Sixteen Years to Build the Tools

In 2009, I took out a personal loan from the bank where I was working and quit. I rented a house in southeastern Poland 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. I called it "Organisation for People." It was the first complete idea I'd ever had.

The loan, the prize, the cap table

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. 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. 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.

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.

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. But it was the first time I sat inside a two-sided platform attempt and watched it lose. That experience would matter later.

By the time I left corporate work in late 2015, I had spent 9 years inside other people's companies. 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 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. I was building, slowly, a model of how Polish corporate decision-making actually functioned — and, accidentally, of how channel distribution actually scales.

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.

That's also where Maciej Gardziel joined me — friend since school days, 2016 intern, today CEO of the operating company. I had opened the market. 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. 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 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 the cap table. The incubator wanted 40%. The NCBiR grant required a different structure. The combined dilution was somewhere I wasn't willing to go.

I walked again.

I was 34. I had two children by then. I walked away from €440,000 for the second time in my life, for the same reason I walked away from €200,000 at 23. The cap table was wrong.

The AuDHD diagnosis

In 2024, at 36, I was diagnosed with AuDHD — autism spectrum disorder combined with ADHD. The diagnosis didn't change anything I'd built. It explained everything about how I'd built it.

The pattern recognition that let me see regulatory openings before anyone else. The inability to work in someone else's system without eventually breaking it. The hyperfocus that let me build 80 enterprise client relationships in 7 months. The same hyperfocus that made the next 100 someone else's job. The way I'd been building capability frameworks for 16 years without being able to explain why I couldn't stop.

The diagnosis was the first time I had language for the operating system I'd been running on. It didn't make me different. It made me legible — to myself, finally.

Four months in which it changed

Between December 2025 and March 2026, something broke open. A contract we had been working on with a corporate client for years fell apart. The reason? Corporate paralysis caused by the departure of the responsible person. A gap formed in the company: everyone wanted to move forward, but nobody knew how.

At the same moment my existing business model collapsed, the largest leap in AI development I had been tracking from the beginning happened. It was then, in those four months, that I built something I had been trying to create for sixteen years and could not.

Those four months were total flow, fuelled by the AI world and my AuDHD. The years-built ability to adapt to and interpret unstable regulations found its outlet in turbo mode: the autistic mind finally found the pattern and the tool it had been looking for, and ADHD entered the hyperfocus needed for the rapid explosion of work.

Yesterday

Yesterday — the day before I finished writing this prologue — I delivered the most complete carbon and ESG analysis any company of that size in Poland has received this year. A meat producer. 40 locations. Full Scope 1, 2, and 3. Delivered on a platform that didn't exist 4 months ago.

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.

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.

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

Why I'm publishing

I've been writing about this for 16 years. The earliest manuscript dates to a competition entry in 2010. The book is finished — 18 chapters, in two languages, 42 pull quotes ready for graphics, layout complete. I finished it in recent weeks. This prologue was written last — because only now do I see what the rest leads to.

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.

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. 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.