How OpenFiskal started as a company

Ferry built his first POS at fifteen — not to launch a startup, but because Word invoices weren't cutting it. The side job at a small Apple reseller turned into responsibility for stores across Germany, and a front-row view of the systems holding retail together — most of them buckling under modern compliance.

That curiosity became Paydroid, his first company: an iPad-native POS. He later opened an online store selling Apple accessories and learned, the hard way, how much engineering it takes to run a shop in Germany legally. The experience stuck.

After Paydroid he joined a Berlin startup building POS software for the DACH region as employee #1, eventually leading product as CPO. From UX to regulatory research, he saw compliance turn into the single biggest blocker keeping good merchants from growing.

In 2017 he moved to Shopify in Canada. As Shopify expanded internationally, Ferry became the go-to for local compliance — later leading the rollout of Shopify POS across 12 countries.

Christof has spent 15+ years building scalable commerce platforms — from niche marketplaces to global point-of-sale. He pairs deep technical architecture with a sharp sense of what merchants actually need to sell, grow, and stay compliant.

In 2017 he co-founded VanlifeLocation, an Airbnb-style marketplace for nature campsites. It covered the full commerce flow — onboarding, escrow, disputes, high-frequency bookings — and grew to thousands of daily users before being acquired by ADAC PiNCAMP.

Next came dot9, a software agency building commerce-ready platforms for startups and SMBs. dot9's products integrated payments, subscriptions, and marketplace logic, helping clients reach 7-figure ARR and raise 7-figure rounds. The team grew to fifteen.

At Shopify he joined the POS team as a senior full-stack engineer and built the compliance platform that opened up Germany, Italy, and Spain — letting thousands of merchants sell in-store and online while meeting strict fiscal rules.