Markus Raunig is the CEO of AustrianStartups – a non-profit platform that promotes entrepreneurship in Austria. He is leading a distributed team of 50 people all over the country and stays in close contact with all relevant stakeholders in the startup ecosystem. Before taking over at AustrianStartups in January 2017, Markus founded his own startup sponsor.bar, organized Europe’s largest student startup conference Entrepreneurship Avenue and worked closely with several successful international startups during the Pioneers Challenge. He holds a master degree in strategy, innovation & management control and wrote his master thesis about the user acceptance of artificially intelligent chatbots.