I love complexity.
Why? And what does that have to do with the future of our health, artificial intelligence, and the way we build companies?
More than you might think.
For around 25 years, I've been developing digital platforms, connecting people, and turning technological possibilities into working products and business models.
From the beginning, the idea was to bring people together through shared interests and topics in digital communities. Later came the idea of making those connections tangible in physical places — connecting people online so they could meet in real life and pursue their interests together.
That enthusiasm has never faded. Neither has the desire to understand technology from the ground up. From the initial idea through architecture, code, and technical infrastructure to business processes, organizational design, and economic viability. Building things myself and experimenting with new technologies remain an essential part of what I do.
One thing has become increasingly clear: The greatest opportunities emerge from how individual components work together. And the real challenge is making that complexity useful to people.
Progress Requires Adaptability
Technology is opening up extraordinary opportunities. Artificial intelligence, in particular, is fundamentally changing how we process information, develop software, support decisions, and build companies.
What makes this so exciting is the pace of change.
New models, frameworks, and integration capabilities are emerging at an accelerating rate. Following these developments, evaluating them early, and quickly putting them to the test has become part of everyday work.
What matters is the ability to assess developments, recognize connections, and consistently apply new insights.
This applies to technology just as much as it does to organizations.
Today, a company can be designed from the ground up with a very high degree of automation. End-to-end value streams, intelligent processes, and systems that process information, support decisions, and independently handle recurring tasks.
But this goes far beyond efficiency.
The more routine work and organizational overhead we can take on with intelligent systems, the more freedom we create for human capabilities, creativity, and personal development.
The belief that technological progress can ultimately give us greater freedom and autonomy is a powerful motivation.
A well-designed organization should enable people to contribute where their abilities create the greatest value: through experience, responsibility, empathy, and new ideas.
From Complex Systems to the Human Body
Around 15 years ago, a growing curiosity drew me toward a very different kind of complex system: the human body.
How do our organs and metabolic processes work? How do nutrition, physical activity, environmental factors, and health interact? What are the long-term effects of certain habits and everyday exposures?
The deeper I explored these questions, the more fascinated I became by the interplay of countless biological processes.
Around that time, my children were born. Watching them grow up remains one of the most remarkable experiences of my life. A miracle of life that continues to demonstrate just how extraordinarily adaptable and complex our bodies are.
There were also very difficult health situations within my family.
These experiences shaped me as a person and helped me learn how to navigate challenging circumstances. To remain open to new insights, adapt quickly when situations change, and stay capable of taking action even in moments of great uncertainty.
Through it all, I've held on to something that matters deeply to me: the confidence to look ahead, find solutions, and approach even difficult situations with a positive mindset.
Above all, these experiences reinforced how valuable health is and how important it is to understand our own bodies.
Understanding Complexity — and Connecting the Dots
To me, there is a fascinating parallel between developing digital platforms and the human body.
Both depend on the interaction of specialized components and complex interdependencies. A change in one area can have far-reaching effects across the entire system.
Understanding these relationships opens up new perspectives.
Medical knowledge continues to advance. Increasingly precise diagnostic capabilities, new treatment approaches, and highly specialized medical disciplines are creating tremendous opportunities.
At the same time, navigating our increasingly complex healthcare system is becoming more demanding. Health information and test results now come from a growing number of sources, extending well beyond traditional healthcare settings.
A blood test at a retail store, unexpected results from a health check, wearable data, or different assessments from medical specialists. What happens next? What do these findings mean together? How should they be interpreted? What are the appropriate next steps, and where can someone find the right support?
The people navigating this healthcare system every day deserve tremendous respect. Physicians, nurses, and many other healthcare professionals bring exceptional expertise to their work and accomplish remarkable things every day, often under challenging conditions. As medical knowledge expands and specialization increases, so do the demands placed on them.
At the same time, people taking care of their health — whether proactively or while managing a medical condition — face the challenge of understanding growing amounts of information, recognizing connections, and making informed decisions.
This is where I see enormous potential in using intelligent technologies to support both sides: making medical knowledge more accessible, facilitating collaboration across specialties, and giving people greater clarity, confidence, and control over their health.
Why Liver & Heart?
This is exactly where our vision for Liver & Heart begins.
We are building an AI-powered platform for prevention, patient identification, and care navigation in metabolic health.
