I spent 12 years inside Fortune 500 companies before I learned to build my own.

Eight years at adidas, four at Wayfair. At adidas I planned big marketing campaigns: 500+ Reebok stores worldwide first, then adidas's online business, then everything we did in Korea and Southeast Asia. At Wayfair I sold a logistics service to German suppliers and grew that from €1.5 million to €5 million in 18 months. I also built a system that helped the European team run their projects better.

Good titles. Bigger budgets. Bigger teams every year. But I was working hard enough to skip vacations, get sick on Christmas, and miss the version of me my family deserved. And the impact was going to shareholders. My ideas for things that would matter long-term kept getting shut down for things that would hit quarterly numbers.

I wanted work that mattered, on timelines that made sense, that also paid the bills. That meant building something of my own instead of working inside someone else's. Olga had taken the leap a few months earlier. I followed.

Then we got an expensive lesson.

In 2020 Olga and I started our own coaching business. Pandemic, two kids at home, no website, no funnel. We grew to €6K/month in 15 months. Stable enough to live on, never quite stable enough to relax.

Year one cost us €40K in extra certifications and random courses, trying to become better coaches. None of it made a real difference. What we needed was the work we'd been doing at adidas and Wayfair for over a decade: marketing and sales. We'd just stopped using those skills when we left corporate.

So we pivoted. Packaged what we knew about marketing and sales into a venture for senior experts going independent. That became mettaCofounder. A second venture, mettaScale, came later for sales teams at growing tech companies. Same playbook, different audience.

At mettaStartup Studio I run ops and product.

Across both ventures. I decide what AI does versus what humans do, and what each customer walks away with when our work together ends. Every system we build can be exported. Nothing locks customers in.

"Life is a perfect adventure. A game that cannot be won or lost, only played."

A lot of the cost of building a business comes from treating it like a test you can fail. It's a game you keep playing as long as you want to. The bad days are part of the play. The good ones are too.