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Oskar Hartmann (born May 14, 1982) is an entrepreneur, super business angel, international investor and philanthropist. He is the founder and partner of Hartmann Holdings, Fastlane Ventures , Simile Ventures Partners and HR CAPITAL LARIX. He himself has been the founder and CEO of 10 companies and an investor in over 100 Internet companies in the US, Europe, India, Japan, Russia and the Middle East. Since 2012, he has also supported and helped create 25 non-profit projects to promote entrepreneurship around the world.

Childhood and Family
Oskar Hartmann was born on May 14, 1982 to Elisabeth Hartmann (nee Krebs) and Richard Hartmann. He grew up in the city of Dzhambul in Kazakhstan. His mother came from the Ukrainian SSR (born January 24, 1953). She graduated from the Pedagogical Institute in Yambul as a philologist and worked as a Russian language and literature teacher at a school until 1990. His father came from the Kazakh SSR (born December 17, 1950). He graduated from the Ust-Kamenogorsk Construction and Road Institute (UKZDI) with a degree in engineering. Hartmann has two brothers and one sister: Hermann (March 01, 1975), Edith (June 19, 1977) and Arthur (April 26, 1987).

Hartmann always worked from an early age. From the age of 11 he delivered numerous newspapers and magazines, later worked in a warehouse and at a gas station. At the age of 18 he started his first business of his own, the online store profitnessshop, which first sold sports nutrition and later other popular products.

Education
At the age of eight (June 1990), Hartmann moved with his parents from Kazakhstan to Germany, where he received his high school diploma and completed his studies. In between, at age 17, he moved to the United States and enrolled at Tuscarawas Valley (Ohio) High School through an exchange program to study English. In 1999, Hartmann returned to Germany and graduated with honors from the Technical High School in Müllheim. After graduation, Hartmann did community service in Russia at the Children's Cancer Hospital, where he began learning Russian again. In 2004, Oskar Hartmann enrolled at WHU, the Otto Beisheim School of Business Management in Germany. After graduation he received a degree in International Business. In 2005-2007 he also studied for an MBA at the University of Hawaii (Hawaii, USA) and on exchange at the Financial University under the Government of the Russian Federation (Moscow).

During his studies, Hartmann interned at multinational companies: BMW in Malaysia, Game Goods in Germany and Boston Consulting Group.

ProFitnessShop, Firmatech, KUPIVIP
After completing an internship in 2006 and graduating from WHU in 2008, he began working as a consultant in BCG's Moscow office and developed the idea for his own company. That same year, the 25-year-old Hartmann decided to start over. "After my experience at Firmatech and ProFitnessShop, I wanted to be an entrepreneur again, not stay a consultant," the businessman told Forbes Russia. That same year he set up one of his companies, the online store KupiVIP, which became the leader of the online fashion market in Russia with a sales volume of $250 million over 5 years.

Thanks to a friend from Europe, he learned about closed shopping clubs that sell leftover collections of branded clothing, shoes, and accessories at deep discounts. "There has never been anything like this in Russia," Hartmann told Forbes about the creation of the online store KupiVIP.

Analogous to the Russian shopping club was the then successful French Vente Privee. In addition to co-founder Damian Doberstein, Hartmann's partner in KupiVIP and key mentor was Oliver Jung, co-founder of the German shopping club Brands4Friends and one of the most successful internet company investors in the world.

The retail format, innovative for Russia, allowed KupiVIP to grow rapidly. Major clothing retailers and distributors of international brands, such as TSUM, Bosco and Jamilco, became suppliers. In 2011 KupiVIP was named Runet's champion in terms of growth and speed of investment. Forbes estimated the company's turnover at $160 million in 2011 and ranked it among the top 30 largest Russian Internet companies. KupiVIP received $55 million from Accel Partners, Mangrove Capital and Bessemer Venture Partners (a record in the Russian market at the time).

In 2013, Hartmann left KupiVIP as CEO and then the company's board of directors. In 2017, the entrepreneur left the company entirely as a shareholder.

FastLane: Sapato, ShoppingLive, Teamo, Relevant Media, Giftery, Ozon
The creation of FASTLANE and its incubator was followed by a very creative entrepreneurial phase: the creation of the Shopping Live TV channel, the online shoe store SAPATO (bought by the Russian Amazon - Ozon for 75 million dollars ), the dating site Teamo (later acquired by Mamba), the "content factory" Relevant Media and a number of other companies such as GIFTERY, MIGCREDIT, HOMEFAIR, HEVEREST. At the same time, Hartmann began investing in the same business models he was building in other countries. For example, SUKAR.com (later acquired by SOUQ and then AMAZON ), Fashionandyou.com and Casacanda (sold to FAB.COM, which was the first company in the portfolio valued at more than a billion dollars before the company dissolved).

Hartmann Holdings, SIMILE VENTURE PARTNERS, CARPRICE
To manage the growing number of investments, he founded his first venture capital fund SIMILE and Hartmann Holdings together with Pascal Clement and Tatiana Kim.

In 2014, Oskar Hartmann and 4 co-founders launched CARPRICE, which has become one of the largest used-car marketplaces in Russia with a trading volume of 300 million euros.

AKTIVO
In 2015, Hartmann and his partner launched Egor Klimemko, the first crowdfunding service for private investments in commercial real estate. "Our goal is to make the process of investing simple, understandable, and accessible to a larger group of people," Hartmann explains the essence of the project.

HR CAPITAL, LARIX
Since 2015, Oskar Hartmann has worked closely with Igor Rynakov, founder of TechnoNicol, on non-profit projects to promote entrepreneurship and education. This has created a close friendship as well as a platform for joint investments by IMPACT HR CAPITAL and the Larix Foundation.

Sports
In 2019 in St. Petersburg, Hartmann broke the world record in 100-meter sprint rowing, which previously belonged to Benjamin Smith, right during the forum.

Since 2017, Hartmann has also been training as a cycling sprinter. His mentor Denis Dmitriev was the world sprint champion in this sport. In 2022, Hartmann plans to compete for the title of champion in the sport.

In 2021, he passed one of the most difficult tests, the Everesting, developed by members of the Hells500 cycling club in Australia. The challenge consists of climbing the same mountain as many times as necessary until the total sum of the climbs reaches the height of Everest (8,848 meters). Hartmann completed the test in 33 hours in one attempt without sleep. The project was called "Neveresrt-2021.

Media enterprises
In December 2021, Hartmann recorded and released the longest podcast ever, "What does a person need to be happy?" lasting 50 hours. During this time, the Russian entrepreneur conducted about 50 interviews in a row, without sleep.

Hartmann is the author of the bestseller "Einfach machen!" (with a circulation of over 150,000 copies). This is a detailed guide for entrepreneurs and everyone who wants to learn how to successfully achieve their goals.

Personal life
Oskar Hartmann has been married for many years. He met his wife Tatiana during his studies when he came to Moscow. Oskar tries to maintain a balance between work and his personal life and says: "I am grateful to my wife Tatiana. Thanks to her I have managed to remain human. She saved me from turning into a business machine and helped me to be myself".

The Hartmans are raising three children, two sons and a daughter. Together with their children they travel a lot; they have made more than a hundred trips around the world.