Patrick Theobald founded the IT start-ups Theobald Software and Peakboard. In the interview he explains why money has become an unpleasant full-time job for him and why he had no desire for it at all
Mr. Theobald, did you tinker with the computer as a child?
PATRICK THEOBALD: Exactly. I wrote my first applications in Basic, on a Commodore 64. Later, around the age of twelve or thirteen, I developed my first commercial software – a program for generating barcodes.
Sounds banal.
It is the same today, but in the early 1990s it was still technically quite complicated. Curiously, the screw manufacturer Würth came across the program via an internet forum and bought it from me for a few hundred marks. Far too little in retrospect. But it was the beginning of my professional career.