Part IThe Story
Sometime in the 1990s, not long after the Wall came down, a German software executive in his early fifties walked up a hill in Potsdam. The Brauhausberg is not much of a mountain. It rises above the Havel on the southern edge of the old garrison town. At the time its summit held the hulking building that served as Brandenburg's state parliament. The man climbing it had already co-founded the most important software company in Europe, and he was in the middle of turning it into one of the most important software companies in the world. He looked down at the city, at the palaces and gardens of the Prussian kings and at the gray damage of forty years of East German neglect, and he had an idea. "I thought it would be nice," he would say three decades later, at eighty-one, "if I founded a university up there."
Then he came back down. The path was slippery. In the parking lot at the bottom he saw a sign that read Zur Universität, "To the University." Potsdam already had one. The dream, as he put it, had burst.
Most people would have taken the sign as an answer. Hasso Plattner took it as a negotiating position. What followed was an institute, then a faculty, then a reconstructed palace, two museums, a foundation that has given away roughly a billion euros, and, on June 2, 2025, a letter of intent between the State of Brandenburg, the University of Potsdam, and the Hasso Plattner Foundation to build a new university campus on the Brauhausberg, on the site of the old parliament, by 2035. The hill he climbed to imagine a university will, if the paperwork holds, get one.
The story is worth telling slowly because Plattner himself never did anything slowly. For fifty-two years he was the engineer's conscience of SAP, the company whose software quietly runs the payroll, inventory, and general ledgers of most of the large enterprises on earth. He was impatient, impulsive, and frequently right. He lost his temper and won regattas. He also spent a lifetime building permanent things for a country he kept leaving, and he courted a city he had loved as a boy precisely because, for most of his life, he could not get to it.
By the Numbers
Plattner's Ledger
1972Year five IBM engineers left to found SAP
€36.8BSAP revenue in 2025, with 110,650 employees
98 of 100Of the world's largest companies that run SAP
€200M+Plattner's commitment to HPI, up from an initial €50M pledge
~€1BDisbursed by the Hasso Plattner Foundation, 2016 to Q1 2025
$110.7MPaid for Monet's 1890 Meules for the Museum Barberini
6d 16h 4m 11smaxZ86's record elapsed time in the 2005 Transpac
The Only Road Was the Water
He was born in Berlin on January 21, 1944, in the Grunewald, the leafy villa district on the city's western edge, sixteen months before the end of a war that would flatten most of the rest of the city. His father, Horst, was an eye surgeon. His mother, Inge, was a teacher. Family accounts hold that the father managed to keep the household out of the war. That is the kind of sentence that carries a great deal of weight while revealing very little.
What the father did reveal, by the son's account, was a habit of opening the boy's eyes to new ideas and a sailboat. The Plattners would take it down the lakes and channels of the Havel toward Potsdam, a few S-Bahn stops from the Grunewald by land and an afternoon's sail by water. "When I was small, my parents had a sailboat and we sailed it all the way to Potsdam," he told the broadcaster rbb. "I always had a secret love for Potsdam."
The Cold War ended those trips. After August 1961 West Berlin was an island, and Potsdam sat on the far side of a border that ran through the water itself. Manfred Stolpe, the Social Democrat who would later govern Brandenburg, described what happened next. The young Plattner, a passionate sailor, tried to get as close to the city as the water would allow. The border guards apparently left him alone. "The obstruction," Stolpe said, "only made the affection greater."
The family moved to the south of Germany shortly before Hasso finished high school. He studied communications engineering at the Technische Hochschule in Karlsruhe and graduated in 1968. He has spent much of his old age describing that degree as a debt. "I studied at an excellent university in Karlsruhe and built a successful career at IBM and SAP," he said when asked why he founded his institute. "Through the Foundation, I want to give back." The foundation's own literature puts it more plainly: free public education was "life-defining" for him. His mother taught school. His wife, Sabine, taught school. The men in this story have a way of marrying the institutions that made them.
The other inheritance from those years was the boat. Plattner never stopped sailing. He raced his maxi yacht against Larry Ellison of Oracle in duels that manager magazin described as legendary and occasionally rough. In 2005 his maxZ86 crossed the Transpacific race course from Los Angeles to Hawaii in six days, sixteen hours, four minutes, and eleven seconds, a monohull record. It won the Barn Door, a slab of carved koa wood given to the fastest boat. In 2013, at sixty-nine, he won the German Dragon Championship as one of a three-man crew. In October 2024, five months after leaving SAP for good, he told Handelsblatt that he hadn't been back to Germany since. "I have a lot to do in America," he said. "I just sailed two regattas here."
The water was the first place he learned that the distance between where you are and where you want to be is a problem of speed, persistence, and how close the border guards will let you get.
Five Men and a Cancelled Assignment
In 1971 Xerox got out of the computer hardware business. It asked IBM to migrate its business systems onto IBM machines, and as part of the compensation IBM received the rights to a software repository from Scientific Data Systems. At IBM's office in Mannheim, five young engineers were assigned to build an enterprise-wide system on that code. Then they were told it was no longer needed. One account says they were told, in effect, that IBM's job was to sell computers, not to write software for customers.
The five were Dietmar Hopp, Klaus Tschira, Hans-Werner Hector, Claus Wellenreuther, and Hasso Plattner. Rather than shelve the work, they quit. In 1972 they formed a private partnership under the German Civil Code in Weinheim and called it Systemanalyse und Programmentwicklung, "System Analysis and Program Development." They took no loans from banks, no venture capital, and no money from the government. One company history records that they worked at night on borrowed computers.
Their first customer was the German subsidiary of Imperial Chemical Industries in Östringen, a town in the hills between Heidelberg and Karlsruhe. For ICI they wrote mainframe programs for payroll and accounting. The insight that would carry the company for half a century was already in that work. IBM's approach was to punch business data onto cards and process it overnight in batches. The SAP founders kept the data in the machine and let every function read from a common logical database, so the answer was available now. They called it real-time. The R in the name of their flagship product, from R/1 to R/3, stood for that word until the late 1990s.
