Alexander Graf and the business of asking better questions

Alexander Graf’s early business education involved getting people into parties. In Kiel, the school graduation committee led to organising parties for his own school, then for schools across the city. A business partner opened a club. Graf considered that a little too adventurous, so he helped at the door instead. Before there were enterprise software buyers to persuade, there were students who needed a reason to turn up.

It is a useful beginning for someone whose working life has kept returning to customer access. Graf would become a commerce entrepreneur, the host of Kassenzone and a co-founder of Spryker. Yet the underlying puzzle has a familiar shape: someone has something to offer, someone else might want it, and a business grows around bringing them together. The difficulty begins when a third party takes charge of the meeting.

His career offers an unusually connected view of that puzzle. He has examined commerce from inside Otto, discussed it in public and sold software to companies trying to change it. Each activity supplies questions for the others. Sometimes, apparently, it supplies a company.

The accidental education at Otto

Born in 1980, Graf studied business administration and computer science in Kiel and at the Autónoma in Madrid. His account of the route into retail has little of the polished inevitability usually added to a founder’s biography. Investment banking and consulting were attractive destinations for business students. His grades, he has said, did not qualify him for either.

Otto turned out to be a productive alternative. After finishing his studies in 2005, he entered a business in which online commerce was becoming a substantial strategic question. He helped the group understand and develop e-commerce models. An analyst could look outward at the American market, then inward at what a German retail group might do with the information.

He stayed for five years. Graf credits Björn Schäfers, associated with shopping24 and smatch, as an encouraging mentor. That relationship helps explain his later advice about choosing work: pay attention to the person who will manage you. A celebrated company name occupies one line on a CV. A manager occupies rather more of the week.

The lesson was practical. He was being asked to make unfamiliar developments intelligible to decision-makers. Knowing what had happened was useful; working out what it might mean for the business was the job. It gave him a reason to keep learning rather than settle into being the colleague who already knew.

A blog with consequences

In 2008, Graf and Florian Hermsdorf began Kassenzone in Otto’s “Neue Medien” rooms. The name means the checkout area. Their initial ambition, as Graf later described it, was modest: participate in the discussion and be a little like the industry commentators they followed, including Jochen Krisch.

The podcast arrived around 2013. A recurring conversation gave Graf a way to ask founders and executives how their businesses actually worked. There is a difference between admiring a company from a distance and asking the person running it where customers come from, what costs money and which assumptions have survived contact with reality.

By the time Kassenzone celebrated 600 episodes in 2025, Graf described it as several things bundled together: learning, work, a network, a sales channel and a home for related activities. Karo Junker de Neui had become a co-leader of Kassenzone; Krisch joined the anniversary conversation. The original wish to join the discussion had acquired a considerable back catalogue.

Graf makes a particularly consequential claim about one early recording with Project A’s Florian Heinemann in 2014: Spryker was, in essence, an outcome of that exchange. It is a pleasingly untidy company origin. Instead of a solitary revelation, there is a conversation that continues after the recording stops.

The company inside the conversation

Graf co-founded Spryker with Boris Lokschin in 2014. Project A backed the business at its beginning. The opportunity concerned enterprises whose commerce requirements could not be accommodated comfortably by an ordinary shop system. Marketplaces, complicated transactions and businesses wanting to build their own capabilities needed more room to manoeuvre.

Spryker’s proposition was software that could be assembled and adapted. Its commerce operating system reached its first release in 2016. In everyday terms, the promise concerned a company’s ability to change how it sells without rebuilding everything around the sale. That is a technical problem with a commercial deadline attached.

The company’s own history identifies Siroop as its first customer, working on a marketplace project. It reached 100 employees in 2018 and established a partner-training programme the following year. These are quieter milestones than a funding announcement, but they describe the work between having an idea and supporting other people’s businesses with it.

In December 2020, Spryker announced a $130 million Series C led by TCV, with One Peak and Project A participating. Its stated plans included expanding B2B and enterprise marketplace products and increasing its international presence, particularly in the United States. The company reported a valuation above $500 million. Those figures describe Spryker at that moment; the more durable point is how far the enterprise-software idea had travelled.

Who gets to meet the customer?

