Lars Hinrichs is a serial entrepreneur, investor and tech geek. One of his first efforts, politik-digital.de was a platform for politics and new media, which he launched when he was 22. His next venture, a new media consulting firm, failed but not without first paying rich dividends in learning. Hinrichs applied these lessons learned to his third major effort XING, the world's first Web 2.0 company to go public. He also became active in investing in and helping secure funding for a wide range of tech start-ups. His most recent start-up, HackFwd, is an innovative pre-seed venture capital company investing in technical talent across Europe. Hinrichs and HackFwd have been profiled in Wired, the Financial Times and TechCrunch. He is an Honorary Member of the German Committee of UNICEF.