Build what matters.
Turn strategy into delivery.

What began as a naive internship became the first big pivot away from a 'normal life.' Over twelve months, I met the person who would become my lifelong mentor—someone who introduced me to the real working world. I worked on ERP systems, which gave me exposure to virtually everything: finance, planning, sales, warehousing, engineering, assembly, and purchasing. Building reports and expanding functionalities that had gone unused taught me how systems actually run beneath the surface. More than anything, it taught me how to interact deeply with a different culture. And perhaps the most memorable moment came near the end: a colleague I'd grown close to admitted honestly that when I first arrived, they had suspected I was sent to spy on them—a Western worker in their midst. A humbling and fascinating perspective that has stayed with me ever since.

It started with a childhood dream: to actually develop a game. That dream led me to study Computer Games Engineering in Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. From there, competitive gaming and game engine work taught me that performance isn't an optimization—it's a design constraint. When you're working in milliseconds, every abstraction has a cost. Every allocation matters. I went deep into shader programming on LEGO Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and I'm credited on AAA titles including LEGO Worlds, LEGO City: Undercover, and LEGO Dimensions. This mindset carries into everything I build: respect the machine, measure before you assume, and understand that perceived performance is the real performance.

My start was probably like many: investing in a coin that never got listed—though in the hopes it would. From there, I read deeply into the technical side and became fascinated. Not just by the technology, but by its impact on society. How money actually works, what the value of currencies really means—or the hope thereof. I dove into Ethereum and smart contracts, and for me the beauty of smart contracts is undeniable. But the clash with reality and the need to customize everything makes them incredibly difficult to implement. For now, I'm a Bitcoin maximalist. And yes, I still have bitcoins.

Building Retraced from scratch was the first time I truly felt what it means to have great partners. When my co-founders put their own money down to found the company, that commitment changed everything. They came from selling huaraches sourced from Mexico into Germany — they knew supply chains firsthand, not from textbooks. They wanted to capture the market, but quickly realized that real impact required connecting directly to consumers. That's how the idea of a digital product passport was born. By 2018, we were the first solution in fashion and textile to offer one. Then came the VC game — raising a total of roughly €22.5M over the years to scale the vision. As co-founder & CTO, I carried the technical direction, but being a co-founder means you naturally tap into everything — operations, finance, strategy. It was a great playing field to explore areas far beyond engineering. I grew the dev team from just me to 30 engineers, and watched it contract back to 16. The ups and downs of building something real. When AI emerged, it became a pivotal moment — not just for the product, but for me personally. It opened a door I couldn't ignore, and ultimately led me to depart from the venture. I needed to find what really matters in life.

To scale Retraced, I traveled to remote regions of Rahim Yar Khan in Pakistan, visiting cotton farms firsthand. What I found profoundly reshaped how I think about digitalization. Not everything can simply have a digital twin. The real world is layered with political and personal constraints that no dashboard captures. Farmers were selling spot cotton bales to ginners—not because of market logic, but because those ginners had provided them seeds after a devastating flood season. These dependencies aren't bugs in the system; they are the system. It taught me that building the perfect algorithm for fair redistribution or transparent payment isn't something you solve from a desk. You have to investigate on the ground, understand the relationships, and respect the complexity before you can even begin to model it.

Vipassana revealed what I can only call a personal singularity—a point where so much of what life had given me converged into one overwhelming clarity. I discovered how deeply addicted I am not to any single craving, but to the constant need for something more, something else, every second of every day. In a foggy mind, there are really only two states: craving—wanting what you don't have—and aversion—not wanting what you have. Ten hours of meditation each day for ten days was the most painful experience I've been through. But that suffering closed the loop. Goenka's teaching landed with full force: everything is temporary. Every sensation, every thought, every desire rises and passes away. And if everything is temporary, there is no point in clinging to cravings or resisting aversions. The only sane response is equanimity.

Living across the UK, Cyprus, Germany, Denmark, and China—and marrying a Greek woman—taught me something I didn't expect: how deeply language is woven into culture. Our children grow up speaking Danish, German, Greek, and English, and watching them navigate those worlds has shown me that each language carries something untranslatable. I love AI and what modern translation can do, but there's a kind of magic in actually learning and speaking a language—a closeness to meaning and to people that no tool quite replaces. It's made me more humble about what I think I understand, and more curious about what I'm still missing.