Our starting point is the liver. It plays a central role in metabolism and is closely connected to cardiovascular disease, obesity, type 2 diabetes, and many other health conditions.
Metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease (MASLD) affects a significant proportion of the population and often goes undetected for years.
This is where we want to make a difference: reaching people earlier, improving health literacy, making relevant connections easier to understand, and helping people access appropriate prevention and care services.
At the center are structured Health Journeys that guide people from their initial questions through understanding their health situation to preparing for and taking meaningful next steps.
We aim to connect these individuals with healthcare professionals, organizations, and partners in a shared, journey-driven ecosystem.
One principle is particularly important to me: personal agency and sovereignty.
In health, this means being able to understand information, recognize connections, and make informed, independent decisions.
Digital sovereignty means maintaining control over personal data and consciously deciding which information is used or shared, with whom, and for what purpose.
We want to strengthen both.
AI as the Foundation for a New Kind of Health Guidance
The technological possibilities for making this vision a reality are evolving at an extraordinary pace.
With Liver & Heart, we are building a multilingual, scalable platform designed to bring together structured health information, knowledge sources, people, and organizations.
Artificial intelligence is a fundamental capability of the platform.
Through Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and semantic search, we can make medical knowledge accessible in the right context. Our AI Companion supports people throughout their Health Journey, explains complex information, and helps them navigate and prepare for their next steps.
Standards such as the Model Context Protocol (MCP) open up new possibilities for connecting knowledge, applications, and specialized AI systems.
The broader vision is ambitious:
Relevant knowledge should be available wherever people need it — in the right context, clearly explained, and integrated as seamlessly as possible into the applications and workflows they already use.
The next generation of specialized AI models makes this particularly exciting.
Alongside large language models, we are increasingly exploring smaller models optimized for specific tasks and new architectures for structured decision-making.
Approaches such as Jev offer interesting possibilities for intelligently orchestrating information and decision processes.
Imagine an architecture capable of interpreting different types of medical information against current clinical guidelines, selecting appropriate specialized models, and considering connections across medical disciplines.
With the appropriate consent, laboratory results, medical reports, medication records, and diagnostic findings from different specialties could eventually be brought together in a shared context.
This could open up fascinating possibilities, particularly at the intersections of liver, cardiovascular, metabolic, and other areas of health.
Clinical guidelines also continue to evolve. AI systems could help incorporate these changes into decision processes in a controlled and traceable way, making relevant new evidence available more quickly.
For Liver & Heart, this represents a long-term direction.
We are starting with health literacy, education, and care navigation. From there, our ambition is to develop scientifically validated capabilities and, where required, medical devices certified under the European Medical Device Regulation (MDR), with the potential to support clinical decision-making in the future.
This includes increasingly integrating personal health information, developing specialized medical AI models, and eventually exploring regulatory and reimbursement pathways such as Germany's Digital Health Applications (DiGA) program.
The combination of technology, medical evidence, and regulatory responsibility is what makes this development both challenging and fascinating.
The necessary technical foundation is built on proven technologies, thoughtfully integrated into a modular architecture, alongside the continuous evaluation of new possibilities.
At the same time, AI and automation are transforming how we work ourselves: from software development, testing, and quality assurance to cybersecurity, platform operations, knowledge processing, and the automation of operational workflows.
This allows us to experiment with new ideas faster and focus more of our attention on the questions that truly matter for advancing our products.
A Shared Vision
I'm excited to be building this together with my co-founders: Dr. Maurice Michel, who brings his outstanding medical and scientific expertise; his brother Christoph, who has a particularly strong instinct for business opportunities; and my longtime friend and business partner Thomas Vilcans, who combines his passion for data and intelligent information systems with a love for building vibrant communities and bringing people together.
Our different backgrounds and perspectives complement one another. And we share the enthusiasm for turning this vision into something that can make a meaningful difference.
For me, Liver & Heart brings together much of what has developed over the past decades: a fascination with technology, a passion for complexity, an understanding of organizations and enterprise architecture, and a personal interest in health and human development.
At the same time, it marks the beginning of a new chapter in an era where artificial intelligence is opening up entirely new possibilities.
The most exciting question is what we choose to do with these possibilities. How we turn technological progress into successful companies, products, and ecosystems that empower people, give them greater agency, and sustainably improve their quality of life.
With Liver & Heart, that's exactly what we hope to contribute to.
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