The Beginning
The early years of an unexpected journey
I grew up in a loving and sheltered home as the youngest of four siblings.
Even as a child, I was quiet, introverted, and sensitive.
I never wanted to be the center of attention. I rarely spoke up.
Yet there was one place where I found my voice and energy: Sports.
Sports became a big part of my life early on, giving me a sense of confidence and belonging.
I went through all the youth football teams, played golf competitively and swam for a local club.
Academically, however, I wasn’t particularly gifted.
I didn’t have a great memory, and nothing came easily to me.
When I was 10, I failed the entry exams to move on to secondary school.
In Germany, after primary school, students are placed into different tracks based on their performance. Hauptschule, the lowest level focused on practical skills; Realschule, a middle track; and Gymnasium, the highest level that prepares students for university.
My primary school teacher gently advised my parents to send me to Hauptschule because she thought the higher tracks would be too challenging for me.
Her main concern was math. The subject I consistently struggled with the most.
At the time, no one really understood why.
It wasn’t until the end of primary school we finally had an answer:
I was diagnosed with dyscalculia.
A learning disorder that makes working with numbers incredibly difficult.
I couldn’t even count to ten properly.
In my first therapy session, the psychologist asked me to count aloud.
I began confidently: “One, two, three, four, six, seven, nine, ten.”
She dictated me to write down some numbers.
I kept flipping them, writing eighty-nine instead of ninety-eight, sixty-two instead of twenty-six.
Numbers just didn’t make sense to me the way they seemed to for everyone else.
Despite the diagnosis, I carried a quiet sense of shame.
All my siblings had gone to Gymnasium and I was the only one who didn’t make it.
But something shifted once I entered Hauptschule.
I quickly became one of the top students.
For the first time in my life, I started to work hard.
After just one year, I was able to transfer to Gymnasium.
I was proud of myself.
On my first day at Gymnasium, I made a friend.
Little did I know I had just met my future co-founder.
We quickly became best friends.
One day, he came to school and told me that his family was moving to London.
At the same time, another one of my closest friends had to switch schools because he didn’t make it to the next grade.
I felt like I had lost two of my closest friends overnight and suddenly staying felt like standing still.
One morning, just two weeks before the start of the new school year, I woke up with a thought: What if I left too?
I’d always been fascinated by Italian culture. My family spent nearly every holiday in Italy.
The food, the language, the energy. It felt like a second home.
Over breakfast I told my parents about the idea of going to school in Italy.
Being the open and spontaneous people they are, they packed the car and drove a couple of days later.
My sister had already been living in Italy, so I moved in with her and enrolled into my classes.
At fifteen, I suddenly had to learn to cook, clean, and do the grocery shopping.
It taught me independence and responsibility.
I experienced new cultures and languages, making friends from all over the world.
I studied Italian and English, alongside Latin and Ancient Greek.
That time was incredibly formative.
It taught me how to adapt, connect, and stand on my own.
More than anything, it helped me grow up.
As I approached my final years of schooling, I found myself wondering what I wanted to do professionally.
As a kid, I dreamed of becoming a cook.
Later, when I got into golf, I imagined going pro.
For a while, I even considered a career in football. I was playing almost every day as a kid and rarely missed a game from my favorite club, FC Bayern Munich.
Music was another passion of mine. People said I had a good voice and a natural feel for melodies. I loved listening to music for hours, getting lost in the details. At one point, I even thought about studying sound design.
At the same time, I developed a strong fascination with capital markets. By age fourteen, I was reading Warren Buffett’s books and had started experimenting with small-scale trading.
Despite all these interests pulling me in different directions, I couldn’t quite decide on a clear path.
In the end, I chose to study Business Administration.
A decision that felt broad enough to keep my options open.
I chose a small university just outside of Munich.
And I hated it.
What we studied, how we studied.
It all felt completely disconnected from real life.
Six exams crammed into a single week.
Bulimic learning: stuffing my brain with textbooks, only to forget everything days later.
University didn’t teach me how to think for myself or solve real problems just how to memorize and survive.
But two good things came out of it.
First, I started teaching statistics to undergrads as somehow I had gotten really good with numbers. Considering my history of dyscalculia and years of bad grades, that shift gave me a massive boost in confidence.
Second, university gave me the opportunity to spend a year abroad in South Africa through an exchange program.
An experience that would later play a much bigger role in my life than I could’ve imagined.
During my studies, I did several internships.
My first glimpse into how companies actually work and what professional life is really like.
I spent time in M&A at a large auditing firm and later worked in equity sales at an investment bank.
Capital markets fascinated me. Fast-paced, unpredictable, with no two days alike.
I remember looking around at the people sitting next to me and thinking:
Is this really what I want my future to look like?
Trying to accept that this might be the reality after university was tough.
It scared me.
Still, I stayed on the path I thought I was supposed to follow.
After finishing my bachelor’s degree, I enrolled in a Master’s program at Maastricht University in the Netherlands.
By then, my main goal was simply to complete my studies, even though the prospect of stepping into the corporate world felt equally uninspiring.
I deliberately chose a program I could complete within a year.
To my surprise, the experience was much better.
Smaller classes, practical learning, and finally subjects that actually felt relevant and interesting.
During that time, I had already signed a contract with a well-known investment bank in London.
I hated that I was signing myself up for the same life I had seen during my internship but it still felt like it was the next step society expected from me.
The path everyone else was on.
Then, in the middle of my studies, I ran into my old friend from Gymnasium who had moved to London.
By chance, he was studying at the same university.
We quickly reconnected and realized we had something in common:
We both hated our internships.
We both couldn’t stand the idea of starting a corporate job after graduation.
And we both felt there had to be another way.