Some leaders operate. Others build. Fabian Fuchs does both and does it under pressure.
From steering frontline teams through lockdowns to reshaping how marketplaces scale, his career hasn’t followed a straight line. It’s been a series of high-stakes sprints. Now, as he builds an AI startup in stealth mode, he’s channeling that operator’s instinct into tools designed to perform in real-world conditions, not just on whiteboards.
If you’re leading a high-growth startup or navigating transformation at scale, Fabian’s journey reads like a field manual written while navigating the terrain himself.
Fabian didn’t begin in the chaos. He started with structure.
From 2009 to 2012, he trained at SAP, the world’s leading enterprise software provider with €16B in revenue and over 65,000 employees globally. From there, he joined The Boston Consulting Group (2013–2017), where he worked on global strategy and transformation programs across industries. At BCG, generating over €13B in annual revenue, he led workstreams in the sectors Industrial Goods, Consumer Goods and Banking, developing a systems-level understanding of how scale impacts strategy, execution, and organizational behavior.
But something didn’t sit right.
“I got tired of designing playbooks I’d never run,” he shared in a Guest Lecture at ESCP Europe Business School. “I wanted to feel the cost of a bad decision. That’s how you get better.”
In 2018, Fabian transitioned from advising to execution. He joined Delivery Hero Germany, then a €100M revenue business with over 1,000 employees, as Senior Manager in the Strategy Team to the Country MD. In this role, he helped shape the national strategic roadmap and led key commercial and efficiency projects. He was later appointed Head of Courier Operations Germany, where he managed the transition from a fully remote driver model to a hub-based operating system. When Just Eat Takeaway acquired the German entity, Fabian continued in this role to integrate operations and scale last-mile delivery under the new logistics framework.
From 2019 to 2021, Fabian served as Head of Operations for Just Eat Takeaway in Germany, a role that placed him at the center of one of the company’s most critical markets. He scaled the courier fleet from just over 3,000 to 10,000 across 50 cities, managing a team of over 120 people spanning operations, business intelligence, project management, and communications. In 2021 alone, the unit handled 15 million orders and contributed roughly €600M in revenue, representing around 10% of Germany’s total business. During COVID, Fabian led the deployment of contactless delivery, implemented the hub-centric model, and enhanced density and pricing algorithms to boost courier utilization and increase revenue per delivery through distance-based compensation.
Fabian’s response wasn’t just logistical. It was structural.
He rolled out contactless delivery protocols ahead of the curve. Introduced the Hub-Centric model, adding stability to a volatile gig-based workforce. And when margins tightened, he enhanced the company’s existing density and pricing models, boosting courier utilization and unlocking more revenue per delivery track by introducing distance-based compensation.
This wasn’t just survival mode. It was systems thinking under pressure, designed in real time for real stakes.
From 2021 to 2023, Fabian served as Chief of Staff to the Global COO of Just Eat Takeaway. Leading a Chief of Staff Office of project managers, analytics experts, and executive assistants, he supported operations across 20 markets, aligning strategy across a business with 14,000 employees and €5.4B in revenue. This role gave him a panoramic view of how logistics, customer experience, and growth levers interact at scale—and where operational complexity tends to hide.
In 2024, Fabian took on the role of Director for Just Eat Takeaway’s London business, a region with over £700M in gross transactional value, rivaling entire country markets like Spain or Italy. With indirect P&L responsibility for £160M and a cross-functional team of around 50 across Sales, Marketing, Logistics, BI, Customer Service, and Product, he was tasked with reversing a five-year market share decline in one of the company’s most high-profile and operationally complex cities.
Many saw it as a sunk cost. Fabian saw it as a system failure that could be rebuilt from the ground up.
He launched what became known internally as the City Lab framework: a decentralized, squad-based model that applied a stage-gate approach to hypothesis testing. Ideas were gathered from across teams and run through a structured model that started hyperlocal, then scaled to city-level pilots, regional pilots, and eventually nationwide if they showed traction. It allowed the organization to experiment rapidly, surface what worked, and double down on proven innovation. Borough by borough, they tailored campaigns to local behavior, tested hypotheses, and scaled what worked.
“We didn’t try to ‘fix London,’” Fabian explains.
“We developed a 360° city review, using data to analyze each borough and even individual districts to pinpoint the root causes of decline. From there, we translated insights into targeted countermeasures, which each functional team turned into action plans. That’s how you win cities, one real problem at a time.”
The results? The decline stopped. Then reversed. But beyond numbers, something else shifted: momentum. Teams moved faster, owned outcomes, and created solutions from the street up, not HQ down. In doing so, they surfaced broken processes that had gone unnoticed at the organizational level, insights that Fabian regularly shared with UK and global leadership. This feedback loop helped spark broader transformation projects, ensuring the company could adapt and stay competitive well beyond London.
