In 2011 Max Bittner packed up his young family and left Germany for Singapore. He had a backer, Rocket Internet, and an idea borrowed from a market he already knew: sell everything online, the way Amazon did.
There is not much public record of his early life. He is said to have been born in Munich. He studied at University College London, worked as an analyst at Morgan Stanley, then as a consultant at McKinsey, and went on to an MBA at Northwestern. A 2014 CNBC profile described him as a consultant turned entrepreneur.
He later became chief executive of Vestiaire Collective, the luxury resale site.
The bet was bold for the time. Southeast Asia had hundreds of millions of people and little online retail. Roads were bad, credit cards were rare and cash on delivery was the norm. Lazada launched in 2012 as an Amazon-style retailer, added third-party sellers in 2013 and began operating in Singapore in 2014. It raised over US$685 million from investors such as Tesco and Temasek.
The turn arrived in April 2016, when Alibaba took a controlling stake. In 2017 it raised that to 83 percent with another US$1 billion. A German-founded startup now ran on Chinese capital and logistics.
The founder did not stay. Bittner stepped down as CEO in March 2018, and a relay followed: Lucy Peng and Pierre Poignant in 2018, Chun Li in 2020 and James Dong in 2022. He later became chief executive of Vestiaire Collective, the luxury resale site. Lazada launched LazMall for authentic brands that year and reached 50 million annual active buyers by September 2019.
The cost showed up later. Counterfeit goods dogged the platform. The Philippine IP office tied 69 percent of its reports in the first half of 2023 to Lazada. A January 2024 Singapore retrenchment drew criticism from the union, which said it had not been consulted. Another round of cuts, about 5 percent of staff across Southeast Asia, followed in 2026. Shopee became a tough rival.
Lazada still operates across the region and in September 2025 opened a programme letting Tmall merchants sell directly to Southeast Asia.
The lesson of Bittner is about being first and being the founder. He moved a family across the world to start something others would run. A company can outgrow the person who started it, and the founder has to decide whether that is a loss or a launch.