Why I Founded Kompairo

I founded Kompairo because I wanted to build something useful that could also contribute to society.

For many years, I was severely affected by ME/CFS. My health has improved significantly over the past several months, and today I am only mildly affected. This improvement has changed my daily life, but it has not changed what those difficult years taught me: the quality of medical care depends heavily on the state of research into a disease. Doctors can only diagnose and treat patients based on the knowledge and therapies available to them. When an illness is still poorly understood and has no effective treatment or cure, even dedicated medical professionals quickly reach the limits of what they can do.

For people affected by diseases like ME/CFS, research is therefore not an abstract scientific goal. It shapes whether they are understood, whether they receive appropriate care, and whether there is a realistic prospect of recovery in the future.

The Final Push

I had been thinking about creating a platform like Kompairo for some time. The final push came from Christoph Ströck, who is also severely affected by ME/CFS and has spent years advocating for more research. He contacted me and asked whether I could use my abilities to contribute to the research effort. That question turned an idea into a decision: I would try to build Kompairo.

Useful for Individuals, Valuable for Society

Kompairo is intended to offer genuine value to its users. It should make products and services easier to compare, explain relevant differences clearly, and help people make better-informed decisions. That usefulness has to come first, because only a platform that people trust and choose to use can create a wider impact.

At the same time, I believe a company should take responsibility for more than its own success. Kompairo is designed so that part of the value it creates can support research into diseases that remain poorly understood, difficult to treat, or incurable. My hope is that its commercial success and its contribution to society can reinforce each other.

I do not know whether Kompairo will succeed or whether it will ever create the impact I hope for. But I know that doing nothing would guarantee that it never could. Even if the idea does not work, I will at least have tried to turn my own difficult experience into something useful for others.