About

I'm Richard Stahl. I live in Vienna, and for going on thirty years I've worked in the place where technology meets the business that has to sell it, fund it, and make it pay off.

That has mostly meant the commercial side of enterprise technology (business development, sales, product, innovation) with the P&L sitting on my own desk. I started out engineering. I can write code, but and continue to do it as hobbyist. I managed engineering projects, spent a long stretch running large deals and the teams behind them. These days my work centers on enterprise software and AI now rearranging it.

What keeps me interested is the part no single org chart owns: the space between functions. That gap is where the genuinely hard problems live and, not by coincidence, where most of the expensive mistakes get made.

There's a European thread through all of it. As a teenager I read Stefan Zweig, and in The World of Yesterday I was handed a kind of promise: a Europe you could move through as one place. The way I pictured it then, you might wake in Vienna, take lunch in Prague, and still make the evening opera in Budapest, the whole continent strung together by high speed railway. Zweig was writing an elegy, not a brochure but I still hang on to it.

I care about how technology gets built in and for Europe, under European rules and European constraints, against the tired assumption that the only work worth doing happens in the Bay Area.

I also keep circling back to the people technology quietly leaves out. My parents were optimists about it, believers really, for as long as I can remember, and a good stretch of their working lives was spent inside IBM. And yet even they lost the grip of how the can use today's technology. I think technology industry is building for a narrower slice of people than it likes to admit, with seniors kept out. That bothers me enough to keep thinking - and occasionally writing - about it.

When I'm away from a keyboard I'm usually somewhere uphill: in the mountains, on a bike, outside. I never own the correct number of bikes (which is of course n+1).

If something here lands, or you'd like to tell me I've got it wrong, you'll find me at kontakt@richard-stahl.at.