Sixteen Years to Build the Tools

# Sixteen Years to Build the Tools

Why I'm publishing eighteen chapters I wrote between 2010 and now.

In 2009, I took out a personal loan from the Polish bank where I was working — Eurobank — and quit. I rented a house in southeastern Poland, where I'd lived my whole life, and started building a company in it. I was 22. I had a concept I called Incubing — a working company in which students learned by doing, instead of by sitting in classrooms hearing about it. I called it "Organisation for People." It was the first complete idea I'd ever had.

A year later, with the loan running out, I won a national innovation competition. The prize was €200,000 from a Warsaw foundation. In southeastern Poland in 2010, the average monthly net wage was around €450. That made the prize roughly 30 years of average local wages — closer in purchasing power to a multi-million-euro early-stage round in San Francisco today than to anything that word scholarship would suggest. For a 23-year-old in debt, in a region most Poles called the country's poorest, it was everything.

I moved to Warsaw — the first time I'd ever lived outside my home region — and we co-founded the company together with the foundation. For somewhere between 6 and 9 months, we worked on it. I built. They handled the paperwork — and the paperwork mattered, because the money was EU funding, channelled through PARP, the Polish agency that distributes EU enterprise grants. We were waiting for PARP to release the funds.

Then they showed me the cap table.

The competition rules said the founder gets 51%. The foundation said: 49% for us, a third of your 51% for you, the remaining two thirds for "partners we'll appoint." 17% for me. 83% for them. The company built on my idea, funded by money that was supposed to be mine, controlled by people I'd never heard of until that meeting.

I walked.

I had no money, no return ticket to Podkarpacie, no apartment in Warsaw. I slept on a friend's couch and took the first job I could find — a sales role at Rzeczpospolita, the broadsheet daily. The shell company we'd registered together is still legally suspended in a Warsaw registry. 16 years later, it sits there as a quiet monument to what I learned about cap tables before I'd built anything worth diluting.

That was the first lesson. I didn't understand it yet, but it was the lesson that would define every business I built afterwards.

The corporate years

I'd started corporate work at 19, in 2006, while still living on Podkarpacie. Frito-Lay Poland for about a year. Allianz for a few months. Then Eurobank for 2 years, until I quit and took the loan. By the time I won the Warsaw competition, I had 3 years of sales experience inside large companies — but I'd never lived outside my home region.

After Warsaw, after the friend's couch — borrowing money from family to eat, knowing I could go home to my parents but mentally couldn't — I took a sales job at Rzeczpospolita, Poland's broadsheet daily. The role was selling subscriptions to Parkiet News, an internal attempt to build a Bloomberg-style B2B newswire for the Polish capital markets. It didn't work. Reuters and the Polish portal Onet did the same thing better and cheaper. But it was the first time I sat inside a two-sided platform attempt and watched it lose. That experience would matter later.

While at Rzeczpospolita, I read a wire about Poland's newly liberalised electricity market and didn't understand how it worked. I found a job ad for a sales rep selling electricity. I gave notice — covered by a 6-month paid non-compete that protected me legally as I moved into a different industry. Within a month I was a regional manager. Within two months, the director of the partner network. The company was AMB Energia — founded by ex-McKinsey people, eventually sold to Duon and now part of Fortum. From there: Lumen Technik, then Foton Technik — successive companies built by the same founders, the second eventually sold to Innogy. The same team would later build R Power into a Polish solar major. I'd left by then. Independent collaborations with Axpo, the Swiss energy major, and others, continue to this day. A short stint at Open Nexus, an early B2B procurement marketplace, gave me more perspective on platform mechanics in 3 months than 3 years of formal study could have.

By the time I left corporate work in late 2015, I had spent 9 years inside other people's companies, in two distinct phases — 3 before HREM, 4 after — and I had stopped being a salesperson within my first year at Frito-Lay. From that point on, the role I kept getting hired into, in industry after industry, was the same one: building partner sales networks. Banking branches. Credit-broker desks. Energy field reps. PV installer agents. Procurement marketplace partners. 14 years of designing distribution channels, watching three of them get acquired by the same founding team into successive exits.

