Maximilian Matschke was born and raised in Munich, Germany. He attained a Bachelor's degree and a Master's degree in Technology and Management from the Technical University in Munich, and subsequently completed an Honours degree in Technology Management, spending a term abroad at Columbia Business School in New York, and doing internships in Germany, Singapore, China, and Spain. Max started three social ventures, all addressing the issue of youth employment. The first of these, founded in 2011, was a student-run consulting firm in Johannesburg, The Consulting Academy Johannesburg, which later expanded to Cape Town, Nairobi, and Guadalajara. The second was an entrepreneurship boot camp for unemployed youth, which was successfully piloted and used as a base for a train-the-trainer approach. The third, uNowanga, is an upskilling initiative done in collaboration with the international charity, St John, South Africa. It is a programme to send unemployed youth from South Africa to Germany to train as nurses. He interrupted his career in consulting to pursue a doctorate on youth employment in South Africa. The resulting PhD formed the basis for this book.
