center for high technology and innovation. Located in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area, it corresponds roughly to the geographical area of the Santa Clara Valley ...

while he attended a Gymnasium in

Lüneburg Lüneburg, officially the Hanseatic City of Lüneburg and also known in English as Lunenburg, is a town in the German Bundesland (Germany), state of Lower Saxony. It is located about southeast of another Hanseatic League, Hanseatic city, Hambur ...

, Marco Börries founded

as a garage company at the age of 16. As its first product the company distributed StarWriter, a

word processor A word processor (WP) is a device or computer program that provides for input, editing, formatting, and output of text, often with some additional features. Early word processors were stand-alone devices dedicated to the function, but current word ...

application developed by friends, as an alternative to

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

's office package. StarWriter later became

(and thereby was the foundation to

OpenOffice OpenOffice or open office may refer to: Computing Software * OpenOffice.org (OOo), a discontinued open-source office software suite, originally based on StarOffice * Apache OpenOffice (AOO), a derivative of OOo by the Apache Software Foundation, ...

and

LibreOffice LibreOffice () is a free and open-source office productivity software suite developed by The Document Foundation (TDF). It was created in 2010 as a fork of OpenOffice.org, itself a successor to StarOffice. The suite includes applications ...

). StarOffice was sold over 25 million times. On 5 August 1999 Börries sold Star Division to

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc., often known as Sun for short, was an American technology company that existed from 1982 to 2010 which developed and sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services. Sun contributed sig ...

, where Börries was subsequently briefly employed. In parallel to Star Division Börries also founded the Hamburg-based company Star Finanz as a

joint venture A joint venture (JV) is a business entity created by two or more parties, generally characterized by shared ownership, shared returns and risks, and shared governance. Companies typically pursue joint ventures for one of four reasons: to acce ...

with Deutsche Sparkassen-Organisation, a German savings bank. With StarMoney the company grew to become a significant provider of

home banking Online banking, also known as internet banking, virtual banking, web banking or home banking, is a system that enables customers of a bank or other financial institution to conduct a range of financial transactions through the financial institut ...

software in the years following. In early 2001, Börries sold his shares in this company as well. In August 2001, Börries founded VerdiSoft and served as its CEO. The company developed the Yahoo! Go technology to enable

mobile phone A mobile phone or cell phone is a portable telephone that allows users to make and receive calls over a radio frequency link while moving within a designated telephone service area, unlike fixed-location phones ( landline phones). This rad ...

s to have screen-optimized access to emails, photos, messages and other web content. VerdiSoft including its technology know-how was sold to

Yahoo Yahoo (, styled yahoo''!'' in its logo) is an American web portal that provides the search engine Yahoo Search and related services including My Yahoo, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo News, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, y!entertainment, yahoo!life, an ...

in February 2005, where Börries worked as an Executive Vice President in the ''Connected Life'' division until April 2009. Until 2008 Börries lived with his wife and three children in California, but then moved to Hamburg and Berlin in Germany. On 1 September 2009, Marco Börries launched his latest business idea, NumberFour AG, based in Berlin. The company developed an open software platform (

PaaS Platform as a service (PaaS) or application platform as a service (aPaaS) or platform-based service is a cloud computing service model where users provision, instantiate, run and manage a modular bundle of a computing platform and applications, w ...

) for the development, distribution and marketing of vertical services for

small business Small businesses are types of corporations, partnerships, or sole proprietorships which have a small number of employees and/or less annual revenue than a regular-sized business or corporation. Businesses are defined as "small" in terms of being ...

es. After four years of development, Börries gathered 38 million USD from financial investors in mid 2013. The company launched a platform for small business in March 2017 connecting online services, software and hardware ( PoS terminals). In September 2024, insolvency proceedings were initiated against NumberFour AG. Börries himself is reportedly under investigation on suspicion of delaying insolvency. Other entrepreneurial activities that did not lead to market entries were Adhoc Mobile GmbH, founded in 2009, and Mag10 GmbH, founded in 2010. This was a company to develop a service for tablet publishing, but was shelved at the end of 2011.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Borries, Marco Businesspeople from Lower Saxony 1968 births Living people People from Lüneburg

Career

References

Further reading

External links