In 1973 came RF, a financial accounting system and the first commercial product. By 1976 the founders had formed SAP GmbH, with twenty employees and 3.8 million marks in revenue. By 1978 they were selling the accounting software to forty corporate customers. The idea of a single integrated system that could be configured to any company's business was, at first, a hard sale in a world of isolated, bespoke programs. The founders' modest ambition was to reach 100 million euros in revenue within a few years. "That it got a little bigger," Plattner told rbb, "we accept gratefully."
A word on the partners, because the story is often told as if Plattner did it alone. Dietmar Hopp was the one who went door to door. In 2015 he told the Nordwest-Zeitung: "We were very lucky and in the right place at the right time. Our startup phase lasted about ten to fifteen years." A ten-to-fifteen-year startup phase sounds absurd now. It describes a company that grew on the cash its customers paid it, which meant growing only as fast as its customers trusted it. Manager magazin once titled a profile of Hopp "Vadder Hopp," roughly "Papa Hopp," and the nickname captures the division of labor that defined SAP's first two decades. Hopp was the steadying paternal salesman. Plattner was the volatile technical engine. Klaus Tschira, a physicist by training, left his stake to a foundation that in 2024 still held 3.63 percent of the company. Hector stayed into the 1990s. Wellenreuther was the first to leave. In 2013, the founders together still controlled 22.7 percent of SAP's voting rights. That was enough to get their way at any annual general meeting they cared to.
In 1979 they released R/2, a mainframe suite that extended the integrated model into materials management and production planning. Two years later the economy collapsed under them.
"In 1981 we had just developed the new R/2 system when the economic crisis broke out," Plattner recalled to Handelsblatt in 2024. "For half a year practically no orders came in. Things got tight for us." Hopp had the idea of taking down payments for products the company would not deliver for another year. He went, in Plattner's phrase, Klinken putzen, polishing doorknobs across German industry. "That saved us." Asked whether he ever thought SAP was finished, Plattner said no, never. "In all fifty-two years I certainly had a lot of stress, but never fear for the company." His prescription for an existential crisis is as unglamorous as the rescue: don't commission studies, don't bring in consultancies, analyze the situation soberly, decide on the facts, test whether the decisions were right, and correct course as often as necessary. He added a warning against falling for "the guys in suits."
Betting the Company on Three Tiers
SAP went public on November 4, 1988, on the Frankfurt and Stuttgart exchanges. Hopp became chief executive. Plattner became deputy chair of the executive board and took technology, development, and the American market. If you ask him which part of a half-century career he loved best, he does not name the IPO, the billions, or the yachts.
— Hasso Plattner, Smithsonian Awards Program oral historyThe period between 1988 and 1992 was wonderful. I spent every day developing software. It was a great time.
What he was developing was R/3. The mainframe era was ending. Customers were moving toward distributed networks of smaller servers feeding desktop machines, and every enterprise software vendor faced the same choice: rewrite for the new architecture or be stranded on the old one. SAP's chief rival in North America was Dun & Bradstreet Software, which then sold far more in the United States than SAP did. Plattner ran a development effort that IndustryWeek later put at $200 million and hundreds of developers, the largest project in the company's history. R/3 was named for its three tiers: database, application server, and the client GUI on the user's desk.
He could have waited until every module was fully built out. He didn't. "It was a necessity," he said in 1998. "It wasn't a certainty it would work."
— Hasso Plattner, IndustryWeek, 1998It was a necessity. It wasn't a certainty it would work. But if we didn't, we'd have ended up like Cullinet or D&B.
R/3 was officially released on July 6, 1992. That spring, a young American technology correspondent named Joshua Greenbaum, then living in Paris, was invited to a press conference about it. He had been briefed on R/2 a year earlier in Silicon Valley and, by his own admission, had understood relatively little. R/3 was different. It ran on Unix. It was built on relational database technology. It was, in his judgment, "the largest and most complex piece of client/server software the tech industry had ever seen." He wrote the first technical analysis of R/3 for the American market. Decades later he summed up Plattner the way a reporter who had interviewed Gates, Ellison, and Jobs might: "brilliant, spontaneous, dedicated, and articulate," and the only European of the modern tech era who could honestly claim global scale.
SAP launched R/3 to the North American market at its customer conference that fall, catching competitors flat-footed. "We got close to 200 customers in the first year," Plattner said. Revenue went from about $660 million in 1993 to $3.5 billion in 1997. Net income went from roughly $90 million to roughly $550 million. By 1998 more than two million people at 16,000 plants and offices used R/3 to manage orders, production, inventory, invoicing, accounting, and payroll. SAP held about a quarter of the market. Cullinet and D&B Software, the names Plattner had invoked as cautionary tales, are footnotes. SAP entered the DAX in 1995.
Even then, Plattner understood why nobody in America knew the company's name. "America is technology-crazed," he told IndustryWeek. "But it's more difficult to talk about applications." SAP's software is the plumbing of the enterprise. Plumbing doesn't get magazine covers. It just runs the building.
In 1997 Plattner and Hopp became co-spokesmen of the executive board. In 1998 Hopp moved to the supervisory board, and Henning Kagermann, the finance chief, became co-CEO alongside Plattner. That same summer, as chief executive, Plattner announced that he would found an institute in Potsdam.
The Skipper Who Missed the Press Conference
In the spring of 2002, SAP held its annual press conference and its co-chief executive was not there. He was at sea. SAP was the main sponsor of a sailing race, the SAP Cape to Rio, from South Africa to Brazil, and Plattner was skippering his own racing yacht in it. He had fancied his chances. Then the wind died, and the boat sat becalmed in the South Atlantic while the business press gathered in Germany.
