2017

Enterprise Pivot, Swiss Serenity TLTR: Left Berlin with newborn second daughter, pivoted to enterprise WiFi. Rebuilt system from scratch with top engineer, focused on service providers. Moved to Swiss farm house, balanced family and bootstrapped Airfy. Longversion: In 2017, at the age of 31, with our second daughter just three months old, we made the decision to leave Berlin after an intense three years filled with learning, growth, and transformative change, choosing to relocate to a serene house near a farm in Switzerland to provide a nurturing environment for our growing family while pursuing the next ambitious chapter in our enterprise WiFi journey. Berlin had been a whirlwind of excitement and opportunity, but its relentless pace and urban chaos no longer suited raising young children, so we sought peace, focus, and sanity in the Swiss countryside, where open spaces and quiet moments allowed us to recalibrate both personally and professionally. Professionally, the shift to enterprise WiFi demanded a complete overhaul, as we aimed to create centralized, multi-site, fully managed systems tailored for companies with serious infrastructure needs, requiring a level of reliability and scalability we had only begun to master. After shutting down our Berlin operations, I partnered with my best engineer to rebuild our system from the ground up, a painful but deliberate choice informed by the hard-earned lessons from running our own WiFi service for 3,000 SMB customers over three years. Most vendors avoid such resets, piling features onto outdated code until technical debt buries them, but we chose a different path, starting clean to craft a management system specifically designed for service providers, ensuring every component was built for performance, flexibility, and future growth. Bootstrapping remained my north star, keeping everything - brand (we later move from Airfy to AirZen as brand-name), code, stack, and ownership - under my control, came with me to Switzerland, where I designed our first fully Made-in-Europe WiFi router, a milestone that revived my long-held dream of European manufacturing despite the challenges of timing and market dynamics. The move to Switzerland was as much a family decision as a business one, allowing me to spend nearly every free moment with Mona and our daughters, free from the demands of an office or constant travel, creating a balance that fueled my creativity and sharpened my focus. The enterprise pivot marked the start of a new chapter, one grounded in lessons, family, and an unwavering commitment to doing things my way.