I was good at it. I disliked almost all of it.

What I was actually doing — though I wouldn't have framed it this way at the time — was studying. I was learning, from the inside, how enterprise systems behaved. How sales worked. How procurement worked. How decisions actually got made versus how the org chart said they got made. How a CFO read a contract. How a technical director said yes when his boss had said no. I was building, slowly, a model of how Polish corporate decision-making actually functioned — and, accidentally, of how channel distribution actually scales.

For 15 years, I could have just sold electricity. The Polish energy market gave me every opportunity. I'd watched the same founders sell three companies to Fortum and Innogy; I knew exactly how to run a top-paid partner-director career. That wasn't the project.

I wasn't planning to use it. I was just paying off debts.

The first regulatory bet

In late 2015 I founded Grüne Energie UG in Germany. The plan was German. I didn't speak German. The plan was to ride a Polish renewable energy law that was about to enter into force — feed-in tariffs, PV-as-a-service, investor model — and Germany was the holding structure. The law passed in January 2016. I had investors lined up. Customers in pipeline.

In March 2016, 2 months later, the new Polish government cancelled it.

I bought out my investors. I didn't leave anyone holding the bag. Then I stopped.

For about 6 weeks I had no idea what to do. Then I noticed that an EU directive on energy efficiency was being implemented in Poland — and unlike the renewable feed-in tariff, this was an EU obligation, not a national political choice. It couldn't be cancelled by an election. The law required large companies to perform mandatory energy audits. Big 4 firms were preparing offers. So were the engineering consultancies. So was everyone.

The difference: when the buyers showed up, I had a working offer and they had a slide deck. I'd been watching it coming for 6 months.

In 7 months I signed 80 enterprise clients. No degree, no referrals, no sales team. Just earlier than everyone else who would eventually do the same work for more money with worse results.

That was the second lesson. Watch the regulatory openings. Be ready before everyone else notices. Build the offer first, sell second.

It's also where Maciej Gardziel joined me — friend since school days, 2016 intern, today CEO of the operating company. I had opened the market — found the regulation, the offer, the first dozens of clients, the methodology. What I cannot do, ever, is take an opened market and turn it into a repeatable system. The first 10 clients are an adventure for me; the next 100 are someone else's job. Maciej took what I'd built and made it systematic — repeatable engagement structure, delivery teams, operational protocols. The audit business that ran for the next 8 years and still pays today was my discovery and his system. That partnership pattern would repeat — twice more — in everything we built afterward.

The Kozminski paper

In 2017, while running the audit business, I went back to school. I enrolled at Kozminski University in Warsaw — the country's leading business school — and worked through their program in management theory. I wrote a paper, with co-authors, on self-managing organisations. We used Grüne Energie as a case study: a company that had tried to build itself on holacracy and failed within months because, as we put it, people in chaos need a leader before they need self-management.

In that paper, I formalised something I'd been carrying since 2010. I called it re-incubing — cascading replication of competencies. The idea was that an organisation could be built by encoding the knowledge of one expert into a system that taught the next person, who encoded their additional knowledge, and so on, indefinitely. A capability factory. A way to scale expertise without hiring proportionally.

The paper concluded with a sentence I have not stopped thinking about: the tools to build this don't exist yet.

That was 2017.

The second regulatory bet, the second cap table fight

In 2021 I founded a company called Carbonek. The thesis: ESG was about to become the next mandatory disclosure regime in Europe, and the Polish market was 10 years behind on the methodology. I wanted to be the firm that taught the country. My first child was born in September that same year.

I went through an incubation program. There was 2 mln zł on the table — roughly €440K. There was a second grant from the national research funding agency, NCBiR, lined up behind it. Real money. Money I needed.

Then they told me I had to attend a particular government-aligned political congress, get photographed with the President of Poland, and post the photo. I did. I have the video.

Then they told me a particular gentleman — they named him — had to receive 30% of the company.

I left.

