Cyriac Roeding is a German-American entrepreneur based in Silicon Valley. Roeding's focus areas are consumer businesses, software meets biology, brain-to-machine interfaces, AI and consumer robotics, in the U.S. and China. He is a former EVP of CBS, where he started the division CBS Mobile, and an entrepreneur-in-residence at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers., where he co-founded and led shopkick to >20 million users and a $250M cash acquisition by SK Telecom/SK Planet. Shopkick is a mobile shopping app that rewards users for just walking into retail stores such as Macy’s, Best Buy, Target Corporation and scanning products from Procter & Gamble, Revlon, Unilever, Pepsi, L'Oreal. Fast Company ranked shopkick one of the world's 10 Most Innovative Companies In Retail, alongside Apple and Starbucks. ranked it the most widely used shopping app in the real world, driving over $1B in sales annually for its partners. The World Economic Forum named Roeding a Tech Pioneer in 2013. Roeding is a Limited Partner in Andreessen Horowitz, Founders Fund, , Greylock Partners, KPCB, IVP, ZhenFund, SV Angel, Silicon Valley Bank. He is a direct investor and advisor in over a dozen startups, including , , Karma Science, Cardspring, , , Curbside, Zumper, , , Furaxa. He is frequently included on innovation topics such as Chinese vs Silicon Valley startups on , , , has published on these topics e.g. on , and has been a speaker at the World Economic Forum in Davos, at , the CTIA Wireless Summit and Money 2020.
Early years & education
Roeding was born in Constance, Germany, and grew up in a small village north of Frankfurt, Germany. His father is a physicist and his mother worked with under-privileged children. Roeding went to high school in the U.S. and Germany. He sold his first computer program to a local newspaper at the age of 15 in an effort to make his job obsolete, and succeeded. Roeding then became a programmer for Hewlett Packard, while still in high school. He went on to university in Germany and in Tokyo. Roeding received a degree summa cum laude in engineering and business administration from Germany’s Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. In 1994, he went to Tokyo to study Japanese management at Sophia University, and there first became exposed to mobile phones that had just become available in Japan.
Career
During college, Roeding was a radio talk show host and reporter, and a management consultant for Roland Berger Strategy Consultants in the retail and technology sectors. After his university degree, Roeding joined McKinsey and Company in Munich, worked on growth business models for media companies,. and co-authored the book about the software industry, published by Harvard Business School Press. He later co-founded the mobile marketing firm 12snap in Munich, London and Milan, which worked with Coca-Cola, McDonald's, Nokia, L'Oreal and others and won the first Lion Awards for mobile creative concepts in Cannes. Roeding left to build CBS Mobile, the mobile division of CBS, where his interactive entertainment concepts won Emmy Award nominations. In 2008, he traveled around the world for two months to learn how mobile is used across cultures, e.g. in Bhutan in the Himalayan Mountains, in India and in the Brazilian Amazon Jungle. When Roeding returned, he spent a year at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence to identify next-generation cross-platform mobile and online venture concepts. In 2009, he founded shopkick, a company that rewards consumers just for being physically present in retail stores or for engaging with products with their smartphones. Roeding is also an in startups and venture capital funds in the U.S., China and Europe in the consumer world, software meets biology healthcare, AI, consumer robotics and brain-to-machine interfaces.
Accomplishments
The World Economic Forum named Roeding ; Fortune Magazine named him a . He also received the first for Mobile in 2007 and 2008, and the in France in 2003 and 2004.