It wasn’t a grand strategy on a slide deck. It was a cultural and operational reset fueled by speed, autonomy, and learning loops.
Today, Fabian is back in builder mode.
His current venture: a stealth-mode AI startup focused on building agentic enterprise software that enables greater customer centricity and operational excellence. In parallel, he’s also creating solutions in the consumer wellness, health, and lifestyle space to address everyday challenges people face in their personal lives. Details are still under wraps, but his approach is consistent: build products that solve real friction, not abstract problems.
“AI is only as good as the problem it’s solving,” Fabian says. “And you can’t solve real problems if you haven’t lived them.”
What sets his work apart is a deep understanding of the human layer inside organizations.
“I believe the real winners in AI will be those who can bridge two worlds, the hard operational systems, and the human dynamics behind them,” he explains. “You’ve got process, data, infrastructure. But you also have behaviors, emotions, and judgment. Humans are still in the loop, and we need to design for that.”
His system reflects that belief: it’s built to endure operational complexity, but also to support how real people think, decide, and adapt. From marketplace revenue optimization to tools that help individuals focus or recover in daily life, Fabian’s goal is clear: design systems where AI serves humans and humans evolve into system architects.
Forget the hype cycles. Fabian’s building for the moments when systems are strained, teams are stretched, and complexity can’t be abstracted away.
Outside his own startup, Fabian is helping others build.
In 2025, Fabian joined Antler as a Visiting Partner, a global VC and accelerator operating in 23 cities, with over 500 investments that year alone. Portfolio highlights include unicorns like Airalo and Lovable. Antler had recently raised $510M USD to back early-stage startups. Fabian worked closely with over 12 founding teams to stress-test product-market fit, build durable operating systems, and avoid scale-stage pitfalls by embedding early structure and feedback loops.
He also brings that guidance into the academic world, serving since 2025 as a mentor at ESCP Europe’s Blue Factory, the business school’s startup incubator, where he advises the next generation of founders as they move from theory to traction.
“After seven years inside one firm, this was a deep dive into how the startup world really works,” he reflects. “I got exposed to state-of-the-art innovation, saw what founders are building, and brought in my own playbooks to help them navigate product-market fit, feature prioritization, sales pipelines, and real-world problem validation.”
Whether challenging assumptions, making warm intros, or pushing teams to pressure-test their thinking, Fabian became a trusted operator-mentor grounded in execution rather than theory.
“I love working with founders who are out over their skis,” he says. “If your ambition is outrunning your systems, you’re probably on the right track.”
Fabian’s coaching is deeply tactical, drawn from years of leading in ambiguous environments, rebuilding broken P&Ls, and designing operating models that hold up under pressure. Having led teams of 150–200 people early in his career, he learned to think in scalable systems from day one, a mindset that continues to shape how he mentors founders and builds products.
Fabian’s next focus? The U.S. market.
As a founder, advisor, and emerging thought leader, he’s looking to bring his playbooks built at the intersection of AI, marketplace operations, and scale to an ecosystem where timing and traction are everything.
The spark for this began during his internship at SAP’s New York office in 2011, where he first experienced the city's unique energy. He’s returned every year since, consistently inspired by the entrepreneurial spirit and velocity of the U.S. tech scene.
He’s also becoming a consistent presence in the future of work conversation, sharing his perspective on how organizations can bridge the gap between human dynamics and AI systems. Over the last couple of years, Fabian has spoken on panels at The Boston Consulting Group, London Business School, and Bayes Business School, and regularly judges hackathons and innovation challenges. His essays and talks aim to connect high-concept thinking with grounded operational insight anchored in his belief that the best AI augments human potential rather than replaces it.
“The future of work lives in the overlap between human insight and machine intelligence,” he says. “It’s less about replacement and more about rethinking where judgment matters most.”
In Fabian’s view, the best AI doesn’t displace leadership. It makes space for it by absorbing low-leverage tasks and sharpening human focus where it counts.
Fabian’s arc from global strategist to frontline operator to AI product builder offers a rare blend of perspectives. It’s this combination of systems thinking, executional depth, and cross-cultural fluency that makes his journey especially relevant for anyone building through uncertainty.
Some guiding principles Fabian designs to:
Test before you scale: Hypotheses beat assumptions. Local wins before global.
Lead turnarounds with empathy: Numbers matter, but people carry them.
Design for friction. The best systems aren’t the most elegant, they’re the most durable.
Live the problem: If you’ve felt the pressure, you’ll build smarter, faster, and better.
For more grounded insights from operators who’ve built through chaos and now shape the next wave of innovation, explore our founder interview series at Analytics Insight.
Because the future isn’t built in theory, it’s built by people who’ve been there, done the work, and still show up to make it again.