Hi, my name is Sebastian and I'm a Gen-Z tech enthusiast from Germany. I'm a huge nerd that started his computer science carrer with teaching himself C# using sticky notes all over my notebook and some book from amazon. My goal back than was to make silly games in Unity, Blender Game Engine and CryEngine. While trying to build the next AAA game the importance of starting small became evident to me (LEARNING#1: Iterate, Iterate, Iterate). Also I remember back from the days how everyone was saying that the mobile app game market is saturated and oh boy have they all been wrong... (LEARNING#2: Don't care what others say - especially on the internet).
Driven by curiosity I got really fascinated by the rabbit hole of electronics. Arduinos and ESP32 have been a huge part of my teenage years. Even today I often find myself typing "Arduino" into Google unconciously, since I did it so often back then. A huge inspiration was the YouTuber ElectroBoom, who was a huge idol and even though he always said, “Don’t try this at home kids!” - I didn’t listen and remember myself playing with 230V straight from the plug. My bedroom floor also still carries the burn and explosion marks from my “experiments”. Another mentionable Youtuber should be to Styropyro who has been a huge idol as well. So during 10th grade, I had built a coilgun tank, and in 11th grade, I upgraded it to be Bluetooth-controlled and even (poorly) autonomous. I developed everything in Unity — because, honestly, I didn’t know any better back then 😅. Looking on the current conflict situation around the world, this tank was maybe the idea with the most business potential, as I was pretty early and autonmous weapons are nowadays everywhere.
Around the same time, I stumbled upon AI for the first time through an over-engineered school project: an augmented reality board game using OpenCV for object and dice detection + ATMEGA-controlled LED matrix + a 3D simulation of it in Unity (LEARNING#3: Seems like I didn't have had any hobbies back then). Driven by this passion for technology it was clear for me to continue with a Bachelor’s in Computer Science, which I started in 2020 in cooperation with SAP, one of Germany’s biggest tech companies. There I learned a TON about software engineering and SAP even helped me fulfill a huge dream since I have read a book about the Silicon Valley — with an internship in Palo Alto for 3 months. It was an awesome time and we did a ton of roadtrips, but in the end I saw that the social system in germany has some major advantages compared to the us (LEARNING#4: The California Dream is no longer mine).
After the internship came my bachelor thesis, where I fell in love with the idea to understand the hype behind Blockchain, so I spent a lot of time there learning about web3, smart contracts and tokenization, just to realize that most of it is just hype, market manipulation, cult and the greed of the human being (LEARNING#5: Question the hype).
But what I realized early enough was that I am too young to settle into a coporate career path and since I was always interested in entrepreneurship and saw great potential in AI - I decided to pursue a Master’s in Entrepreneurship to learn about startups and how to bring ideas to life. The main thing I learned here is that (LEARNING#6: Marketing is as important as engineering), since I developed cool stuff but struggled to find early testers. Like one mobile game I failed to get 20 consistent testers, that I found equally on the appstore with millions of downloads after a year. If we think about marketing we should just think of mumble rappers, they lack talent and produce bad music, but still manage to go viral.
During my "business-related" master studies, I never stopped coding and spent most of my time experimenting with machine learning frameworks and diving into all kinds of tech projects and even followed several startup ideas. Many of them failed, but each one taught me a valuable lesson. So this blog will be my way of reflecting on this journey and what is about to come. As i have written this post i already remembered a lot of stuff from my past, so this blog is primarily for my future self, but feel free to stick around my unsupervised thoughts.