European Young Leaders (#EYL40)

Steffen has been a Member of the Bundestag since 2009 and Chairman of the North Württemberg district branch of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) political party since 2011. From 2018 to 2021 he served as Parliamentary State Secretary at the Federal Ministry of Transport and Digital Infrastructure in the cabinet of Chancellor Angela Merkel. Since the 2021 elections, Steffen has been serving as one his parliamentary group’s deputy chairs, under the leadership of chair Ralph Brinkhaus. In this capacity, he oversees the group’s legislative activities on agriculture, environmental policy, nature conservation and consumer protection.

Steffen is Director of the International Media Centre Hamburg. He researches and teaches with a focus on media sociology, social media, privacy and public sphere. His current research includes the transformation of privacy as a consequence of the internationalisation and digitalisation of media. He is a Founding Member of the Global Communication Association and is associated with numerous international organisations and think-tanks. He is a member of the selection committee of the German National Academic Foundation and several trusts to promote press freedom, human rights and democracy.

Prior to his current position of Global Head Consulting at Forvis Mazars Group, Jakob Haesler was the CEO and Co-Founder of Tinyclues SAS, a Paris-based software startup with the objective of industrialising datamining on Big Data with the help of advanced machine learning algorithms in a Cloud Computing environment. Previously, he was a partner and consultant at McKinsey & Company in Germany and France, where he worked on topics ranging from Banking to Public Sector Reform to Global Public Health issues, notably the creation and distribution of child HIV treatments. Haesler is also a founding partner of the ‘Cercle du Leadership’.

Fabian founded the leading German couponing company DailyDeal in 2009. To date he still leads DailyDeal together with his co-founder and brother. In private, he invests as a business angel in technology start-ups through his holding Heilemann Ventures. Before founding DailyDeal, Fabian worked for various German law firms and as a business consultant for Booz & Co. Prior to that, he passed the First Bar Exam of the State of Hamburg with distinctions and submitted a PhD thesis in Corporate Law at Heidelberg Law School. He was a visiting student at Santa Clara University and Stanford University, CA, USA and founded the Entrepreneurs Club at Bucerius Law School, Hamburg, Germany.

Lars is a serial entrepreneur and investor. He is the Founder and CEO of both Cinco Capital, a private equity fund that invested in tech companies throughout Europe and the United States, and HackFwd, a pre-seen venture capital company which invests in technical talent across Europe. Lars also founded XING, a networking platform dedicated to cultivating business contacts. His other projects include Apartimentum and politik-digital.de. Among the most successful web entrepreneurs in Germany, Lars has received several awards, including the 2004 German Internet Prize of the Federal Ministry of Economics and the Lead Award, Germany’s top award for print and online media. He was also elected Germany’s most important web entrepreneur in 2008 by the Startups Initiative. A true expert in his field, Lars is a member of the supervisory and advisory boards of various companies and advises politicians on digitalisation at the local, national and European levels. He is also an honorary member of the German Committee of UNICEF.