Lenz Gschwendtner
geek, hacker punk
Lenz Gschwendtner has been breaking and fixing the internet since the 90s. He doesn’t care much for titles — founder, developer, community builder — but he’s worn them all when the work called for it. What matters to him is building things that last and helping others find their own path to do the same.
The Founder
Lenz is a serial entrepreneur who doesn’t raise capital — he recycles it. He built and sold iWantMyName, a domain registrar loved by independent developers, and has gone on to launch projects like local.foundation, emails.eco, and even the odd space-cat experiment. Long before remote work became fashionable, he was running globally distributed teams on nothing but trust and dial-up connections.
The Community Builder
Wherever he lands, Lenz builds community. In New Zealand he was a fixture in the Wellington startup scene, running Startup Weekends and mentoring founders. Now based in Portugal, he is a driving force in the Algarve startup ecosystem. He doesn’t look for followers; he looks for tape-traders — people who take ideas, remix them, and pass them forward.
The Developer
At heart, Lenz is a geek with hands deep in the code. His tool of choice is Elixir, a language that mirrors his philosophy of resilience, clarity, and small but strong communities. He has shipped large-scale systems, spoken internationally on continuous deployment and architecture, and consistently leaned on open source as the foundation for everything he builds.
👉 In short: Lenz builds, shares, recycles, and repeats — always pushing for independence, resilience, and community over hype.