Emanuel Jöbstl

My main focus at Authory is building the tech which powers the product. That not only means leading the engineering efforts but also actively working on the backend as well as our own website monitoring solution.

Operating Authory on the technical side is sometimes challenging. After all, we manage and host a substantial amount of text and media content, while still making sure we can iterate on the product fast to provide value to our customers. We also employ a considerable amount of deep learning so we can reliably extract text and multimedia content, as well as detect the correct author for each article. And all that, at scale — we check roughly 100,000 websites every single day for content from our customers!

Before joining Authory in 2017, I built multiple other companies, usually in the role of the technical co-founder.

One of them offered an app that allowed people to take VR photos using their phone and share them — think Instagram for VR. The company was acquired by a company manufacturing VR headsets, primarily because they wanted to acquire the novel computer vision technology for recording VR images our company developed.

Also, I helped to build and scale a non-profit, called Sigma Squared Society, as the head of Global Community. Sigma Squared Society is an organization focused on connecting and empowering founders below 26. To this day, close to 1,000 young founders have received the Sigma Squared Fellowship. The organization is present in 32 locations across 5 continents, and I brought in a big part of the team, which was an incredible learning journey for me. Given my strong tech background, community building is a passion that I did not know I had, but I love every little bit of it!

I also helped to get fwei.at off the ground — it's an app that helps emergency workers navigate to their destination. It might sound surprising, but, at the time, there were just no reliable navigation solutions that integrated with the systems governments used to manage and dispatch emergency calls. Our system is in use by several hundred fire brigades and the Red Cross in Austria. They even use it for rescue helicopters.

Personal stuff

Besides building a lot of exciting things, I also studied computer science at Karlsruhe Insititute of Technology in Germany. I was also invited to do two research internships at Carnegie Mellon University, one of the top schools for computer science, in the US. My main focus during uni was algorithms, deep learning, signal processing, and computer networks. Honestly, I had a lot of fun studying, and learning new things every day, and even joined the computational programming team (yes, that's a thing!) of our university. Having already started programming at the age of 14, I always knew I wanted to really learn about computer science.

And last but not least, I'm a total Drum'n'Base nerd. It's my favorite genre of music and has kept me going for more than a decade!