There is a moment Damir describes in his book that tells you everything about how he leads.

That story is the thesis of his leadership philosophy, his book, and his career. The Japanese call the art of repairing broken things with gold KINTSUGI. The cracks do not diminish the object. They become its most distinctive feature. Damir has spent 30 years learning, sometimes painfully, that this is equally true of leaders, organizations, and the digital infrastructure of entire continents.

Before 2024: Building, Breaking, and Learning in Gold

Damir co-founded Axinom Group and served as its CEO and CFO for 23 years. Not 23 years of smooth scaling. Twenty-three years of building a global software company across aerospace, media, and entertainment through economic cycles, technological disruptions, and the full complexity of leading international teams across cultures and time zones. He came through it. That is the credential no CV can adequately capture.

Before Axinom, he held executive roles at a Deutsche Telekom subsidiary, pioneering some of Germany’s earliest B2B e-commerce strategies. His academic foundation in theoretical computer science from Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nürnberg gave him something most executives lack: the ability to evaluate technology at the level of architecture, not just application. He knows when an engineer is telling him the truth.

In parallel with building Axinom, Damir co-founded INETA, the International .NET Association, and served as President Europe for nearly 20 years, growing it into the world’s largest Microsoft Developer community with over two million members. This is not a footnote. Building a company to scale requires capital, strategy, and execution. Building a volunteer-driven global professional community to that scale requires something rarer: the kind of authentic credibility that makes highly capable, independently minded people choose to follow you across decades and time zones, for no reason other than that they believe in what you stand for. He also served together with Richard Hubert as Co-President Europe for IASA, the International Association of Software Architects. He served as a Microsoft Regional Director for 17 years.

His influence extended into policy long before it became fashionable for technologists to engage with government. He worked directly with the European Commission and European Parliament on Digital Single Market initiatives, collaborated with the German and Estonian governments on digital identity and public services (e-residency), and delivered keynote addresses at the United Nations Internet Governance Forum in Nairobi, the European Parliament in Brussels, and the U.S. House of Representatives in Washington D.C.

He has traveled to over 70 countries, speaks several languages (among them Croatian, German, French, and English), and has spent his career building trust across boardrooms, policy chambers, and developer communities that most executives would treat as entirely separate worlds. The ability to read a room across cultural contexts is not a soft skill in his case. It is a career-long practice, earned mile by mile.

Since 2024: Applying Everything

When Damir left Axinom, he redirected three decades of hard-won experience toward the work he believes matters most.

As founder and CEO of Business in Tech, he advises leadership teams facing the decisions that actually matter: where AI creates genuine competitive advantage, where it creates expensive distraction, and how to build the organizational and human foundations to tell the difference. His clients do not receive frameworks assembled from business school literature. They work with someone who has made these decisions himself, at real scale, under real pressure, and who carries the scar tissue to prove it.

As Co-CEO and Chief Strategy Officer at run.events, he leads strategy and business development for one of Europe’s most technically ambitious event management platforms. run.events serves professional organizers from intimate executive gatherings to international conferences with over 150,000 participants. Its Event Intelligence Cloud (EIC) is a multi-agent AI system that handles the full operational complexity of professional events so that organizers can focus on what technology cannot replicate: human connection, creative vision, and the moments that make people glad they were in the room. The EIC learns from every event it runs. It gets sharper over time. So do the events it supports.

As a Distinguished Fellow at reTECH Europe, Damir is working on the question that will define the next decade of European technology: how does Europe build digital infrastructure that is sovereign and secure, without sacrificing the openness and human-centeredness that make it worth building? He brings to this not just policy knowledge, but the practical understanding of someone who has built technology systems across European regulatory environments for three decades.

He invests in health and longevity deeptech companies, at the convergence of biotechnology, AI, and preventive medicine, because he believes the most consequential technology of the coming decades will be the technology that extends and improves human life. The same conviction runs through his ambassadorial work: as Ambassador for the Carbon Drawdown Initiative he advances practical climate solutions; as Ambassador for Digital Accessibility and UX with AI at IThilft gGmbH he advocates for digital experiences built for the people most often excluded from the design process; and as EU BEFuture Mentor he supports the next generation of European technology leaders. Different domains, one thread: technology in service of people.

He speaks regularly at the world’s most significant forums on technology, leadership, and policy, most recently during the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2026.

The book (coming in 2026)

KINTSUGI LEADERSHIP: THE GOLDEN SEAM PRINCIPLE is Damir’s first book, co-authored with systems philosopher and executive coach Thomas Bothe. It is not a business book in the conventional sense. It is a sustained, honest examination of what leadership actually requires when things break, written by two people who disagree about almost everything they can articulate and have learned to disagree beautifully.

The book opens with the Madame Renou story. It ends with a question neither author can fully answer. Everything in between is the kind of thinking that only becomes possible after you have stopped trying to appear unbreakable.