The 5,000 Year Equation

As a kid, whenever something fascinated me, I wanted to build my own version of it. That was the default. At 11, I tried building a magnetic motor. A device that would generate infinite energy from magnets alone. It didn't work. It can't work. It violates the laws of thermodynamics. So I moved on. I played Super Mario and wanted to make my own game, so I programmed a jump-and-run. I got my first phone, and began to repair broken phones to resell them on eBay for pocket money.

I don't mention these things to impress anyone. I mention them because they show a pattern that explains most of my decisions since. When something interests me, my first instinct isn't to admire it. It's to take it apart and figure out how to build it myself.

ii.

At 13, I watched the movie Limitless. A man takes a pill that unlocks his full cognitive potential. Fiction, obviously. But it made me obsessed with neurochemistry. I wanted to start a biotech company. So I contacted a scientist at Bayer and asked what it takes to set up a lab. Her answer: millions of euros.

My net worth at the time was 8.73€.

So I did what made sense to me. I calculated. A biochemist in Germany earns roughly 55,000€ gross per year. If I saved 30% of the net income, that's about 10,000€ per year. To accumulate 50 million euros, I would need approximately 5,000 years.

That was the end of the standard path. The math just didn't work out. I had the same reflex with the magnetic motor. Physics says no, move on. Math says 5,000 years, find another way.

I think this is one of the more useful things I learned early: some paths are broken no matter how hard you work. The discipline to recognize that and switch, instead of pushing through out of pride, matters more than most people think.

iii.

I started reading biographies. Jobs, Musk, and many others. A pattern emerged quickly: nearly all of them had started their own companies. But biotech requires massive capital, years of education, labs, permits. As a teenager with no money, that wasn't a viable first step.

So the question became: what creates the most output with the least resources?

I was doing well in school, so I started tutoring. 8€ per hour. Almost immediately, I thought: what if instead of teaching myself, I connect students with tutors and take a commission? That way it's no longer my time against money. It's a system that can run without me.

I started building a platform with a friend from my computer science class. A marketplace for tutoring combined with an integrated video conferencing tool. Software made sense because it's cheap to build if you do it yourself, requires almost no starting capital, and scales without needing more of your time.

He focused on development. I focused on distribution. The constraint was clear: we had no budget. Whatever marketing strategy we used had to be free and scalable.

iv.

That's when I came across TikTok. It was 2019, before the pandemic. I downloaded it, wasted too much time watching videos, deleted it, and went back to coding, school and finding other ways to market the platform.

Then Covid hit. And suddenly, I had time.

I downloaded TikTok again. The logic was simple: people don't follow brands, they follow people. So I'd build a personal audience in our target demographic and use it to market the platform.

I started posting school-related comedy content. Within months, I had 100,000 followers. Exactly the audience our startup needed. But the timing didn't work out. School got too demanding, and we paused the project to finish our Abitur.

I kept going on TikTok though. Stopping would have meant losing the momentum and wasting the audience I'd built. Before I even graduated, brand deals started coming in. After the third one, I understood the pricing models. And I realized: earning thousands of euros for a 30-second video with near-zero production costs is a very efficient business model.

With a top-grade Abitur done, the tutoring project faded into the background. I set a new target: one million followers before starting university. So I postponed enrollment. Then postponed again. The million followers came, then two million. Over 500 million views across platforms. All organic. No ads, no agency. Everything self-taught and self-produced.

Then my father was diagnosed with cancer.

I fell into a hole. For three years, the prognosis kept shifting. Weeks left. Then months. Then suddenly days. Then months again. It was impossible to plan anything because every day could be the last one.

I wanted to spend as much time with him as possible.

My father passed away on February 10, 2026.

What that whole experience did was change what I consider hard. Building a business is stressful. People burn out, people quit, people break under the pressure. I get that. But after watching your father fight cancer for three years and lose, after spending nights not knowing if he'll still be there in the morning, the stress of a failed launch or a bad month just doesn't hit the same way. It's not that I'm tough. It's that I have a reference point for real pain, and most business problems don't come close.

vi.

Brand deals taught me a lot. But they're inconsistent. I can't plan around them, I can't scale them, and they depend entirely on my face being in front of a camera. I don't want a business that only works while I'm personally producing. I want systems that run with a team, that generate revenue whether I'm in front of a camera that day or not.

So here's the plan.

Step 1: Road to 100k€ per month. Cash flow. Building systems that generate consistent, predictable revenue. I've built over 2 million followers and generated over 500 million views across platforms. The skills are there. Content, personal branding, audience building. The task now is translating all of that into a business that doesn't depend on me being the product.

In parallel: expanding my network, traveling, learning from different cultures. And finding my partner. Not just in business. I want someone to build a life with. Someone to start a family with. Someone to build empires with. I saw the love my parents had for each other, and I want that. That kind of love isn't something you find ready-made. It's shaped by years of living together, fighting together side by side, growing together. I'd rather find that person now and build from the ground up than meet someone after everything is already done.

Step 2: Scalable products and exits. With capital reserves and no dependencies, I build products in large markets that don't need to be profitable on day one but can scale aggressively. Once product-market fit is proven, venture capital accelerates growth. Target: at least one exit in the nine-figure range.

Step 3: 3D printing. After reading Al Gore's "The Future" at 16, I became convinced that 3D printing will be one of the most disruptive technologies of our time. Imagine ordering a product but instead of waiting two days for delivery, you download the file in two seconds and print it at home. Logistics as we know it would fundamentally change. No more mass production, just print on demand. No shipping costs because printers stand in every country, every city, eventually every household. Costs drop. Risk drops. The entire value chain gets rewritten. This step isn't about cash flow or exits. It's about building something that lasts.

vii.

Everything above is worldly. And as ambitious as these goals are, I don't lose sleep over them. Not out of indifference. Out of trust.

I'm a practicing Muslim. I pray five times a day. My faith gives me something that might seem contradictory to ambition but isn't: peace. I give everything I have, every day. And at the same time, I accept that the outcome isn't mine to control. If something is meant for me, I'll reach it. If not, there's a reason I might not see yet.

That's not a contradiction. It's the foundation. Because it removes the fear of failure. And someone without that fear can take risks that others won't.

My intention behind everything I do goes beyond money. I want to leave something behind for my family, for my community, and for anyone reading this in 30 years wondering what kind of thinking it took to get from 8.73€ to wherever I'll be standing then.

viii.

If you're reading this in the future, you know how it turned out. You know which of these plans worked and which didn't. You know whether the 23-year-old who wrote this was naive or clear-eyed.

But regardless of the outcome: look at the thinking, not the results. The question was never whether every plan succeeds. The question was always whether I had the clarity to pick the right path and the willingness to change course when the math stopped working.

My father taught me that no one can take away your joy. That applies to you too. Start. Calculate. And if the equation doesn't work, find another way.

There's always another way.

Written on February 17, 2026.