Ulrike is a social entrepreneur, connector, speaker and author whose work spans sports, business, digital culture, social innovation, and grassroots transformation. She studied business management at the University of Mannheim before embarking on a multifaceted career that moves fluidly across systems — corporate and informal, Western and Global South — translating complexity into lived, human experience. Rather than following a linear professional path, she has built a body of work rooted in presence, trust, and long-term relationships, working with companies, institutions, communities, and individuals across continents.
1999. Beer-Sheva. I was invited to “Cool People in the Hot Desert” — Hubert Burda’s idea, German and Israeli internet founders, researchers and investors, brought together at Ben-Gurion University to spark something. I went. I kept going back for years after, running workshops with students there. We visited the Weizmann Institute and other places like […]
Three lawyers, one decade, one Germany still learning what its own constitution meant. Horst Mahler, Otto Schily, Hans-Christian Ströbele — all three pulled into the student unrest of the late 1960s, all three lawyers, all three convinced the new Federal Republic’s freedoms were worth defending. Then their paths split so completely that reading them side […]
Geneva, 6 July 2026. Palexpo, not Palais des Nations — the AI for Good crowd, plus 193 flags. First time every country has had a seat at this particular table. The occasion: the first UN Global Dialogue on AI Governance. Not a summit of the willing, like Bletchley or Seoul or Paris. All of them. […]
A conversation is not an exchange of information. Information moves in one direction — sent, received, filed. A conversation moves in two, and something in both people is different afterward because of it. I learned the difference on The WELL, back in 1987. The one rule that shaped everything there was: you own your own […]
The question sounds absurd until you follow the money. Payroll taxes fund most of the safety net — social security, unemployment insurance, healthcare. That system assumes a human is being paid a wage somewhere in the chain. Replace the human with a robot, and the wage disappears. So does the tax that rode along with […]
I keep returning to the same question, in different rooms, on different continents: what does it take to build a genuine We? Not a slogan. Not a hashtag. Not a flag waved at a rally and put away by evening. A We that holds — because the people inside it are strong enough, clear enough, […]
A field note from the media diet chapter of The Nomad. The Nomad is a growing collection of stories, encounters, lived moments — and the quiet (and not-so-quiet) joy hidden inside them. They’re all rooted in my life, wandering freely between places, people, questions, and unexpected turns. The book is finished. The Nomad is out […]
The Nomad is a growing collection of stories, encounters, lived moments — and the quiet (and not-so-quiet) joy hidden inside them. They’re all rooted in my life, wandering freely between places, people, questions, and unexpected turns. The book is finished. The Nomad is out in the world now, closed between two covers — but the […]
Federico Faggin invented the first microprocessor. Half a century of building machines that process information — and then he spent the second half of his life arguing that this was never “the thing” itself. A chip can hold every fact about pain. Weight it, model it, run it a billion times a second. It will […]
This is a talk I gave on July 4, 2026 in Telč, Czech Republic. In 2015, a skatepark arrived in Janwaar — a small, remote village in Madhya Pradesh with no reliable electricity and a school most kids skipped. Nobody asked for it. But under two rules (“No school, no skateboarding” and “Girls first”), the […]