Carbonek became Akademia Klimatu, with no outside money, no grant, and no famous photograph. It survived 4 years on services revenue. It became the laboratory in which I would build everything that came after.

If I'd taken the 2 mln zł in 2021, I would not be writing this essay. The Live Office would not exist. Because Akademia Klimatu would have belonged to someone else, and the platform that came out of it would have belonged to someone else too.

That was the third lesson, and it was the same as the first. 11 years later. In a different industry. With a different number of zeros. Same answer.

The diagnosis

In 2023, at 36, I was diagnosed with AuDHD — autism and ADHD together. Late diagnosis. I'd spent my whole life building businesses in seasonal bursts — project, exit, project, exit — and assuming that was a personal failure to "build something permanent." I'd read about it in Harvard Business Review years before, the project entrepreneur archetype, and not realised they were describing me.

The diagnosis didn't make the institutional path available. It made it irrelevant. I didn't need to fit a system designed for a different operating system. I needed to build environments — businesses, offices, methods — designed around the way my brain actually worked.

That reframe changed how I thought about everything I'd built before. Grüne Energie hadn't failed because I lacked persistence. It failed because the regulatory system collapsed under it. The audit business hadn't worked because of grit. It worked because I'd built it in 7-month sprints with high novelty and high stakes — exactly the conditions in which an AuDHD operator outperforms. Carbonek hadn't been a half-step toward something bigger. It had been the right shape for me, just under-equipped.

What had stopped me, repeatedly, was not character. It was tooling.

The tools arrive

I started using GPT and Bard from the beginning of 2023, and Gemini as it evolved. Initially I used them in Akademia Klimatu for course-writing and content work — not yet consulting. Akademia by then had taken over the operations of Grüne Energie, and we were riding a different wave: the energy crisis of 2022 had pushed prices up, Fit for 55 was tightening, and Polish enterprises were urgently looking for decarbonisation help. We had dozens of corporate clients across green energy procurement, energy efficiency, ISO 50001, and increasingly ESG. Medicover signed the first pilot in 2023 — running analogue across 40% of their 360 Polish locations, and producing, in 2024 alone, over 1.1 mln EUR of documented energy savings and more than 10,000 tonnes of CO₂ avoided. Rank Progress and others followed.

Two years of mapping where AI understood ESG correctly and where it confidently hallucinated. Two years of building a private library of "what AI gets wrong about energy compliance" inside real client engagements. My tech capability grew exponentially as AI evolved.

In March 2025, my second child was born. From April 2024 to September 2025, I trained for an Ironman with a professional coach. 18 months on top of a consulting firm, a marriage, two small children. I am not an athlete. I never was. What I did was design the training around an AuDHD operating system — short blocks, high novelty, hard intervals, flexible scheduling — and trust the system to do its job whether or not I felt like training on a given day. I crossed the finish line because the system did, not because I was the kind of person who would. I still train. I'm preparing for what's next.

That was the proof I needed. Not the running. The proof that systems carry you when motivation can't. After that I believed I could do anything.

In late 2025 — running parallel to the closing months of Ironman training — the AI agent layer became reliable. Not "AI helps me write faster" — that was already old news. AI agents could now run procedures, validate against deterministic blocks, execute multi-step workflows without my input on every step. Most founders started experimenting at that moment. I had two years of head start on the question of what to do with it.

In Q1 2025, we took on a new ESG client at the most demanding scope we'd ever attempted: a Polish family-owned international meat producer with a 30-year history, a national retail chain, and exports to over 40 markets. The engagement was a full CSRD readiness exercise under the VSME standard. I led the methodology and the regulatory work — the part of the engagement that hadn't been done in Poland before. Maciej, again, took what I figured out and turned it into a systematic delivery process: documentation flow, data collection protocols, stakeholder management, audit trail. I broke the ground; he built the road. The engagement became, accidentally, the most thorough audit they'd ever received — and the dataset from which a platform was about to be born.

Between December 2025 and March 2026, while that engagement was running, I built The Live Office. 290,000 lines of code. 289 database tables. 1,121 tests. 550 deterministic calculation blocks. 6 specialised AI agents. 33 procedures.