Graf’s writing gives the operational story a wider frame. In 2015, he and Holger Schneider published Das E-Commerce Buch. They had worked together on Otto projects and continued exchanging ideas while advising companies. The book put market history, business models and strategic questions into a form that readers could revisit without waiting for the next interview.

The English edition followed in 2016. Its description gives priority to understanding why the market behaves as it does and what is changing. The questions include Amazon’s position, the response of established retailers and the future of the traditional value chain. The book’s interests are recognisably those of someone who wants to know where bargaining power will end up.

His later Winning in the Platform Economy project extends that inquiry across markets. Regional editions involve collaborators including Giulia Staffieri in Italy, Lina Gallagher in the Gulf and Niklas Helgesson in the Nordics. The geography matters: a platform argument should survive a conversation with someone who understands the local customers.

One can read the books and the software company as parallel responses to the same concern. The books examine how commercial control moves. Spryker offers companies tools with which to act. A retailer may have a recognisable name, a warehouse and years of experience. Graf keeps asking how those assets translate into a reason for the next customer to arrive.

The interviewer has a stake

A founder conducting interviews brings a particular complication to the microphone. Graf has businesses, opinions and reasons to care about the answers. He has discussed that overlap openly, acknowledging that his involvement in commerce makes the conventional journalist’s role difficult. He has also admitted to interrupting and getting ahead of a conversation.

That candour helps a reader understand the format. Kassenzone offers access to a participant’s thinking, including his preferences and arguments. The listener can weigh those interests while hearing the discussion. Commercial experience supplies useful questions; it also supplies commitments that deserve to remain visible.

The same appetite for a new angle has shaped his use of media. In an OMR conversation, he described testing a new traffic source each year and considered Instagram’s usefulness for business audiences. Trying a channel is itself a small experiment in customer access. Even the person explaining platforms has to discover where people will pay attention.

A farm, a fish sandwich, another question

For Kassenzone’s 400th episode in July 2022, the arrangement was reversed. Philipp “Pip” Klöckner visited Graf at his farm in the Gettorf area near Kiel and asked the questions. Graf’s introduction included fish sandwiches by the Kiel Fjord. It was a birthday party for a podcast, with a suitably northern menu.

The reversal made space for self-examination. They discussed chance, early ventures and Spryker’s development. Graf also addressed MoinMoin, an unsuccessful HR platform, identifying mistakes in the product, market assessment and ecosystem. A long career acquires discarded ideas as well as company names. Leaving those failures in the conversation makes the successes easier to understand.

His attitude to effort is similarly practical. Despite the injunction “Innovate or die”, he has rejected the cult of the 100-hour week, favouring productive time and enough calm to use it. He has described archery as a hobby he can pursue at home. The farm provides a setting for a life whose conversations range considerably further.

After the CEO title

The dates now matter. Spryker announced in August 2025 that incoming CEO Stefan Ropers would work alongside Graf, who would continue as Co-CEO. In a June 10, 2026 interview, Graf said he had handed over the CEO role on January 1. Spryker subsequently appointed Sebastiaan Verhaar CEO effective July 1, with Ropers becoming Executive Chairman.

Graf’s public work continues across commerce and Energiezone, his energy-sector interview podcast. The subjects differ, but the habit is familiar: find someone operating inside a market and ask how it works. Giving up an operating title leaves plenty to investigate.

His recent commerce arguments focus on adaptability, technological capability and the economics of reaching buyers. In July 2026 he described B2B ordering as an opportunity for digital change and discussed Chinese platforms and AI purchasing agents as forces that could alter the market again. These are his assessments of where commerce is heading, rather than settled outcomes.

By August, the conversation had turned to AI productivity and dependence on model providers. The discussion considered why companies struggle to turn new tools into practical gains, and why retaining control of business data and context matters. The technology changes; the concern about who controls a company’s options remains familiar.

“The marginal cost approach always wins.”

Alexander Graf · July 2026

The sentence has the bluntness familiar from his public work. It asks a business to look beyond how impressive it appears and consider what happens to its economics as it grows. A customer still has to turn up. The route to that customer still has a cost. Graf began by persuading students to come to a party; he is still interested in who controls the door.