Manager magazin noted that he could have left the boat if he had wanted to. Apparently he did not want to. The magazine framed the choice as a question: Wen im Stich lassen? Schiff oder Unternehmen? Whom to leave in the lurch, the ship or the company? He chose his crew. In mid-May of 2003, at sixty, he stepped down as co-CEO and became chairman of SAP's supervisory board. The magazine took the becalmed yacht as an argument for those who wanted him gone.
The same profile described him in terms that would follow him for two more decades. Internally they called him "Mister SAP." He was combative and impulsive, moody and press-shy, and he rarely gave interviews. He was also a workhorse and a visionary who knew SAP better than anyone, and he always turned up when the company needed him. Colleagues said that when a customer conversation seemed lost, Plattner could talk it back around. When they were exhausted, he found motivating words, "not always quietly."
The yacht episode is less a scandal than a parable about how he understood the difference between a title and a role. German corporate law separates the executive board, which runs the company, from the supervisory board, which oversees it. The chairman of the supervisory board is meant to supervise and advise. Plattner took the chair and kept a second job, "chief software advisor," concentrating on SAP's mid- and long-term technology strategy. E3 Magazine, a German trade publication that covered him for years, put the result bluntly: it never mattered what position he held, because his presence and determination steered the company anyway. "In the U.S., no one is surprised by his active role," the magazine wrote in 2013, "but in Europe, people are suspicious of the lack of distance between company management and company supervision."
The suspicion had grounds. In 2007, after Shai Agassi left SAP, Plattner told ZDNet that his technology discussions, once held with one executive, were now spread across four groups. "When you are not in an executive job, you can pick and choose a bit," he said. "I am fascinated by in-memory databases, communities, and user-centered design." Agassi was the founder of TopTier Software, an Israeli portal company SAP acquired in 2001, and had been given responsibility for the company's overall technology strategy. That same year, WirtschaftsWoche reported that Plattner had stopped a midmarket development project code-named Kayak because it competed with another product, A1S, and he feared two products would confuse the market. "You can see Plattner's handwriting clearly," one manager told the magazine. "He banged on the table and said: 'This won't do.'"
Then came February 2010. Léo Apotheker had been SAP's sole chief executive for about nine months, through the financial crisis and the first large-scale layoffs in the company's history. On a Sunday, after a special board meeting, he was told his contract would not be renewed, and he resigned at once. Plattner, now sixty-six, explained it to Der Spiegel in terms an engineer might not be expected to use. The numbers were not the problem. Employee surveys showed that confidence in the company's direction had fallen from 76 percent in 2006 to about a third. "Confidence arises out of many factors," he said, "and in this context emotions are more important than things that can be measured rationally. That may sound surprising for an IT company, but how people perceive things is all-important." Whether the perception was objectively justified, he said, "is, ultimately, irrelevant." Jim Hagemann Snabe and Bill McDermott became co-CEOs. Plattner said the board had asked him to strengthen his role during the transition, and he insisted he was not interfering in daily operations. "I am only doing my duty as chairman of the supervisory board. Otherwise I give advice. That is allowed and explicitly desired."
He kept giving advice for fourteen more years.
A Lavatory Sign on a 747
David Kelley was born on February 10, 1951, in Barberton, Ohio, and studied electrical engineering at Carnegie Mellon. At Boeing, early in his career, he was responsible for designing the "Lavatory Occupied" sign on the 747. The experience sent him back to school. If the most a young engineer could hope for was to perfect the little lighted panel above an airplane toilet, he wanted to understand how things are designed for the people who use them. He earned a master's in product design at Stanford, started a firm with a classmate, and worked on the mouse for Apple's Lisa and the first Macintosh. He met his wife through Steve Jobs. In 1991 he merged his firm with three others to form IDEO. He is the person most often credited with the phrase "design thinking." By his colleague Tim Brown's account, every time someone asked Kelley what designers do, he kept inserting the word thinking.
In the spring of 2004, at SAP's Sapphire conference in New Orleans, Plattner arrived waving a copy of BusinessWeek. The cover story was about IDEO. He had read it that day. "These guys are doing many of the same things we're doing in the way of new design techniques," he told an InfoWorld reporter. "We even use some of the same terms, like 'unfocus groups' and 'observation.' This is incredible because I wasn't aware of this company until now."
His complaint about his own industry was that business software was "overfeatured." Developers who didn't understand how users actually worked simply added more functions for them to pick through. He wanted "massive prototyping." He wanted to bring in not only focus groups but "unfocus groups," people who might oppose an idea, early, when a change cost little. "The reality today," he said, "is that only a few people in a room really fight over a new idea, while most others listen." The man who had been described as combative and impulsive was proposing a method designed to protect ideas from people like himself.
Eighteen months later, on October 3, 2005, Plattner pledged $35 million to Stanford to establish the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, which everyone calls the d.school. Kelley, who had been running design-thinking classes there since 2003, would head it. The institute moved into the Peterson Building, 4,400 square meters at the heart of the campus, to be gutted and rebuilt as open, flexible studio space.
— Hasso Plattner, at the founding of the Stanford d.school, October 2005As a person supporting the development of state-of-the-art business process software, I know that design has to start with the user. One sets up shop at the customer to immerse oneself in their company culture and business processes. Only in this manner can developers gain a deep understanding of user requirements.
"One sets up shop at the customer" is, almost exactly, a description of five ex-IBMers writing payroll code inside an ICI plant in Östringen in 1972. When asked a decade later why he had bet on design thinking, Plattner said so outright. "First of all I recognized design thinking as a chance for SAP. There was an urgent need for a cultural turn towards a user-centric perspective in Walldorf and on a global scale. Design thinking reminded me of the good old days at SAP when we were closer to the customer. When we had this entrepreneurial spirit in everything we did. I had the feeling that we had lost this spirit."
