“I make choices that maximize my personal energy because that makes it easier to manage all of the other priorities” is what Scott Adams writes in his book “How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big.” Unfortunately, my personal energy and creativity have been lacking for the past couple of months as I have not had the necessary passion and perspective for the work I have been doing.

For me, the time has come to take a step from the technical professional focus I started with programming about ten years ago and go towards customer, product, and business development for an early-stage venture to explore a new side of myself.

Rewind

Ever since high school, I have been listening to entrepreneurial podcasts. I knew that I wanted to dip my feet into entrepreneurial ventures at some point, and so I did with a FinTech startup a mere two years ago, where I got in on day one. The year was filled with highs and lows, fun and despair. Absolute dedication to doing everything for the company to succeed and, on the other side, risky decisions which eventually led me to leave the company before much materialized.

Although this seemed like a personal failure at first, what I left with was worth every hour of overtime and a reduced salary. From the beginning, my primary motivation was to use the opportunity as a real-world master’s education (à la Tim Ferriss’ “create your own real-world MBA”). Being part of the founding of a company in Germany, building a product from scratch, learning all about microservice architectures and their issues, and then pivoting due to the customer validation we had done were incredibly insightful. I left with no large exit payment but confident that I don’t need a fixed employment contract and that I am good enough in my domain to freelance and ask for a multiple of the salary I received at the company prior to the startup.

Without a gap, I worked as a freelance backend developer and can barely imagine a better freelance project than being part of a greenfield project with a small autonomous team. Looking only at the facts, it seems like the perfect job. For me, however, I felt drowned and not fulfilled. Trading time for money never was my way of working. I simply could not see myself on my 30th birthday having a full portfolio but going to sleep every night and not being excited for the work I would be doing the next day.

Although I had started with many side software projects, DIY projects, and travel plans, none of them fulfilled the ambitions I had, and thus with time, I noticed how the creative part of my brain was being drained out. I knew that I could enjoy freelancing in the short term but that it would be toxic in the long run.

So What Is Next?

Moving to the US, of course. As a dual citizen, that is what I put into my head since leaving the FinTech startup: “In April 2022 I will move to a city in the US and build a new life there”, I said to myself. Tired of Germany, its anti-entrepreneurial policies, a culture of distance, order, and stability.

… well, not so fast.

The US plan has been replaced by another stint in Europe: Joining the very early stage DataLbry startup as the first non-technical employee. With DataLbry we want to aggregate and make use of much of the information available in companies but currently not being used effectively. A data fabric, which Gartner sees as the #1 trend for 2021, provides business users information available anywhere, regardless of where the data lives. With this data, KPI dashboards can be built for anything from customer retention dashboards to high-level CFO financial dashboards all with live data from various sources. With this same homogenized data, a data engineer can quickly extract value from the data. Lastly, with this exact data, a user search across multiple systems à la Google. The ambitions are grand, the use cases are innumerable, and the execution will be challenging to say the very, very least—more on the actual business in future blog entries.

Especially the non-technical role at DataLbry makes me excited for 2022. Although every single job I have had so far started being completely technical, they always drifted significantly towards business as I am simply very interested in understanding the full circle. Knowing that my technical skills are sharp, it may be the best or worst time to follow the advice I saw on LinkedIn recently: “Be brave enough to suck at something new.”

Jumping headfirst into something completely new. That is what excites me. That is what gets me out of my comfort zone. That is why I will possibly hate myself in the short term but be proud in the long term. It is also the reason I can ask people to give me advice and not only learn so much about customer development, business development, sales, hiring, and all-around building a company but also get to know genuine, interesting people. Having the title “co-founder” written on my business card permits me to mingle at meetups in a community of passionate people, all trying to build something meaningful.

As we are currently bootstrapping this venture, I will continue to consult for the time being. Knowing that it will be exhausting, it still feels better to have the consulting money go towards UX designers, marketers, and developers instead of taxes.

I am trying to put all the necessary tools into my toolbox to reach eventual success, all the while living a balanced life where I am excited to get up in the morning. Knowing what I will be doing, I feel like taking up the online MBA program again, reading more, and educating myself in various areas. The positive lift I get from spending time on something I am passionate about is great for my personal energy, and I hope and think that all else should follow.

Life is a journey, and there is too much uncertainty in every option to know what is right and what is wrong looking into the future. I hope to connect the dots looking back. I know that I would rather fail at doing something I am having fun with than do what I know will work but does not fulfill me and my ambitions.

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