I Am Here Because of You

This post is not just here to get attention. Or to spread knowledge.

This post exists to acknowledge the great work of many people who have helped me become who I am today. This post is a big thank you, an appreciation. This post is going to be a bit cheesy — I am simply grateful and happy about where we are together.

Why is this important?

In the past days I’ve been investing a lot of my time into “learning new things”. I’ve started listening to some audio books during my runs, as well as watching videos from other entrepreneurs who seem to be either successful or happy.

I’ve realized one thing even stronger than before. We’ve been building a proper business, not because I’m a supposedly smart guy or I’m determined. We’ve been building a company out of individual heroes and I stand with each and every one of them. We’ve built an incredible team and that’s simply a lot more than just me.

I’m planning on posting something on what I’ve learned every single month here on medium. And today I am starting with our team and all the people who’ve made me who I am and put me where I am.

Our Heroes

Here follows a selection of people who I have worked with. More people than those listed here deserve credit, for the sake of practicality I have to limit it to all the great people who work with me on building the next level of entrepreneurship — VIPERdev.

Also I’ll have to limit myself to about 1–2 paragraphs per person, there’s obviously more to everyone.

Here they come. (Mathematically it’s a set of unorderable people, so it’s in alphabetical order.)

Abdeali — “The Fire Extinguisher”

Man. You’re kickin’ it. If something doesn’t work out as expected, if anything is on fire you’re there. You’re the high precision surgeon in our team and I can sleep better if I know you’re helping us with <insert random thing going wrong here>. And we all know that in any growing company, random things are going wrong.

Thanks for your help Abdeali :)

Chris — “The Iron Man”

Chris is your guy if you want to get competitive. “I bet you can’t go vegan.” “Can you do an Iron Man?”

Chris, you’re more than my running and biking buddy — as well as helping me to swim properly (long way to go :)). You’re our guy for all those fancy startups and customers who actually need data scraping, AI and machine learning. And I also know that you’ll be around when I need you the most.

Thanks Chris, for always being at my side!

Emil — “The Colorist”

You need something that actually looks stunning, you’re wrong with many average software developers. Emil will not only design but even implement beautiful pages. He is responsible that we can show off work like the Hamburg Innovation Summit. With us professionalizing more and more, going beyond the initial MVP with some of our customers his skills become more and more necessary.

I obviously didn’t continue our weekly bike rides while you were on vacation, seeing forward to you coming back :).

Thank you, Emil. For making us shine 🌅.

Finn — “The Magic Card”

Finn is our town planner. He reminds us to take a step back at times and go fix our shit. He helped me giving birth to our bug reporting and user story drafting tool and is especially our man for very backend heavy applications that have a need to scale.

As quiet as he sometimes is, don’t get fooled — this is when he pulls his magic cards and crushes you in no time.

Finn, you ground us. Thank you.

Hemang — “Mr Sunshine”

You were one of the first people we hired and despite your timezone actually being behind ours, I remember you coming online in our evenings just to get started to crush bugs. At the same time (or maybe rather because of this?) you’d never have a problem pulling an all-nighter with us because of an important fair for one of our partners and shit hits the fan. (Luckily we’ve managed to avoid those situations oftentimes by now :)) Without you we’d be screwed so many times. — And you’ll always have a smile on your face :)

With you in my team, I’ll never face a difficult situation alone. Thank you, Hemang.

Jonna — “The Taskmaster”

Jonna is with us since quite some time already, mainly as a project manager. And she’s really pulling us to be our better selves: founding the VIPERdev Climate Team was basically her idea. Jonna doesn’t only manage projects, she makes sure people grow and learn to manage themselves. Jonna got our most complicated projects well under control.

Jonna, I know you shield me and our developers from a lot of things and I know I can trust you with basically anything. I thank you for all you keep handling for me and the whole team, as well as your bright ideas which are always aimed at making the world a better place.

Kaisar — “I am root”

Kaisar, also called “Yuki”, is our devops developer. He won the Google Code In challenge a couple of years ago at our open source project coala and is now helping us to maintain servers — be it dedicated or in the cloud.

As one of our youngest members you’re always here when we need you, be it to resolve a downtime of a customer at 2am in the morning (thankfully not happening too often), set up a new kubernetes cluster or improve our template generator to make it more usable.

You do way more than just keeping our systems running. Thank you, Yuki :).

Lolita — “Moneypenny”

Many people only know you by the name “Moneypenny”, which is the alias you’re operating our finances on. You’re taking a lot of stress off me especially and since a while we’re developing our sales area together, which is nothing easy at all and especially not straightforward.

Lolita, I thank you for all of your support and for pushing through new ideas even if I can be a little sceptic at times.

Naveen — “Die Hard, Bugs!”

Naveen. You’re awesome. We’ve been through a ton of stuff together, including building our last startup GitMate. In all those years we’ve built a ton of stuff together. By now, I sadly can’t help you as much as I used to anymore as I’ve converted to the part of our business that brings less direct value. However, I can always trust that you’ll make every team you work with excel and crush those bugs hard.

Naveen, with you at my side, none of the bugs coming at us will stand a chance. Thank you.

Surya — “The Invisible Hero”

Surya, you’re always so quiet. One could so easily not see you — and one would miss out for sure. In reality, you are an awesome coder, while you patch in new features you elegantly fix underlying issues and make things simpler. (I’ve just looked at yet another of your merge requests removing more code than it adds while making things easier to read and more flexible.) You always understand the issues at hand and I always know that I and the team can rely on your help when we need it, even spontaneuosly.

Surya, thank you for being our invisible hero and always being around when things are critical.

Teja — “The Machine”

You are our one-man-think-tank who we send into battle at our most important projects. Armed with both frontend and backend knowledge, you could tackle complete projects even alone if needed. Even though you only joined full time recently, you’ve become an integral part of our team in no time.

Teja, thank you for joining and bringing us forward every day.

Conclusion

The thing I’m most proud of having built, is all of us. Thank you. Everyone.