He was paying an American design school to reteach his own company something its founders had known without being taught.
The d.school became one of the most sought-after programs at Stanford. In 2010 it moved into a 40,000-square-foot building. Students developed Embrace, a low-cost alternative to the neonatal incubator, and d.light, an inexpensive solar LED lamp for villages without electricity. A newsreader app called Pulse, born in a d.school class in 2010, became the top-selling app in Apple's store that June and sold to LinkedIn in April 2013 for $90 million. In 2007 Plattner opened a German twin, the HPI School of Design Thinking in Potsdam. In 2008 he put $16 million into a joint Stanford-HPI design-thinking research program.
His explanation for why Germany needed one revealed the national argument he had been having with himself for decades. "In Germany we have the best engineers but much too often our ideas and inventions vanish in drawers instead of being embedded into innovative business models," he said. "Quality made in Germany is useless unless somebody is able to see it, right? Americans are much more adventuresome. They build something, which might not be perfect in the beginning, take the iPhone for example, and then the quality gets iterated into the product later on."
R/3, it should be said, was launched before it was perfect.
The Speed of a Question
In April 2007, at Sapphire in Atlanta, Plattner gave a keynote that was really a lecture. He was teaching at Stanford by then, and he flew his entire class to Atlanta and treated the conference as an offsite session. He dressed in black. The slides were designed to look like chalk on a blackboard. One blogger in the audience said he felt he was back at university, in Professor Plattner's class.
The lecture was about what he called the "New Idea" for enterprise software: on-demand delivery, model-driven configuration, user-centered design, community, and one item buried near the bottom of the list that would consume the rest of his career. In-memory databases. He described a test. Five years of accounting data, 36 million line items, took 20 gigabytes on disk and 1.1 gigabytes compressed in memory, and any question asked of it came back in about a second. "There is no relational database anymore," he said, as the blogger recorded it. Analytics first, then everything in memory. Google speed for all enterprise information.
He would later date the idea to roughly the end of 2006. The research was done at his own chair at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, "Enterprise Platform and Integration Concepts," where he was a working professor. Alexander Zeier, who reported to Plattner and is often called HANA's co-inventor, described it as "Hasso Plattner's visionary idea." From 2008 SAP ran a renewal project under the HANA banner. From 2010 it dominated SAP's engineering. In 2012 HPI and SAP shared the German Innovation Prize for it. Plattner co-wrote the book on it, The In-Memory Revolution, and he took a critical review of an earlier book of his on in-memory data management personally enough to write a letter to the editor of the trade publication that ran it. In February 2015 SAP announced S/4HANA, the ERP generation built entirely on the new database. Plattner said the development of HANA at HPI "was basically inspired by design thinking."
It is hard to overstate how far against the German grain this ran, and Plattner knew it. "It's really only in Germany that I'm asked time and again such strange things like: Why growth? Or: Why does the database have to be so much faster? That just creates stress," he told Der Spiegel in 2012. "And that, even though for the past 40 years IT has been almost exclusively about the question of speed."
Speed was the whole point, from the very first R. The man who broke a forty-year-old monohull record across the Pacific had spent his working life trying to shorten the time between a question and its answer, from overnight to now and from now to faster than now.
The trouble was that customers did not move as fast as he did. In June 2014, backstage at Sapphire, an InformationWeek editor asked why large customers seemed to be using HANA only for analytics while small ones put their whole business suites on it. Plattner did not reach for marketing language.
"That's because we were wimps," he said, "and thought we'd go the easy way and do the read-only [analytical] applications first. My radical approach, if I may say so, scares people, but they're starting to see that they don't have to be scared."
That same week, on June 4, 2014, on the Sapphire stage in Orlando, Plattner debated Clayton Christensen of Harvard Business School, author of The Innovator's Dilemma. Plattner defended HANA as a disruptive innovation. Christensen argued, in substance, that a product built to delight an incumbent's existing customers is a sustaining innovation, and that dressing it up as disruption was probably counterproductive. E3 Magazine later read the exchange as a prophecy. HANA became the foundation of every SAP product. It never became what Plattner wanted: the best database in the world, sold on its own merits to everyone.
He said as much after leaving SAP. Asked by WirtschaftsWoche which dream had not come true, he named HANA. He had hoped SAP could take it to the top of the database market, because "it was by far the best database at the time." Why didn't it? "I honestly don't know. Because the price for Hana was too high? At the time, SAP didn't want to give a discount." In 2019 he had already said from the Sapphire stage what he thought should happen: "HANA is too good a database to be locked inside an enterprise system." In the same keynote, with characteristic abruptness, he conceded that he had misread the market during the early S/4HANA years: "I saw the center of the world still in enterprise systems... that was a mistake. CRM is probably outgrowing the ERP space."
At seventy-five, speaking to thousands of customers, he called the core premise of his own last great bet a mistake. Founders who say "I don't know" in public are rarer than founders who win yacht races. He did both.
Der Stifter
Tuesday, nine o'clock in the morning, in a bright lecture hall in Potsdam, sometime in 2005. Two dozen young men in sneakers, jeans, and stretched-out sweaters drift in carrying croissants, paper coffee cups, and laptops. A lanky dark-haired student is losing a fight with his hair. They look pale, Focus reported, the way students look when they have spent too long in front of a computer or partied too hard. The course is "Trends and Concepts in the Software Industry." The lecturer is sixty-one, a billionaire, and the man whose name is on the building.
"This man has had a career you can only admire," a twenty-five-year-old student from Hamburg named Konrad Hübner told the magazine. "That's what we all dream of." On the few days a year the founder spent in Potsdam, everyone wanted a piece of him. The scientific director had projects to align, the secretary needed signatures, and the marketing man wanted dates. Around the institute they did not call him Professor Plattner or Herr Plattner. They called him der Stifter, the benefactor or donor. The German word has a slightly ecclesiastical ring, the kind of word you find on a plaque in a church that someone paid to rebuild.
