Rolling Up Mystery Shopping: Market Force CEO Karl Maier (Part 1)

Karl Maier is the founder and CEO of Market Force Information. Prior to founding Market Force Information, he was the executive chairman of the board of Vector ESP, a provider of professional information technology services. Before Vector, Mr. Maier was the chief executive officer of VIA NET.WORKS, a public international Internet service provider. Prior to VIA, he was the president and CEO of Cordillera Communications, Corp., a Latin American wireless service provider that was acquired by Nextel International. Before Cordillera, Mr. Maier worked in Germany, serving as vice president of Freyberg Hambros, a Frankfurt-based investment banking boutique, and as CFO of Berlin Kosmetik GmbH, a cosmetics manufacturer in Berlin. Previously, he was an assistant vice president at the Bank of Boston. He received a B.A. from Bowdoin College.

Sramana: Karl, where did you grow up and what kind of background do you come from?

Karl Maier: I had three sisters in my family and we moved around a ton when I was a kid. My father worked in sales for Boise Cascade and focused primarily on newsprint. He ran different regions of the country for them. I was born in Chicago and lived there until I was three. I lived in Atlanta until I was six. I went to grade school in Dallas and high school in Portland.

Sramana: Where did you end up going to college?

Karl Maier: I went to a little school called Bowdoin College [in Maine]. I chose to go there for a couple of reasons. I was looking for a small liberal arts college where I could get a good education as well as play sports.

Sramana: What happened after college?

Karl Maier: I received the true liberal arts education. I majored in history with a minor in German and romance languages. I then got into the world of business. I started my career at Bank of Boston, where I went through a management training program for a commercial lender. It is a foundational business career training program.

Sramana: How long did you stay there?

Karl Maier: I was there for three and a half years. It was fantastic. There were 50 kids in my training program, and they brought in professors from Columbia to teach us corporate finance and accounting professors from other schools. After I had been there for a while, I was placed in the international group. I did find out that the big corporate world was not 100% for me. I decided I wanted to get a more hands-on experience as well as live in Europe.

I ended up getting a interesting, unique, and somewhat random job in Berlin. I became the chief financial officer for a former East German cosmetics manufacturer.

Sramana: What did you do in the cosmetics job?

Karl Maier: I went to college with a guy whose stepfather was an investor in New York City. He bought the company from the German Privatization Agency in late 1992. I worked there as the CFO for two years. It was an incredible experience because we were the only two Americans working there; everybody else came from East Germany. They had only lived and worked under communism.

We spent a lot of time trying to Westernize and modernize their business processes. It was a phenomenal experience. I did that for a couple of years before moving to Frankfurt to be an investment banker. I had been doing that for about a year when I realized that I enjoyed being involved at the company rather than being a middleman in investment banking. I decided to move back to the States a year after taking that job.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Rolling Up Mystery Shopping: Market Force CEO Karl Maier
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