Sascha Konietzke

Sascha Konietzke is the co-founder, Chief Strategy Officer, and board member of Contentful, the Berlin-founded composable content platform. Contentful says it was founded in 2013 by Konietzke and Paolo Negri and pioneered the headless CMS category; Forbes describes the company as one of Germany’s fastest-growing private technology companies and notes that its API-first platform serves customers including KFC, Audible, and Nike.

Before Contentful, Konietzke worked at Hewlett-Packard and was involved in startup projects including Thriventures and Tagcrumbs. His LinkedIn profile lists his education at the University of Cooperative Education from 2004 to 2007, where he studied a program combining computer science and business administration with practical work experience at Hewlett-Packard.

Konietzke was Contentful’s founding CEO before moving into the Chief Strategy Officer role in 2019, when Steve Sloan joined as CEO. In that transition announcement, Konietzke wrote that he would remain an active board member and focus on customer problems, vision, strategy, and product.

He is also listed as the founder of Ko9, focused on angel investments and supporting other founders. Publicly documented angel investments include Weflow, Valuedesk, vivenu, and Stackbit, which broadly match his operating experience in SaaS, developer infrastructure, content systems, and go-to-market software.

• Invests as an angel in early-stage software companies, with public portfolio evidence concentrated in seed-stage B2B SaaS, sales/revenue tooling, developer/content infrastructure, ticketing software, and performance-management software.
• Strong fit for founders building technical platforms that become infrastructure for other teams, especially API-first products or systems that integrate into modern enterprise software stacks.
• His own Contentful thesis centers on structured, decoupled content: “manage content as pure structured information,” delivered through an API-first, cloud-native platform.
• Konietzke has repeatedly emphasized global ambition from day one; in a Balderton interview, he said Contentful was built as an international company from the start and did not even have German marketing materials until much later.
• Based on his operating history, he is likely most useful where founders need advice on category creation, technical product positioning, enterprise SaaS fundraising, US expansion, and moving from founder-led product to scaled leadership.