ETH Zurich · MAS ETH MTEC
In progress
About
As CTO of the We.Publish Foundation, I lead technology with a focus on trust, transparency, and impact — building scalable open-source platforms that empower independent journalism. With an 8-person engineering team, our CMS has run in production since 2020 and today serves 20+ media outlets across Switzerland and Europe — reaching 5M+ monthly page views at 99.98% typical uptime, and growing fast.
I believe in trust-based, empathetic leadership that lets teams thrive through autonomy, clarity, and shared purpose. Combining deep technical understanding with strategic foresight, I translate complex challenges into sustainable solutions that balance innovation with reliability.
I co-founded two companies outside We.Publish: Seccom, an information-security consultancy (with Michael Scheurer, 2017), and FarmX, bringing modern software to agriculture (2018). My background spans software architecture, infrastructure engineering, and organizational development — I'm passionate about connecting technology and people so that strong engineering meets meaningful purpose.
A strategic stance across everything I lead: understand and control the technology we depend on — as the foundation for strategic independence. In practice: infrastructure we own and operate ourselves, mostly on our own hardware, in Europe, independent of US hyperscalers. That applies to We.Publish's publishing platform, Seccom's consulting and customer systems, and my personal research infrastructure. AI fits the same stance: self-hosted LLMs and legal-AI at Seccom, LLM integration at We.Publish under my technical leadership (transparency-first), AI governance at ETH MTEC, and independent LLM security research. The economics back the architecture: migrating We.Publish from Google Cloud to our own infrastructure cut costs by ~10x.
Work
2023 — now
2018 — now
2017 — now
2015 — 2016
2014 — 2017
2012 — 2015
2011 — 2012
2008 — 2012
Education
2017 — 2021
2014 — 2016
2008 — 2012
Executive Development
The MAS ETH MTEC is a part-time executive programme at ETH Zurich in management, technology and economics. I started it in 2025 because the decisions I own as CTO — platform architecture, infrastructure ownership, security, an eight-person team — are increasingly capital, governance and strategy decisions as well.
The programme adds the general-management side to that practice: reading a balance sheet and a capital budget, weighing risk and resilience at board level, negotiating, developing people, and setting technology strategy in economic terms. What I learn there flows straight back into how I lead at We.Publish and Seccom.
Executive Focus
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Strategy & Innovation
Positioning an open-source platform against SaaS incumbents, and reading platform and ecosystem dynamics before committing engineering capacity.
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Finance & Economics
Arguing infrastructure and build-versus-buy decisions in the language of capital allocation, accounting and market economics.
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Governance & Resilience
Framing cybersecurity, vendor dependency and operational resilience as board-level governance questions, not only engineering ones.
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People & Leadership
Leading an engineering team through trust and autonomy, grounded in organizational behaviour, talent development and negotiation practice.
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Technology Leadership & Transformation
Steering AI adoption, cloud strategy and organizational change from the technology seat, with the enterprise rather than the stack as the unit of decision.
Selected Coursework
Official course titles · status as of autumn 2026
Strategy & Management
- Introduction to Management Completed
- Innovation Management Completed
- Platform and Ecosystem Strategies Completed
- Technology and Innovation Management In progress
- Strategic Management Planned
Leadership & Organization
- Organizational Behaviour Completed
- Strategic Talent Management in the Age of AI: Leading Human-AI Teams Completed
- Organizational Change Management Completed
- Introduction to Negotiations Completed
- Human Resource Management: Skills in Practice In progress
- Personal Leadership (four-part series) In progress Effective communication · High-performing teams · Self-leadership & conflict resolution · Advanced leadership skills
Finance, Economics & Governance
- Accounting for Managers Completed
- Corporate Finance Completed
- Corporate Governance In progress
- Principles of Microeconomics Completed
- Principles of Macroeconomics Completed
- Resilience – Beyond Risk Management Completed
Technology
- AI for Executives Completed
- Cybersecurity for Business Leaders Completed
- Leading the Technology-Driven Enterprise In progress
Current Research Direction
Technology Sovereignty as a Strategic Capability
Balancing Cost, Control, Resilience and External Dependency in Digital Organizations
Digital organizations depend on technology they do not control: cloud platforms, SaaS vendors, model providers, open-source ecosystems. Every one of these dependencies trades cost and speed against control and resilience. My research direction examines how organizations can make that trade-off deliberately — treating technology sovereignty not as ideology but as a strategic capability that can be defined, built and measured. It draws on my own practice: migrating a publishing platform off a hyperscaler onto owned infrastructure, running open-source software in production, and deciding case by case what to build, buy or depend on.
Community
2022 — now
Open Source
We.Publish ↗
TypeScript · React · GraphQLOpen-source publishing platform built at the We.Publish Foundation to give independent media a sovereign, self-hostable digital backbone — a headless CMS with peering, paywall, membership, and newsletter tooling. Built as an alternative to US SaaS publishing stacks, prioritizing control and long-term independence. MIT-licensed, in production at 20+ media outlets across Switzerland and Europe since 2020, with 34 contributors on GitHub — and growing fast.
Portcullis ↗
Python · FlaskSelf-hosted WireGuard gateway for internal infrastructure. GitHub OAuth login, per-service time-limited access, and a full audit log — a pragmatic zero-trust bastion you can actually run yourself.
Voice
Available for talks, panels, podcasts, and written contributions on AI governance in independent media, digital sovereignty for European publishers, build-vs-buy and migrations away from US hyperscalers, LLM security, and open-source platform engineering. To invite, reach out via email.
Recommendations
“A very impressive achievement for a Bachelor’s thesis — I’ve so far only had one Master’s thesis that eventually yielded an RFC, and that took 10 years.”
“He most reminds me of Ryan Stutsman, now Associate Professor at the University of Utah — both demonstrated quite similar skill at picking up research ideas, implementing and documenting them, with the difference that Ryan stayed in academia while Elias kept a foot in industry.”
„In seiner Rolle als Mitglied der Geschäftsleitung zeigt er ein ausgeprägtes Gespür für zukünftige Herausforderungen — sowohl in technologischer als auch in ethischer und gesellschaftlicher Hinsicht.“