He had gotten there by way of a bar. In the early 1990s, Plattner and Manfred Stolpe both appeared on Sabine Christiansen's television talk show. Afterward they met at the bar. "Hasso Plattner had no cigarillos," Stolpe recalled, "but I had some." Over Stolpe's cigarillos the Minister-President of Brandenburg talked up Potsdam. Plattner had his Brauhausberg vision. Stolpe, a practical man in a poor eastern state, suggested starting smaller, with an institute affiliated with the university that already existed at the bottom of the hill.
The Hasso Plattner Institute for Software Systems Engineering was founded in October 1998 as a public-private partnership. Brandenburg contributed land near Lake Griebnitzsee. Plattner contributed everything else. He initially pledged €50 million of his own fortune over twenty years, and the commitment grew to more than €200 million. The first seventy-seven students arrived in the winter semester of 1999. The first stone of the institute's own building went in a year later. In 2017 HPI and the University of Potsdam created a joint Digital Engineering Faculty, the first privately financed faculty at a public university in Germany. By mid-2025 the institute counted more than 2,700 graduates and an ecosystem that had helped incubate more than 300 startups.
One of those graduates, Gero Decker, founded Signavio, a business-process company that became HPI's first unicorn. SAP acquired it. Decker now runs it inside SAP. The loop closes so neatly it looks designed: a founder funds a school, the school produces a founder, and the founder's company is bought by the first founder's company.
Christoph Meinel ran the institute from 2004 to 2023. A Focus reporter in 2005 caught him queued up for Plattner's attention on campus. Plattner told the magazine he had no intention of slowing down: "The idea of doing nothing more, or wanting nothing more, I find deadly." He has called HPI his second-greatest professional achievement after SAP.
There is a less flattering entry in the institute's record. In early 2024 the investigative outlet Correctiv reported that HPI had paid more than €200,000 to a law firm known for anti-union work while employees tried to establish a works council. Posters announcing staff meetings had been taken down, and the institute set up an alternative staff committee that critics called a fake council. A spokesperson for the German Trade Union Confederation's legal department called the conduct "clearly unlawful." The matter reached the Brandenburg state parliament. In April 2024, HPI staff voted 68 percent in favor of an institute council. The benefactor's institute, it turned out, had inherited not only his money but some of his impatience with structures that slow things down.
Rebuilding What Was Torn Down
Potsdam's Stadtschloss, the city palace of the Prussian kings, was damaged in the Second World War and demolished by East German authorities in 1959. When Brandenburg decided to rebuild it as the new home of the state parliament, Plattner gave more than €20 million to restore its historic exterior. At the time it was the largest donation ever made in Germany by a single individual. The Palais Barberini next door, a baroque townhouse also lost to the war, was rebuilt as a museum by his foundation and opened in 2017. In May 2019, at Sotheby's in New York, he paid $110.7 million for one of Monet's Meules, the haystack paintings of 1890. It was then the highest price ever paid at auction for an Impressionist work. Since 2020 the Barberini has been the permanent home of his Impressionist and Post-Impressionist collection, now 115 works. Bill Gates, by Spiegel's account, once praised it.
Read quickly, that is a rich man buying a Prussian past. Read slowly, it is something stranger.
Plattner did not only collect French haystacks. He collected the painters of the German Democratic Republic, the state whose border guards had watched him sail toward Potsdam. In 2022 he opened Das Minsk, a museum in a terraced restaurant built in the 1970s on the slope of the Brauhausberg. The building had sat empty for years and was facing demolition when he bought it. He had it restored for his collection of East German art. Three and a half thousand people came to the opening festival in September 2022, and 31,000 had visited by December. In September 2026 Das Minsk opened a retrospective of Annemirl Bauer, an East German painter who challenged the regime's repressive policies and was long excluded from the canon. So the man who rebuilt the facade of a palace the communists tore down also saved a communist restaurant from the wrecking ball. He hung dissident art in the space where Party functionaries once ate.
Not every project went smoothly. In the late 2000s he proposed building a modern art hall in place of the Hotel Mercure, an East German high-rise in the city center, and the city erupted in protest. Stolpe later said Plattner felt nobody had warned him that the Mercure was "a hot iron." "He could have thrown it all in back then," Stolpe said. Another project, a center for science and business on Potsdam's Neuer Markt called the Haus am Platz, was abandoned. The head of the university's technology-transfer company attributed it to "a rather quick about-face" by Plattner. The affection was solid, Stolpe insisted, "deep and reaching back decades," and it should be handled "very carefully." There are few better descriptions of a large donor's temperament.
In 2017 the foundation moved into Villa Wunderkind on Potsdam's Heiliger See, the former home of the fashion designer Wolfgang Joop. The foundation itself grew out of the Giving Pledge, which Plattner signed in February 2013, and was established in 2015. Its reach runs from Potsdam to the Republic of the Congo, where Sabine Plattner African Charities helps protect 1.3 million hectares of rainforest in Odzala-Kokoua National Park. It includes a child-welfare organization in George, South Africa, founded in 1926, near the Fancourt golf estate Plattner bought in 1994. In 2003 Fancourt hosted the Presidents Cup, where he announced €6 million for HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment. In 2005 he paid for the 46664 benefit concert there in support of a fund co-founded by Nelson Mandela.
In 2016 the Jewish Museum Berlin gave him its Prize for Understanding and Tolerance. He was born in Berlin in January 1944. The restored palaces, the rescued restaurant, and the canonization of a forgotten dissident painter all carry an undertone of a man trying to repair a country's memory as well as its skyline. None of it is ever stated outright.
The Ledger's Other Column
The software that made Plattner rich was sold, for decades, by a global sales force he did not run but did oversee. Some of that selling was corrupt.
