Torsten Osthus

Entrepreneur, impulse generator and investor

Torsten Osthus is a multi-entrepreneur, driving force and investor. As an entrepreneur, he has led the OSTHUS GmbH, which he founded, to success - with 70 employees at locations in the USA, China and Germany. He has also built OSTHUS Group into an incubator for startups with the goal of helping life sciences R&D drive their digitization to enable seamless innovation on data and process automation.

His founding company has since been sold. He is still invested in his co-founded start-ups ZONTAL, ACCURIDS and LeapAnalysis/SHARDONE as well as Chemantics and supports especially ZONTAL in the growth process as entrepreneur and impulse generator. In spring 2023, he and his co-founder were able to win Bruker AG as an investor for ZONTAL Inc. In 2021, his portfolio company LeapAnalysis (today SHARDONE) was awarded by FastCompany as the fourth most innovative company in the field of Data Science behind SnowFlake in the USA.

His personal concern is to provide impetus for life sciences R&D that helps transform barriers to innovation into innovations that serve life.

Author, Alchemist & Founder

Torsten Osthus also makes his experience as an entrepreneur and his vision of a corporate culture focused on innovation, responsibility and growth available to others as an author. The impact of his book "Chefsache Empowerment" goes beyond the corporate sphere and reaches deep into the area of personal growth of people.

His gift for recognizing new trends very early on, before they materialize, enables Torsten Osthus to shape change and not be overwhelmed by it. His focus on learning and the shared growth of people in their environments, as a human being, as a successful part of the corporate world, as a valuable supporter of a living society, makes Torsten Osthus a change agent, an innovator, an alchemist who ensures transformation and movement.

This makes Torsten Osthus the founder of The Next Step, which accompanies people, companies and society with the compass for growing success.

Torsten Osthus

"If you really want to ..."

"I can do much better than that!" was Torsten Osthus' constant thought as a student, and he believed that no one would recognize it. This culminated in the 10th grade, when he received a "concrete five" from his math and chemistry teacher in the first half of the year and his Latin teacher said to his mother: He had never seen such a "booze-addled" student.

At that time, he went to a career counselor without hope and was recommended engineering because he liked to build things and his father was a locksmith. That was a good recommendation, because it suddenly gave him a direction he wanted to take.

And so he took his next step, going to his math and chemistry teacher and asking him what he would think if he took math and chemistry as an advanced course. "I was very afraid that he would laugh at me," Torsten Osthus recalls today. But instead, the teacher said, "Torsten, if you really want to do this, you can do it!"

And so Torsten Osthus wrote the second-best Leistungskurs exam in math in the 11th grade; he was even better than his friend, then top of his class, with whom he had studied and from whom he learned, above all, how to study.

This success moved a lot in him: He learned how the clear idea of the goal, the confidence in him and the help on the way can lead to special achievements. Much later, he realized that all it takes are these three things: a compass to point the way, someone to give confidence, and people to accompany him along the way.

But no matter how successful we are, we always have a next step ahead of us, whether it's personal or professional. But one thing is set: The next step begins with and within ourselves ...

Torsten Osthus

"What moves me? Goosebumps moments ..."

When people call up their potential and move things that they themselves did not believe in - these are the changes that move Torsten Osthus.

"When an employee who started out as a clerk becomes the general manager and says: 'Torsten, you always believed in me. And you even saw more in me very much than I did myself' - those are moments that touch me," says Torsten Osthus.

With the movement he founded, he is taking a new first step and hopes that as many people as possible will accompany him on this path. Because for Torsten Osthus, it's about bringing things into the flow that people can't see in themselves.

Helping you see the big picture and take the next step - that is Torsten Osthus' passion. Giving impulses that create a culture of trust, responsibility and appreciation. Bringing more confidence into the world and creating the framework for results and benefits. That is the direction his personal compass points him in.

"The economy of the future functions like an organism, like cells that work together and everything that is not useful flies out. And for the organism to function, it needs a common value system that provides orientation, otherwise everyone runs in their own direction and chaos ensues and in the worst case, we know, cancer. And those who do not focus on growth and benefit for others lose their justification, become dinosaurs, die out.", Torsten Osthus