One of the most common reactions I get, once people learn I went off to build a start-up, goes something like this.
How did you suddenly end up doing that?
Every time I hear the word “suddenly”, I pause for a second. Not because I find it offensive, but because it really was not sudden at all. If I am honest, I spent years drifting towards that point before I finally admitted that was where I had been heading all along.
I had already been close to start-up life once
Right after university, I joined a group company and was soon assigned to help set up a software development subsidiary. There were six of us in the founding team, and the day-to-day work looked a lot like start-up life.
The team was small. We did not have the luxury of sitting neatly inside one function. We built products from scratch, took them from zero to one and then from one to N, worked through product design, agile development and growth. I was also fully responsible for the Android side, working on video products, traffic platforms, marketing tools, apps and web apps.
If you only looked at the work itself, it would have been fair to call that start-up experience.
The problem was that it still was not quite the same thing.
The company was something we built, but our salaries came from the parent group. The equity was not truly ours in the long term. We received profit-sharing, not permanent ownership. A lot of what sits at the centre of real company-building, fundraising, cap table decisions, what happens when money runs short, who carries the consequences when the company is in trouble, never fully landed on me at the time.
So when I look back now, I tend to describe that period as half entrepreneurship.
That half matters more than it sounds. Not because it was less meaningful, but because it was meaningful enough to leave a mark. Once you have felt what it is like to build something from scratch and watch it take shape, it becomes very hard to spend the rest of your career happily building other people’s futures.
I wanted something that was actually mine.
I did not go study entrepreneurship because I had a sudden epiphany
People sometimes treat my master’s degree as the turning point, as though I studied entrepreneurship and strategy and then one day thought, right, perhaps I should become a founder.
That is not how it happened.
The truth is closer to the reverse. I had already been moving in that direction, which is exactly why I chose that programme in the first place.
I studied Entrepreneurship and Strategy at Lancaster University Management School. At the time, I was not treating entrepreneurship as a glamorous identity or a stylish label. I was treating it as a path that deserved to be studied properly, tested properly, and prepared for properly.
So during those years, I was not mainly thinking about what sort of job I should apply for after graduation. I was thinking about what kind of problem I wanted to solve, what sort of company I might want to build, which capabilities I still lacked, and whether my understanding of risk was grounded enough to carry real weight.
Looking back, it was less like dreaming and more like training.
I have always been the sort of person who wants to build things
I have become more certain of that with time.
I am not someone who is naturally content slotting into an existing system, doing my part well, and leaving the rest alone. I can do that if needed, but after a while my attention starts drifting somewhere else. I start wondering where the system is clumsy, what has not been solved properly, and whether the whole thing could be rebuilt in a better shape.
That instinct has always been there.
And it is not limited to product building. I am also the sort of person who gets pulled in by unresolved problems. If I see people putting up with unnecessary friction, wasted effort, or some long-standing pain point everyone has learned to live with, I start thinking about whether there is another way to do it.
That impulse can be inconvenient. It makes it difficult to remain a detached observer. But it also explains why I was never very likely to remain comfortable in narrowly defined roles for very long.
That is also why, when companies reduce product work to requirement gathering, specs and timelines, I always feel a slight mismatch. Those things matter. They just are not the whole job, at least not to me.
My first experience gave me real strengths, and one dangerous illusion
That first “half-start-up” period taught me a lot.
It made me comfortable with zero-to-one work and with one-to-N scaling. It taught me that product is not a document. It is what happens when people, constraints, technology, timing and trade-offs are all forced to coexist in the same room. It also showed me how quickly things can move when a small team is aligned and everyone is carrying real weight.
But it also left me with an illusion I did not notice at first.
Because I had the backing of a larger group, many of the hardest parts of independent company-building never hit me directly. Capital was not the first wall. Recruitment had institutional support. BD and marketing had internal teams to lean on. The initial team was not something I had to assemble from scratch with no safety net.
So although I had been involved in plenty of real company-building work, I still had not met the most exposed version of entrepreneurship.
That only happened the second time.
The first experience taught me how to build. The second taught me that building alone is not what determines whether a venture survives. People do. Adoption does. Trust does. Cash flow does. And so does your ability to keep your judgement intact when pressure starts stripping things away.
What I wanted was not simply to join start-ups. I wanted to build my own thing
Money mattered, of course. There is no point pretending otherwise.
But if I only explain it in terms of money, it makes the whole thing sound smaller than it was.
What I really wanted was a business I could actually call my own. Not because the title sounded good, and not because I thought entrepreneurship was romantic. It was because I had already realised, quite early on, that spending the best years of your life helping build someone else’s system, without truly owning the long-term future you are creating, leaves a gap.
That gap is not always loud. It does not show up every day. But once you feel it, it tends to stay there.
I did think about more standard career paths. I was not incapable of imagining a stable, respectable route back into a conventional structure. It just never quite sat right. Deep down, what I wanted was not a better seat inside an existing system. I wanted to build something that did not exist yet.
Which is why the thesis was never just a thesis
That is where the rest of the story begins.
The topic I worked on during my master’s degree was never meant to remain an academic exercise. From the start, it was a vehicle for thinking through a real business model, a real market, and a real company structure.
I was already looking at it through a founder’s lens.
Was there a market? Where would differentiation come from? What would the moat actually be? How would investors view it? What would the regulatory path look like? Where should the company be incorporated? How should equity be allocated? How large should the option pool be?
Those are not the questions you wrestle with if all you want is to submit a decent paper.
I wrestled with them because I never intended to leave that work inside the university.
So no, it was not sudden
If anything, I had been moving towards it for years.
The first experience inside the group gave me the shape of what half-entrepreneurship felt like, and taught me how addictive the act of building could be. The years at Lancaster turned that instinct into deliberate preparation. By the time I actually stepped in and built my own company, it was not a sudden left turn. It was a direction I had been taking seriously for a long time.
That is probably the most accurate way to put it.
I did not suddenly decide to start a company.
I had known for a while that I would end up here sooner or later. What I did not know yet was what the real cost would look like.
In the next piece, I want to go back to the very first version of the business I tried to build. It was not a small tool or a tidy MVP. It was something much larger, and eventually I had to admit that the version of me who started it was not yet strong enough to carry it.