In 2016 SAP paid $3.9 million to settle SEC charges over a former executive's scheme to bribe Panamanian officials. In July 2017 leaked emails tied SAP to a company controlled by the Gupta family in South Africa, and SAP's own investigation by Baker McKenzie found $7.7 million in commissions paid to Gupta-linked third parties while SAP won $48 million in contracts with the state companies Transnet and Eskom. In 2021 SAP admitted to thousands of illegal software exports to Iran and paid an $8 million fine. In January 2024, the U.S. Justice Department and the SEC announced that SAP would pay more than $220 million to resolve bribery charges spanning South Africa, Indonesia, Tanzania, Malawi, Ghana, Kenya, Zimbabwe, and Azerbaijan. In March 2024 SAP agreed to pay R500 million to South Africa's Special Investigating Unit. Plattner had lived part-time in South Africa for decades, at Fancourt and at Yzerfontein on the West Coast. The company's worst conduct and some of his most generous philanthropy unfolded in the same country.
In 2021 and 2022 Der Spiegel published a series on what it called "the dark side of SAP," including a piece headlined "Hasso Plattner's smokescreen tactics." Manager magazin argued that the leadership's management style had itself become a compliance risk. In May 2022 Bloomberg reported allegations of harassment and of hostile responses to complaints. In September 2024 SAP's chief technology officer, Jürgen Müller, left after what the company called inappropriate behavior at a company event. E3 Magazine, generally an admirer, conceded that "the lack of compliance was often mentioned during Plattner's time in office," and offered his defense in the same breath: he "was committed to the task itself and not to a bureaucratic position description." Those two clauses describe the same trait.
Succession, the last task of any founder, was messy. In 2019 McDermott said he and Plattner were "completely on the same page." Months later McDermott left for ServiceNow. Plattner orchestrated the appointment of Jennifer Morgan and Christian Klein as co-CEOs in October 2019. By April 2020 Morgan was gone, with the company citing the need for "a very clear leadership structure." Klein, who stayed, later credited the board for backing a strategy shift with "the knowledge of the risk of the share price falling by 30%." In February 2023 Plattner welcomed Punit Renjen, the former global CEO of Deloitte, as his designated successor. SAP later split with Renjen before Plattner retired. At the 2022 annual meeting, after accepting another two-year term amid criticism, Plattner called the handover "a very important and emotional task for me, which I've been working on for some time."
On May 15, 2024, at eighty, after fifty-two years, he left the supervisory board. There was a ceremony at the SAP Arena in Mannheim. Chancellor Olaf Scholz spoke and urged him to keep weighing in on German politics, saying his advice was still wanted. There was also a smaller private evening with circus performers, where his two daughters spoke. Twenty years earlier, at his sixtieth birthday party at HPI, Chancellor Gerhard Schröder had said: "We need more Hasso Plattners and more SAPs in order to get Germany moving again economically."
Five months after Mannheim, Handelsblatt asked whether he had visited the chancellery yet. "No," he said. "I haven't been back in Germany since then."
He lives in San Jose, which he calls his adopted home. He owns the San Jose Sharks, who play in an arena called the SAP Center. He told the Neue Zürcher Zeitung that he once wanted to buy a quarter of Apple. He called his own government's work a Trauerspiel, a tragedy in the sense of a pitiful spectacle. He told Der Spiegel that his countrymen "take too little pleasure in success." He told the Frankfurter Allgemeine he supported a universal basic income and opposed a wealth tax. Forbes puts his fortune at about $13 billion. As of early 2024 he was still SAP's largest single shareholder, with 6.6 percent.
Zur Universität
On June 2, 2025, the State of Brandenburg, the University of Potsdam, and the Hasso Plattner Foundation signed a letter of intent. Over the next decade, the university will build a new campus on the Brauhausberg, on the grounds of the old state parliament that once crowned the hill. The parliament has since moved into the rebuilt Stadtschloss, behind the facade Plattner paid to restore. HPI will expand its own campus at Griebnitzsee and add degree programs, international partnerships, and research in artificial intelligence. Its stated aim is now "Europe's digital sovereignty." The man whose company made Germany relevant in global software, and who now lives in California, is underwriting the effort to make Europe less dependent on America.
"Innovation needs a hub," his foundation wrote, "and Europe is gaining one in the city of Potsdam."
He told the story again that summer, at eighty-one. More than twenty-five years ago, he said, he had tramped up the Brauhausberg. He had thought it would be nice to found a university up there. He came down the slippery path to the parking lot and saw the sign.
A father's sailboat on the Havel, heading toward a city the boy would not be allowed to reach again for thirty years. An old man in California who says he no longer goes back. Between them, on a hill above the water, a campus that does not exist yet. At the bottom of the hill, the sign with two words on it, pointing the way.
Part IIThe Playbook
What follows is an attempt to distill a half-century of decisions into principles an operator can use. Plattner never wrote a management treatise; the closest he came were two book-length conversations around 2000, the German Dem Wandel voraus ("Ahead of Change") and its English counterpart, Anticipating Change. His methods have to be read from his choices. Some of them are admirable. Several came with costs that should be counted alongside the gains. Each principle below is grounded in the record above and ends with a single tactic.
The principles
- 1.Treat a cancelled assignment as a market signal.
- 2.Let customers finance the product.
- 3.Ship the bet before it is finished.
- 4.Set up shop at the customer.
- 5.Measure confidence, not just results.
- 6.Import the method, not the mythology.
- 7.Chase the speed nobody asked for.
- 8.Let authority follow the work, and price the risk.
- 9.Teach what you are building.
- 10.Give where you were refused.
- 11.Refuse to invest in what you cannot explain.
- 12.Admit the mistake from the stage.
