Oliver Samwer grew up in a wealthy family in the Marienburg district of Cologne. His father, Sigmar-Jürgen Samwer, was a lawyer specializing in competition law in Cologne. Mother Sabine Samwer was also a lawyer in Cologne.
Samwer graduated from the former Friedrich-Wilhelm-Gymnasium school in Cologne. Since he was young, he agreed with his other two brothers to form a company together.
After graduating from high school, Samwer studied business administration at the West Ham private school – Otto School Beisheim in Vallendar in Koblenz and its associate center, the Kellogg School of Management in Illinois. Samwer studied economics and politics at Oxford and business administration (MBA) at Harvard Business School.
Oliver Samwer lived in San Francisco in 1998, where he had the opportunity to observe how technology companies grew and investigated, which had been the most successful.
Inspired by the dot-com boom, Oliver Samwer and his brothers created in 1999 an auction site like eBay called Alando, which was sold to eBay just a few months later at $ 43 million. They did the same type of operation again after creating Jamba !, a mobile content provider site that would be sold in 2004 to Verisign for $ 273 million.
The Samwer brothers founded the Rocket Internet technology incubator in 2007, which became a public company in October 2014. Currently, the Samwer brothers own 37% of Rocket Internet, while Oliver serves as the company’s CEO.
Rocket Internet has been criticized by some investors to copy the model of other companies and then sell them to the original creators, as happened with eBay and Verisign. Some signal that the real business of Rocket Internet is selling businesses. By the summer of 2011, they had sold 25 companies, getting around $ 1 billion with the operations.
In 1998, he co-authored the most successful Startups study in the United States with Max Finger. Lessons for entrepreneurs. About the start, development, and growth of American Internet companies. Horst Albach supervised the work.
Samwer has been critical along with his brothers for “cloning” companies, although they claim that innovation has been very romanticized in Silicon Valley. Part of Rocket Internet’s success is creating companies in emerging markets and sometimes bandaging them to the companies that inspired them.
