Marco Börries

Marco Börries is a German information technology entrepreneur, born on 1 August 1968, who is best known as the founder of Star Division, the company behind StarOffice and, through it, the origin of OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice. Inspired by a student exchange to Silicon Valley while he was at a Gymnasium in Lüneburg, he started Star Division as a garage company at sixteen, distributing the word processor StarWriter as an alternative to Microsoft's office package. StarOffice went on to sell more than 25 million copies, and on 5 August 1999 he sold the company to Sun Microsystems, where he was briefly employed. He also founded the banking software provider Star Finanz as a joint venture with a German savings bank organisation, then VerdiSoft, which he led as chief executive and sold to Yahoo in 2005, and later NumberFour AG in Berlin, which entered insolvency proceedings in September 2024.