Principle 1
Treat a cancelled assignment as a market signal
IBM told five engineers that the enterprise system they were building on the Scientific Data Systems code was no longer needed. Their employer's verdict was really a statement about IBM's business model: it sold machines and had no interest in selling software to customers. It was not a statement about whether customers wanted the software. The engineers saw the gap between what their employer was willing to do and what the market was asking for, and they walked into it.
Most ideas killed inside large companies are killed for reasons of internal strategy, not external demand. The founders of SAP had evidence that demand was real: a customer had asked for the system. Everything that followed came from separating "my company doesn't want this" from "nobody wants this."
Tactic: When a project you believe in is cancelled, write down whether the reason concerns your organization's priorities or the customer's need. If it is only the former, you may be looking at a company.
Principle 2
Let customers finance the product
SAP took no bank loans, no venture capital, and no state money. Its founders worked at night on borrowed computers and grew on customer cash. When the 1981 downturn halted orders for six months, Hopp's solution was not outside capital but down payments on software that would not ship for a year. That is a bet that the customer relationship is strong enough to carry the company through a crisis.
The cost was time. Hopp put the "startup phase" at ten to fifteen years. The benefit was a company whose priorities were set by paying customers rather than investors, and whose founders still controlled almost a quarter of the votes four decades later. Plattner later complained that German founders lack venture capital. His own company is the counterexample, and the comparison tells you what each path buys.
Tactic: Before raising outside money, test whether your three best customers would pay in advance for your next release. If they would, you are raising capital you may not need.
Principle 3
Ship the bet before it is finished
R/3 cost about $200 million to develop and absorbed hundreds of engineers. SAP could have waited until every module was complete. Plattner launched it into the North American market in 1992, while D&B Software still led, because waiting meant ending up "like Cullinet or D&B." The result was nearly 200 customers in the first year and a fivefold revenue increase over the next four years.
He later praised the same instinct in Americans and the iPhone: build something that is not perfect, then iterate quality into it. The principle is not recklessness. The architecture of R/3 was sound and the risk was in completeness, not in the core. Ship early when the foundation is solid and only the coverage is missing.
Tactic: Separate what must be right on day one (architecture, data model) from what can be completed later (breadth, polish), and launch as soon as the first category is done.
Principle 4
Set up shop at the customer
The first SAP software was written for ICI in Östringen, and the founders built it inside the customer's operations. Thirty-three years later, at the founding of the d.school, Plattner described that habit as a design principle: "One sets up shop at the customer to immerse oneself in their company culture and business processes." Observers of SAP point to the same root: the founders "built the product alongside customers."
The point goes beyond requirements gathering. Real-time processing, SAP's founding innovation, came from watching how a business actually waited overnight for punch cards. You find that kind of insight by being in the room when the waiting happens, not by asking customers what they want.
Tactic: Have your engineers spend a working week inside a customer's operations each year, not in a conference room but at the desk where the product is used.
Principle 5
Measure confidence, not just results
When SAP's board declined to renew Léo Apotheker's contract in 2010, the justification was not revenue or share price. Employee confidence in the company's direction had fallen from 76 percent in 2006 to roughly a third. Plattner's explanation was blunt: in a company that depends on the creativity of its people, "emotions are more important than things that can be measured rationally," and whether the loss of trust was objectively justified was "ultimately, irrelevant."
This principle cuts in an unusual direction for an engineering culture. Plattner defended the cost cuts as correct and removed the CEO anyway, because a correct decision that destroys trust has a cost that later shows up in output. Customer confidence counted too. He named both.
Tactic: Track employee and customer confidence in your direction as a board-level metric, and treat a sustained collapse as a leadership problem even when the financials look fine.
Principle 6
Import the method, not the mythology
Plattner did not discover design thinking from a consultant. He recognized it on a magazine cover in New Orleans because SAP was already using "the same terms, like 'unfocus groups' and 'observation.'" He then did two things. He funded the method's best practitioners at Stanford, where they could develop it more freely than inside SAP, and he built a German version inside HPI, where engineers would absorb it.
His stated reason was not fashion. He believed SAP had lost the customer-closeness of its early years and needed an outside discipline to recover it. The d.school was an investment in renewing SAP's culture, routed through a university.
H
How Plattner Turned an Article into an Institution
From recognition to infrastructure in about three years.
2004
Plattner reads BusinessWeek's IDEO cover story at Sapphire in New Orleans and notices the overlap with SAP's methods.
2005
He pledges $35 million to found the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford under David Kelley.
2006
He announces the HPI School of Design Thinking at Germany's first national IT summit, held at HPI.
2007
The Potsdam d-school opens to advanced students from all disciplines.
2008
He commits $16 million to a joint Stanford-HPI design-thinking research program.
Tactic: When you find an outside discipline that names something your company used to do well, fund its best practitioners and require that the method, not just the vocabulary, show up in your own product process.
Principle 7
Chase the speed nobody asked for
Germans kept asking Plattner, "Why does the database have to be so much faster?" His answer was that for forty years IT had been "almost exclusively about the question of speed." HANA, conceived around 2006 and developed at his chair in Potsdam, reduced five years of accounting data from 20 gigabytes to 1.1 gigabytes in memory and answered queries in about a second. It became the foundation of S/4HANA and every SAP product after it.
The principle has a limit, and Plattner named it himself. HANA never became the dominant independent database he wanted. Customers moved more slowly than the technology, and pricing may have held it back. Speed is a durable direction for a product. It is not a guarantee that the market will pay for the speed you can deliver.
Tactic: Identify the latency your customers have accepted as normal, the equivalent of the overnight batch, and fund at least one serious effort to eliminate it, while separately testing whether they will pay for that.
For twenty-one years Plattner held a supervisory title while doing executive work as "chief software advisor." He stopped products, debated strategy with CTOs, delivered the technical keynotes, and orchestrated CEO changes. Admirers said his title never mattered because his presence steered the company. Critics, including investor groups, Der Spiegel, and Manager magazin, saw exactly the blurring of supervision and management that German governance rules exist to prevent, and they linked it to SAP's compliance failures.
