Fireside Chats at KI labs; ep. 12
Welcome to the Fireside Chat! Let’s start by learning a bit about your background!
I grew up as an only child in a small town in central Bulgaria. My parents met in college as they were pursuing their MD’s. My father is a urologist and surgeon and my mom does mostly laboratory work. At an early age, I felt their strong influence to become a doctor, but that changed when I was exposed to technology.
I had been pressing my dad to get me a computer around the age of 12 and one day, he brought home an old PC he had bought from a friend of his. At the time, it felt quite depressing, having to deal with DOS when other people were already using Windows 98. Looking back, I think this was a good thing for me since I now had to work extra to find games that worked. I started to write my first text adventure games and played them with my friends. When I was 13, a mentor of mine gave me a book on Pascal. Throughout school, I continued to learn more about Informatics — the academic side of computer science.
A few years later I read an article about a guy who started his own business that really caught my eye. I saw entrepreneurship as my way forward. This is still my ultimate goal — owning my own company. That drive was instrumental in deciding my studies when it was time to move on to University.
In University, I double majored in Computer Science and Business at The American University in Bulgaria. It was as close to studying in the US without being in the US. Most of the students were locals, looking to get an accredited degree, but there were also a lot of American students and American Professors. The first two years of school allowed me to take diverse classes and I even tried some journalism, building on a love of writing. As an open source evangelist in the world of technology, I’ve taken the same approach with writing. It’s a pipe-dream of mine to start writing something, post it, and having someone else work on it and send it back. I’ve started a sci-fi story and hope to send it out… Maybe more of a thought experiment more than anything else.
How do you compare Bulgaria and Germany?
Bulgaria is an interesting country. A lot has changed since the 4 decades of Communism that ended in the late 80’s. Everything crashed and there has been a gradual transition to a Western way of life — helped out by the formation of the European Union. I’ve been in Germany for 9 years now. Funny story; Prior to moving here permanently, I had spent an exchange semester in what used to be East Germany. That almost convinced me not to come back! Munich is awesome, though — I like it here.
How to decide to move to Germany after your not-so-good experience in East Germany?
I really wanted to study Bio-informatics and looked into schools in the Netherlands. Research in this area is much less regulated there, so it is a great place to study, potentially the best in Europe. As I was looking into Masters schools, I got an offer from a 3-D game start-up in Bulgaria which I found really interesting. Even looking back, I think it was an awesome opportunity, just not the best timing.
This was also my first encounter with smart people not being the best fit for each other. No matter how much talent is on a team, that does not guarantee success. There was way too much quarrelling about technical and non-technical issues. I started looking at Bio-informatics programs again, but the schools told me I would need 2 more years of Biology undergrad study to apply. I impulsively applied for an Applied Computer Science program at the University of Bremen that looked interesting, while I started looking for another job. My happiness at my job continued to spiral and I was anxiously waiting for someone to contact me from a university. In fact, the University of Bremen sent me multiple emails that went to Spam, so I never saw them. Right before the deadline, they called, telling me about the emails and that I now had one week to decide whether or not to join the program. I had one week to make a life-altering decision. I took the chance and accepted the offer.
How did you decide you wanted to work at KI labs?
Our Android Developer, Wahib, was and has been, my Meetup buddy for quite a few years. I met him back in 2015 at one of the tech meetups here. In Munich, it’s fairly easy to find people who are interested in your niche. Munich is a big city but it’s easy to have a grasp on the communities in different fields. I was quite new to Munich, so I attended multiple meetups and saw Wahib at nearly all of them. We kept in contact for a few years and in 2017 he mentioned that he was joining a small startup with a little over 10 people. He had mentioned that they were primarily focusing on data products and as KI labs grew, the argument to join became stronger. Data had always been an interest of mine and I was ready to learn more, to build on my strong backend experience.
I have always looked for a company with the culture of KI. Whether you want to grow vertically, or horizontally, people here are okay with it and will support you. At previous jobs, I was encouraged to only improve on my current skills, making it very difficult to broaden my perspective. If you’re a Java Developer, you need to be the best the Java Developer you can be! At KI, it’s different. Even though we are sticking to certain technologies, we are not exclusive, and always open to change the perspective and consider other options.
Shameless plug: read my new article about why I like GO as a new programming language
What has kept you here at KI?
To be fair, a lot has changed even since I joined. Things were way more chaotic. Just the basics, as the office was cramped and at any point in time people could be all over you. With the new office (even with the current construction downstairs), it is so nice to have rooms divided by project.
More importantly, if I go back to this entrepreneurial sense I have, KI labs allows me to have more responsibility with what I’m working on, including my time, than any other job I’ve worked at. At the typical German company, it would be the opposite — you work on what you’re assigned. Here, I am working on projects where I am making a significant impact, occasionally jumping into interviews and helping with hiring. This impact makes my current role the closest as possible to be an entrepreneur without the risk of actually starting a company. I am more on the line with real responsibilities, and there is a great level of trust here. When I feel that sense of trust, I am very loyal.
What do you see as the future of KI labs?
I am excited to help develop some products of our own. We have a lot of talented people and after each project we complete, we learn from our mistakes and get better. We have quite a few ideas and the current project developing *secret proprietary information* that seems to be going well. With startups, you never know what can become a big success. We have a lot of engineers who love hacking things, and it’s possible something silly we build ends up being something many people have interest in. Twitter started as a podcast company until Apple destroyed that with the Podcasts app.
I also look forward to more hackathons where we can expand on our creativity and potentially take labs to the next level.