Solo, with Manus and Claude Code as my technical co-founders. No human engineering team — but, as the platform took shape, the same pattern appeared again. I built 90% of every initial component — the architecture, the first version of each block, the agent layer, the procedure engine. Then Maciej came in with his own Claude Code stack and started doing what he always does: verifying, refining, hardening the blocks against real client data, turning my prototypes into something that runs reliably for the next 100 engagements. Third time the same pattern. He builds the road behind whatever I'm exploring next.

The client engagement was the specification. The platform extracted itself from the work, in real time, while the work was being done.

Yesterday

Yesterday morning, Maciej sent that meat producer their final report. 970,000 tonnes of CO₂ equivalent calculated. VSME-compliant. 8 strategic priorities. A roadmap to 2028. The most complete carbon and ESG analysis any company of that size in Poland has received this year. Maciej is now CEO of Akademia Klimatu, the Polish operating entity. He runs the delivery side of every Polish enterprise engagement we have. I am 100% founder of The Live Office Ltd, which is the global platform — separate entity, separate jurisdiction, separate cap table. His shares of Akademia were earned over years of operational work. His role at The Live Office will be earned through Akademia performance, with vesting in TLO Ltd to follow.

That client is one of dozens served by Akademia Klimatu over the past 4 years. The Live Office now serves two of them — and others — on platform contracts. Medicover, signed since 2023, is scaling from 40% of their Polish footprint to all 360 locations, with conversations now opening at Medicover Global. Rank Progress, listed on the Warsaw Stock Exchange, is on a quarterly retainer of roughly €22K. A distribution lead — to thousands of SMEs through a national energy distributor — is in late-stage discussion.

For the first time in my career, I am not betting on a Polish regulation.

The Live Office is not a CSRD play. CSRD is the wedge. The Live Office is the meta-layer — the system through which any expert can encode their domain into a working operating capability, in any geography, under any regulatory regime, in roughly 30 days. Akademia Klimatu is the first vertical. The next ones don't need a co-founder, a CTO, or an engineering team. They need a domain expert, an operating partner, and the platform.

This is what I called Incubing in 2010. This is what I called re-incubing in the 2017 paper. This is what the paper said could not yet be built.

It can be built now.

Why I'm publishing

I've been writing about this for 16 years. The earliest manuscript dates to a competition entry in 2010. The most recent chapter was finished a few days ago. There are 18 chapters, in two languages, 42 pull quotes ready for graphics, the book itself laid out. None of it has been public. The reason is simple: I wasn't ready to defend the thesis until I had built the company that proves it.

The company exists. The thesis is provable.

Starting now, I'm publishing the chapters here. The next essay drops next week. Then weekly, until the full book launches alongside the platform in Q3 2026.

If you've been reading my LinkedIn for years and wondering where it was all going, this is where it's going.

Subscribe and you'll receive each new chapter in your inbox the moment it's published. Early subscribers also get a 30-day Builder Office trial when the platform launches — that's the part of the book that isn't theory but a working system.

I walked away from €200,000 at 23 because the cap table was wrong. I walked away from €440K at 34 for the same reason. The company I'm building now is 100% founded by me, with operating partner vesting attached to performance milestones — structurally clean, and finally, 16 years late, running on tools that didn't exist when I first sketched it.

3 weeks ago, on 8 April 2026, I incorporated The Live Office Ltd in the United Kingdom. First global step. The next is the United States. I'm planning to spend 3 months there this summer with my wife and our two small children. My English is competent, not fluent. That has never been the point.

In 2015 I founded a German company without speaking German. The plan didn't work the way I wanted, but I learned what I needed to learn. Twice in my life, the country I needed to be in didn't speak the language I knew. Each time I went anyway. Each time I learned what was needed once I was inside the work, not before.

This is the answer.

— Damian Jedziniak Dębica, my hometown. 1 May 2026.

Subscribe at expertisewithoutpermission.com. 18 chapters incoming. New essay weekly.