I was born in the post-Soviet Estonia, just a few months after it proclaimed independence. My upbringing was riddled with uncertainty, poverty, economical turmoil and hardships.

At the age of 8, an explosion of WW2 ammunition happened near me, and I was hit by multiple pieces of shrapnel. To this day, I have 6 pieces in my body. I had to undergo several years of psychotherapy (5+ years from the age of 26) to work through the PTSD that was caused by this near death episode. It taught me the preciousness of life and gave me the understanding that I have to live with purpose and help others do the same.

At the age of 11, my mom and I were barely able to avoid sleeping on the streets of Tallinn. At 17 all I had left was 0.20 EUR in my pocket, and my family had to use the local food donation charity to have food to eat.

At the age of 19, I got an internship and then my first real job as a software engineer in a company called Rate Solutions, which was behind the biggest social network in Estonia at a time: rate.ee. This was the first web platform in the world to use the Nginx server, and now it is one of the most used pieces of software in the world wide web. As I was finishing Tallinn Polytechnic School, I got 2nd result in the mathematics exam in Estonia, and shared a 2nd place in the citizen’s day quiz.

At 20, I worked 6 months along with my studies to accumulate 2000 EUR, buy my first laptop computer, my first ever plane ticket and go study in Denmark completely alone and unassisted financially. Around the same time I had a dream, that I will never forget: I was in the middle of the ocean, and I saw a sun coming of the water. I felt the power, the godly presence, the energy. It started making circles in the sky, and as it reached the middle, I saw a flash and woke up feeling energized and ecstatic as never before. This was the turning point.

Five years later, I finished MSc in Economics and Business Administration with specialty in Business Intelligence at Aarhus University, and went to work at an e-commerce automotive parts company as a sales director.

At 26, I started working as a research assistant at Danish Technical University (DTU) in a cognitive systems department studying AI and language models, thinking of starting a PhD and studying artificial consciousness. Half a year later, I land my first data scientist job to do an industrial PhD. Another half a year goes by, and I know that it’s not for me, and I move on to a Head of Operations position at Nexta, where I worked for 2 years, before moving to managing the engineering organization, where I finally found myself.

I became a member of Mensa, and moved on to assist Nexta in being acquired by Kevel. By that time, I have played a major role in building a successful startup, as I dreamed back when I was 20.

Now it is time for me to share my knowledge and experience to help others succeed.