Birol Yildiz

Birol Yildiz is co-founder and CEO of ilert, the incident response company based in Cologne, Germany. He founded it in 2011, right after his computer science studies, according to Happy Bootstrapping.

Getting Nagios Alerts by SMS

The idea came from his master's thesis on context-aware notification systems. "My realization was that even the mundane problem – if there's an issue in Nagios and I want to receive an SMS – was unsolved," he said. After 18 months ilert became a side project while he gained professional experience.

Leaving Rewe Digital After a Car Accident

He was chief product owner at Rewe Digital when a car accident made him stop and reconsider. He left the job in 2019 and restarted ilert with two co-founders he had met at Rewe Digital. "We gave ourselves one year," he said; they survived it on salary cuts of about 50 percent.