I like understanding how things work. Not just mechanically — systems. How parts connect, where pressure builds, what snaps first.
Spent way too many hours on Caesar III as a kid. Wasn't even playing it right — just watching the city grow, figuring out the patterns. Still do this with everything. Traffic, supply chains, organizations. Same puzzle, different skin.
I read a lot. Papers, tools, methods for mapping complex things. Mostly so I can see faster what's balanced, what's not, and what's about to break. Observe, map, fix the obvious stuff first.
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Blockchain
Coordination without someone in charge. Still figuring out if this actually works.
Digital scarcity
When bits act like finite things. Weird concept, interesting mechanics.
Energy
Everything runs on this. Understanding the substrate.
AI
Where most of my time goes now. Hard not to.
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selected work
The puzzles are mostly businesses these days. I collect tangled ones and sit with them until they start to make sense. Slow work, mostly. A few from the collection:
A slow drowning
A small B2B business in Germany, €300k-something in debt while orders kept coming in. Three years of small corrections: cash first, then costs, then the way work moved through the place. It came out profitable.
Trapped cash
Around €40k a company technically had but couldn't reach, locked up in payment and VAT timing. Changing the sequence of when money moved freed most of it. No new revenue involved, nothing cut.
Ad spend
€70k a month going into ads, with no clear picture of what half of it did. Measuring and trimming brought it down to €30–40k. The leads stayed about the same.
Flying blind
A company steering on gut feel and the bank balance. We set up simple instruments: cash monitoring, a few KPIs actually worth watching, processes that don't rely on one person remembering everything. Unglamorous, but it held.
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Engineering background. Ran innovation at a large corp for a while, now running my own thing. Still learning.
(I did finish Caesar III eventually. Properly.)