Both readings are correct. The approach kept SAP's founding technical vision alive across five decades and several CEOs. It also meant that the person responsible for oversight was deeply invested in the operations he was supposed to be overseeing.
⚖
The Two Ledgers of Founder-Led Oversight
What the arrangement produced, and what it cost.
| Dimension | Gain | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Product | HANA and S/4HANA driven by the founder's conviction | Customers moved slower than the vision; HANA never won as a standalone database |
| Leadership | Fast removal of a CEO who had lost trust (2010) | Unstable successions: co-CEOs in 2010 and 2019, a designated chair who never took office |
| Culture | Engineering remained the center of gravity | Departures of technical leaders amid strategy disputes |
| Risk | A founder who knew the company better than anyone | Press criticism that governance and compliance oversight were neglected; $220M+ FCPA resolution in 2024 |
Tactic: If you keep operating influence after giving up an operating title, appoint someone independent of you whose only job is to look at what you are not looking at, especially compliance in distant markets.
Principle 9
Teach what you are building
Plattner lectured master's students in Potsdam on trends in the software industry. He flew his Stanford class to Atlanta and turned SAP's biggest keynote into a seminar. Most importantly, he ran a research chair at HPI where the in-memory database that defined SAP's last decade under him was developed. Teaching was not a philanthropic hobby running parallel to the business. It was part of the product pipeline.
A classroom forces a founder to explain the idea to people with no stake in the old architecture, and it produces graduates who carry the idea into the world. Gero Decker's path, from HPI student to unicorn founder to SAP executive, is the payoff in a single career.
Tactic: Explain your next major technical bet in a teaching setting, a course, a seminar, or a public lecture, before you commit the company to it. The questions students ask are the ones your customers will ask later.
Principle 10
Give where you were refused
Plattner's largest philanthropic commitments went not to Baden-Württemberg, where he built SAP and lived for decades, nor to San Jose, where he lives now, but to Potsdam, the city he sailed toward as a boy and could not reach for thirty years. The Brauhausberg vision met a sign and a politician's suggestion to start smaller. He started smaller. Twenty-seven years later the larger version was signed.
The lesson for operators is not sentimental. Commitment rooted in a personal attachment survives setbacks that would end a strategic donation: the Mercure protests, an abandoned project, a decades-long timeline. Stolpe's observation that the "obstruction only made the affection greater" describes a durable source of motivation.
Tactic: For long-horizon commitments, philanthropic or commercial, choose ground you have a personal reason to care about, because you will need that reason when the first plan is rejected.
Principle 11
Refuse to invest in what you cannot explain
During the 2008 crisis, Plattner told Der Spiegel he had asked his wealth adviser whether they held any derivatives. They did not. "I don't even understand them. The whole business model." He recalled an earlier real-estate investment that went badly, and he blamed himself: "I should have looked into it better first." On the Sapphire stage he has answered technical questions with "I don't know," and he said the same about why HANA failed as a standalone product.
For an engineer, this is natural: if you cannot model it, you cannot trust it. For an executive surrounded by experts, it takes discipline, because the pressure is always to nod along with the people in suits.
Tactic: Before any significant investment, write a one-paragraph explanation of how it makes money that a smart outsider could follow. If you cannot, do not invest.
Principle 12
Admit the mistake from the stage
"We were wimps." "That was a mistake." "I honestly don't know." Plattner said these things in public, to customers and reporters, about his own company's strategy and his own central bets. Diginomica described his "disarming honesty" and credited it to the freedom founders have to tell the truth.
Candor is a competitive asset in enterprise software, where customers make decade-long commitments and are trained to discount vendor messaging. A founder who names a misjudgment makes the rest of what he says more credible. It also signals to the organization that saying the uncomfortable thing is allowed.
Tactic: At your next major customer event, name one decision you got wrong and what you changed because of it, before anyone else raises it.
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Part IIIQuotes and Maxims
In their words
— Hasso Plattner, Handelsblatt, October 2024At SAP, we have celebrated successes, but we have always set the bar higher.
— Hasso Plattner, Der Spiegel, 2012We take too little pleasure in success. In the US, people have a totally different attitude.
— Hasso Plattner, This is Design Thinking!, 2015Design thinking reminded me of the good old days at SAP when we were closer to the customer. When we had this entrepreneurial spirit in everything we did. I had the feeling that we had lost this spirit.
— Hasso Plattner, Der Spiegel, 2010Confidence arises out of many factors, and in this context emotions are more important than things that can be measured rationally. That may sound surprising for an IT company but how people perceive things is all-important.
— Hasso Plattner, Hasso Plattner FoundationI founded HPI to share my experience with others. I studied at an excellent university in Karlsruhe and built a successful career at IBM and SAP. Through the Foundation, I want to give back by supporting education and creating opportunities for the next generation.
Maxims
- Read the cancellation correctly. An employer's lack of interest in an idea is often a statement about its business model, not about the market.
- Make the customer your bank. Down payments from people who trust you are cheaper than any capital you can raise.
- Launch on a sound foundation, not a finished one. Architecture must be right on day one; completeness can follow.
- Sit where the waiting happens. Real-time software came from watching a business wait overnight for punch cards.
- Treat confidence as a balance-sheet item. A correct decision that destroys trust carries a cost that shows up later.
- Speed is a direction, not a guarantee. Pursue lower latency relentlessly, and verify separately that customers will pay for it.
- Price your own influence. A founder who keeps steering without the title needs someone independent watching the parts he ignores.
- Teach the bet before you make it. A classroom finds the holes in a vision faster than a boardroom does.
- Commit where you are personally attached. Long projects survive rejection when the reason for them is your own.
- Say "I don't know" out loud. Candor about mistakes makes everything else you say more believable.
