Who We Are

Meet the Founder

Andreas Gebhard founded Forward Momentum out of a simple conviction: great ideas deserve a real shot at winning. He built his career at the intersection of media, technology, and global markets — including time at Getty Images — which gave him both a wide-angle view of industries in transition and a healthy impatience for incremental thinking. He works with founder-led and owner-operated businesses at inflection points, helping them see and claim the market category that's already theirs to own. His approach is rooted in what he calls Optimistic Capitalism — a deliberate counter to the "squeeze more out of what exists" school of consulting. Originally from Berlin, Andreas has called New York home for the past 18 years.

That work has occasionally happened outside of client engagements. In 2020 he co-initiated the TCN Coalition, merging a scattered set of volunteer projects into a single privacy-preserving exposure notification standard — the TCN Protocol, one of the two Apple and Google built their Exposure Notification system on. The coalition later merged into Linux Foundation Public Health. Read how that came together.

“Andreas is a skilled and empathetic business leader, coach, and coalition builder. His global experience was instrumental in guiding a large international team of volunteers creating unprecedented technology toward delivering innovative real-world results on impossibly tight timelines to fight the Covid-19 pandemic.”

— Harper Reed, Entrepreneur

Our POV

Being extraordinary isn't a size. It's a choice.