Gregor Walter

Gregor has spent roughly 30 years building things on the internet - and now spends his days helping kids build gloriously ridiculous machines out of junk

He's an e-commerce fossil in the best possible sense: he was writing software to selling and ship books online back when the internet still made modem noises and BTX, at Telebuch.de - the German online bookshop that became Amazon.de in 1998. He went on to found pixi*, which grew into Germany's leading software for e-commerce order processing, warehousing and shipping - the unglamorous machine behind the scenes of countless online shops - and sold it to Nasdaq-listed logistics group Descartes in 2016. In short: he spent two decades making online retail fast, optimized and frictionless.

Since 2020 he's been doing more or less the opposite. As co-founder of KidsLab, a nonprofit for digital education in Augsburg, he teaches children that technology isn't something you just consume — it's something you take apart, understand and rebuild. He's also the author of "Programmieren lernen in Minecraft", a children's book that teaches coding inside the famous voxel game.

At the Festival der Zukunft he brings Shitty Robots (a.k.a. HeboCon): the world championship for the worst robots on earth - built from e-waste, hot glue and zero instructions, then sent into the arena to battle it out. His vision: the more spectacularly a robot fails, the more a kid actually learns.