Our Team
Maria Sipka
Founder and Chief Executive Officer
Before starting Linqia, Maria spent 2 years at XING initially as their COO responsible for the company's international strategy and then as the Director of Community Development building and monetizing their groups and premium group offerings. She launched one of XING's flagship groups Global Business Women, attracting more than 15,000 women from around the world which is now famous for it's Positive Monday Booster.
From the age of 18, Maria founded and led a specialized communication/marketing agency for 10 years in Sydney, Australia focused on customer acquisition and retention strategies. More recently, she has worked with Fortune 100 companies (Nestle, Merck Serono, JTI) and organizations (YPO, Business Fights Poverty) consulting on online community and social media strategies.
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Connect to Maria on The Moderator Community
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Rainer Schwarz
Interim Chief Financial Officer
Rainer joined Linqia shortly after the idea was born as our interim Chief Financial Officer. He is the founder of multiple companies including Conmeta Consulting which offers financial consulting services to companies in the IT industry. He also co-founded e-tecture, an Internet technology company and Venture Management & Investment investing in high-tech and online start-up firms.
Connect to Rainer on LinkedIn
Albert Armengol
Product Strategy
Holding a Bachelor of Medicine and an MBA from ESADE, Albert has been actively participating in several projects related to new technologies (co-founding the medical content portal Galenicom 1999), and developing his career at companies like Terra Networks and DKV Insurance. In 2003 he founded eConozco, Spain's first social network which was later acquired by Xing AG - an operation of great strategic significance for the Spanish market.
Albert began to participate as a Business Angel in 2007 focusing on technology-based startups and is currently leading Linqia's product strategy.
Karl Saynor
User Interface
'Without your users, you've got nothing.'
Karl is a highly-experienced and commercial-astute Senior User Experience Architect. Possessing a broad skill set, ranging from web strategy to detailed user journey design, he brings a refreshing clarity to the commercially-critical business of user experience.
Becoming increasingly frustrated with the system-integrator's approach to digital development and user experience, he left Accenture to pursue a more user-centric approach to an increasingly valuable market channel. He has worked as a senior consultant to many of London's top digital agencies, including: LBi, Publicis, TMW & Ogilvy. Karl was the lead architect for britishgas.co.uk, tedbaker.com and bentleymotors.com and has worked for many other brands including Starbucks, Marks & Spencer and Unilever.
Having the luxury to somewhat pick and choose his projects, Karl elected to work with Linqia because he intrinsically understood the paradigm-shifting (his words!) potential that connecting brands to conversations represents.
Marco Lazzeri
Developer
Marco Lazzeri is the lead developer at Linqia and responsible for the systems infrastructure. Marco joined Linqia at the time the company was founded in 2007. With over 10 years of experience developing web solutions, Marco has worked on projects from large enterprises to start-ups.
Marco is currently designing the architecture of Linqia's core Marketplace platform, focusing on reliability, performance and scalability for all critical components.
Prior to Linqia, Marco worked for 4 years as an adviser at Wind Telecomunicazioni, Italy's third largest telecommunication company. At Wind, Marco designed and supervised the development of their analysis and reporting systems, ranging from the company's KPIs to the performance analysis of their systems infrastructure.
Amongst other projects, Marco realized the first management system and social network for the Italian Society of Medical Radiology, connecting thousands of doctors and providing technological infrastructure to their annual national conference. As an entrepreneur he also successfully developed and commercialized an online/offline booking and management system for hotels.
The team at LABEL.ch
IT and marketing specialists
Label.ch are helping Linqia develop and launch the Linqia marketplace platform. Leveraging a strong team of 50+ IT and marketing specialists, LABEL.ch is a leading Swiss company headquartered in Geneva.
Board
Maria Sipka Founder and CEO at Starfish Community Group S.L.
Rainer Schwarz Founder of Conmeta Consulting, Interim CFO at Starfish Community Group S.L.
Arnaud Grobet Founder and CEO of LABEL
Patrick Thiebaud Partner and COO of LABEL
Abir Oreibi Former Director, Marketing & Business Development EMEA at Alibaba.com
Advisory Board
Esther Dyson Investor at Starfish Community Group S.L.
Aaron Emigh Former EVP Core Technologies Six Apart
Boris Pfeifferà General Manager of internet advertising & fees Monster Europe
Nicole Simon European New Media Pioneer & Specialist
Dr. Julia Prats Professor and head of department for Entrepreneurship at IESE Business School
Albert Armengol Investor at Starfish Community Group S.L.