I'm a developer who accidentally became a CEO. Snowboards were the gateway drug.
We built Discord because we wanted a better way to talk to our friends while playing games. That was literally it.
I applied for a US visa eight times. If I had given up after the seventh, none of this would exist.
We almost died in 2015. I laid off everyone and moved to Kyoto with one engineer. It was the best decision I ever made.
I was using Asana, Trello, Basecamp, and Google Docs at the same time. I was managing tools instead of managing work. That's broken.
I dropped out of college because I couldn't sit still long enough to finish a degree. Turns out that energy is pretty useful for building a startup.
I read the Bitcoin white paper on a Saturday night in 2010 and couldn't sleep for a week. I knew this was going to change everything.
My friend couldn't sell a glass faucet because he couldn't accept a credit card. That's a broken system.
I was losing hundreds of pounds a year on foreign exchange fees. Every bank was doing it. I thought — someone should fix this. Then I realized it would have to be me.
I walked into a Brazilian bank, waited two hours, and was treated like I was bothering them. That day I decided to build a bank that actually likes its customers.
We pitched buy now, pay later at a startup competition in 2005 and got laughed at. The judges said it would never work.
My bank was charging me 5% on every transfer to Estonia. I did the math — I was losing thousands of pounds a year. That's not a fee, that's theft.
We started by swapping money between our personal bank accounts. The whole company is just that idea, automated and scaled.
I interned at OpenAI and researched at DeepMind. I learned that the best application of AI isn't chatting — it's knowing.