My Story

2011 & 2012

When I graduated high school, I didn’t know what to do. The lectures never interested me, and my grades were below average. As a result, I had limited options as to where to go next.

The only thing that interested me at that time was track and field, so my parents recommended me to become a gym-teacher. I applied and got accepted.

It didn’t take long until I realized that I was in the wrong place. Apart from just being miserable, I had this nagging feeling that I wanted more..

Before the summer of 2012, after one year of classes, I dropped out. I spent the last part of 2012 doing absolutely nothing. I didn’t travel or work. I just let time pass and tried to figure out what to do next.

Eventually, I decided to get into engineering. To be eligible, I first needed to complete a couple of the math courses that I didn’t take during high school.

After a couple of weeks, I realized that math suited me quite well. Now that I had a goal, learning came quickly, and I got close to perfect grades. As a result, I could pick any engineering education I wanted.

I decided on Energy and Environment. In retrospect, it wasn’t the best fit for me.  I should picked a more math oriented education. Luckily, the outcome was great for another reason.

During my first year, I met a new friend who was similar to me in many ways. He didn’t know what he wanted to do in life, and he jumped around between different jobs and educations.

He was very interested in art and had a business idea about helping young artists to show their work in company lobbies. Starting a business had never crossed my mind, but I was immediately intrigued.

We decided to work on the idea together, and in the spring of 2014, I dropped out for a second time. Before the year was over, however, we decided to stop working on the idea. But from then on, I knew that entrepreneurship was my calling.

After failing at my first attempt at starting a company, I decided to study programming and math courses. At the same time, I applied for part-time work to survive economically.

One day, I saw an ad on Facebook from a company that wanted to hire entrepreneurs to work with business strategy. I didn’t have the required experience, but I applied anyway. For one thing, the position required a five-year education as well as work experience.

The first step in the process was to do a series of tests. Surprisingly enough, they called me up and wanted to bring me in for an interview. Apparently, they liked my test-results.

They decided that I didn’t have enough experience to work with business strategy. However, in my resume, I had written that I knew how to program (which was an overstatement at best). At this point, I had completed one course in programming and worked on some minor projects during my spare time.

After sending them some of my work (mostly copied from the internet), They hired me as a full-stack developer.

I worked in that company for 1.5 years, and that’s how I found my professional calling. Programming came naturally to me, and apart from writing code, I also took care of dev-ops and security.

In 2017, I decided to start my own company and try my luck at entrepreneurship one more time. I didn’t have any particular plan. My only goal was to help clients with machine learning and learn how to build a company from scratch without raising money. Throwing myself into a new situation worked flawlessly before.

I took me six months to find my first customer and another year to understand what type of company I wanted to build.

During these years, I found some amazingly talented colleagues, and we started building high performing team. Our goal was to create an innovation hub where we develop machine learning products and sell those products through partnerships.

It took time for us to find stability. One reason is that I spent too much time with a specific partner when I should have realized that the collaboration wasn’t going anywhere.

Their business model and organizational structure didn’t facilitate innovation, and I was naive, thinking there was a path forward.
However, at the end of 2020, we started working on our first successful product with another partner.

We’re still a small team of 8 people, but that’s how we like it. Our focus is first to build a small but very profitable company, and we’ve come a long way. The covid pandemic didn’t affect us, and we’ve increased our revenue and profit every year since I started the company.

Right now, I run two companies. One where we build machine learning algorithms to detect damage on railway infrastructure, and another one that helps companies to keep track of diversity in their marketing material.