Faces of Tset: Meet the People Behind the Scenes

What makes a company thrive? At Tset, we believe it’s the people. Behind every development sprint, customer meeting, and strategic roadmap are individuals who bring curiosity, talent, and unique stories to the table. 

In this second edition of our Faces of Tset series, we sat down with three team members from different areas of the company to hear how they found their way to Tset, what they’ve learned along the way, and what drives them every day. 

Meet the Team Members

To start, we asked three colleagues from across the company to introduce themselves, and to share what led them to Tset, what they do here, and what motivates them in their roles. 

Q: Can you start by telling us your name and where you're from?

Florian Stradner, Senior Frontend Developer: "Hi, my name is Florian. I’m from Vienna and, as I always say, born and raised in Vienna." 

Tim Wiskemann, Team Lead TechOps: "My name is Tim. I’m originally from Mainz in Germany, and I’ve been living in Vienna for around six years now." 

Steffen Loose, Executive Account Manager: "My name is Steffen Loose, and I'm from Ulm, Germany." 

Q: What inspired you to join Tset, and how would you describe your role?

Each path into Tset is different. We asked what motivated them to join, and how they see their role today.

Florian: “My role is that I’m on Frontend, and I also have a UX role. I try to keep everything together so that we have one product that fits well for everybody and looks nice. How did I come to this company? I tried my own business, which feels like a long time ago, but that didn’t work out because of Coronavirus and other things. Then there was a great opportunity here, and I felt right away that these were the right people. I had a very nice interview process. Back then, we were quite a different company. I think I was the 25th person to start here. We’ve grown a lot since then, but that’s how it goes.” 

Tim: “I joined Tset pretty much at the very beginning. What really convinced and inspired me was the entire vision for the product. That was the reason why I wanted to join [Tset]. 

Let me give you a bit of background. In my first job after university, I started as a Cost Engineer. I noticed that many of the calculations we did were repetitive and required a lot of expert knowledge. But once you gained that expert knowledge, you’d often end up doing very similar calculations over and over again. So, I began trying to automate some of it in Excel by using simple formulas, a little bit of VBA code, and so on. It worked to some extent, but I always felt there had to be a better way of doing it.  In my second job, I met Sasan [Hashemi] and Andreas [Tsetinis]. They told me about Tset and shared their early vision for the product back then. And I thought that was a really, really cool and good fit because many of the things they were trying to do are also things I thought about before, things I tried to do with my limited coding skills. Then I realized it makes sense to just try to do this as a professional software product.  

That’s still what I do at Tset today. I talk to our customers, to clients, and to experts in manufacturing and technology. I also contribute some of my own knowledge. My role is to describe manufacturing technologies in a way that allows them to be implemented in our software. For example, how do you select the right machine for a specific manufacturing process? How do you calculate the cycle time for a certain manufacturing step? How many parts are produced per cycle? And so on. All these things are part of my daily business.”  

Steffen: “What inspired me is that it’s something new that’s starting up, something where you can create, where you can have influence, where you can make an impact. My role here is an Account Manager. I’m in contact with customers, explaining the software to them and, of course, hopefully getting them on board with us.”  

The Tset Experience

Job descriptions outline the what, but we wanted to hear about the how. How does working at Tset feel, day to day? Here’s how our team put it. 

Q: If you had to describe Tset in one word or phrase, what would it be, and why?

Florian: “Effort and freedom. That gives me the possibility to do whatever I feel is right for the product and work toward that goal.” 

Steffen: “Innovative. Because it’s about starting an old idea from scratch. The idea of having knowledge about your costs, and of course about your CO₂, is not new. But the way we approach it is quite different. The way we make it approachable for our customers is new, and it opens up totally new areas for people to explore that topic.“

Q: What’s something you’ve learned at Tset that you didn’t expect to? 

Florian: “I learned a lot because the technology keeps moving on. For that reason, we’re on a constant learning path, which is great because there’s so much out there. I’m super interested in all the new stuff. A lot of it came together for me because in school, I had already worked with many of these technologies. So every time we introduce something new, it’s like, ‘Ah, cool stuff - I know this!’ It connects a lot of interesting ideas from both the technical side and the programming aspect.” 

Tim: “I learned a lot about software development and how complex it is to build a solution that is enterprise-scale worthy.  There’s a huge difference between building a solution for one company and building a solution for an entire industry or market of different companies. My expectation was that cost engineering was done in certain ways, but it's different everywhere how cost engineering is done. One of the most important things we’ve had to address with our software is configurability and making sure it’s adaptable and tailored to each customer’s specific needs. That's one of the very important things that we are doing with Tset, and that's something I needed to learn along the way.” 

Steffen: “There are a lot of boundaries for companies to work in a global market, and many external factors influence them, from both the cost side and the CO₂ side. And these are way more related than I figured before.” 

Making an Impact 

Tset continues to grow, and so does our impact. But what excites our team the most about what’s ahead? We asked what kind of influence they believe Tset is already having, even if it’s not always visible from the outside. 

Q: What impact do you think Tset is making that people outside the company might not see? 

Florian: “We’re helping the economy and the whole system by getting good stuff out. That means things are produced in a good way, in a cost-efficient way, and ideally in a way that benefits the environment too, so that you can make trade-off decisions.” 

Tim: “I believe one of the very important things about Tset that I see with customers going live now, is that it forces companies to think a lot about their data. I believe that having high-quality data and a lot of high-quality data is the future, and everywhere in the industry, but especially in cost engineering. With Tset, we are building a tool that enables our customers to use their data. If they have been generating cost engineering data for decades, it is important to handle this data correctly and to migrate the right data as well. It is important to look at the data quality and the right structure of the data is key. Our software provides a point where customers really need to consider their data quality and work on it. I believe this is the future. Many people don't think about it in the beginning, but it becomes very clear once we start working together.” 

Steffen: “Tset is opening up the topic of cost and CO₂ to completely new departments. It makes the subject easier to approach and easier to use because of the nature of the software. And it makes it also available for the companies that are not enterprise-sized, but still need cost engineering and CO₂ engineering.” 

Beyond the Office

Curiosity and ambition shape how our team works, and how they think beyond their roles. Whether it’s through unexpected hobbies or the people who inspire them, these moments outside of work often reflect the same mindset we value at Tset: thoughtful, driven, and always exploring new ideas.

Q: What’s the most interesting or unexpected career path or hobby you had before joining Tset?

Florian: “Before joining Tset, I spent quite a lot of time in the sport of American football. I was a coach for over 10 years, had a lot of fun, went to different championships, and enjoyed my time there with players of all ages and levels.”

Q: If you could have dinner with any historical or famous figure, who would it be and why?

Florian: “That’s a good question. I guess I’d go with Jocko Willink. He’s a guy from Leadership and was a Navy SEAL. I’m kind of a fan of all those guys! I think it would make for a few good conversations. He has a strong presence and gives me direction for where I want to go and how I want to conduct my life.“ 

Steffen: “I think it would be Albert Einstein because I'm very interested in physics and all the things he discovered. Additionally, he once lived in the same place where I live now, which makes it even more interesting.”