What Apogee Took From Me, and What It Turned Me Toward
The highs
The best moments were about people believing in the work.
I met most of them the hard way, at startup events, online and in person, in universities and shared workspaces, pitching until someone leaned in. Three investors leaned in. Isaac David actually put money into Apogee; he started by offering fifty thousand euros, and having someone back the idea with real capital changed how I saw myself. I was not just a student with a company anymore. Someone with judgment had decided I was worth the bet.
Samuel Cook, who ran a strong marketing agency, fell for one of the internal applications we were building. He believed that if it reached enough people it could take some of the daily struggle out of ordinary life, and he wanted to invest. He was the one who introduced me to more of that world, and I introduced him to Isaac. Then, two weeks after we started talking seriously, the war in Ukraine broke out. Sam was stationed there. He had to sell his company and move back to the United States, and the moment passed with him.
And there was Jason Grenfell-Gardner, an investor who became a genuine friend. We should have been on opposite sides of everything, an Iranian and an American, in a decade that keeps insisting people like us are enemies. We spent real time together instead. We compared how we saw the world and agreed on the thing that mattered most: that the people writing the policies were not speaking for us, and that the two of us were not the labels our governments had printed on our passports. That friendship taught me something I carry into the work I want to do now. Politics is not the same thing as people.
The lows
The low points came from the parts I could not control, and they came close together.
The Ukraine war did not just take Sam. It froze the whole investment climate around us at exactly the moment we needed it to stay warm. Then a product manager we had brought in left and took company intellectual property with him, which is a particular kind of wound, because you do not just lose the work, you lose the trust you spent to build the team. Estonia turned down my visa processing with no reason I could see, the same quiet no I would meet again later in my career. I got sick with COVID and went through it alone, and the only person who came for me was my co-founder, who is also my closest friend. And underneath all of it, the money ran out. I had put around twenty thousand euros of my own savings into development, and the team I had hired to build it could not deliver a working product. I ended up struggling to pay my rent, having spent everything on a thing that never fully shipped.
The juggle
For four years I ran the company and finished a full cybersecurity degree at the same time, and the two never stopped pulling against each other.
I was in incubation, which meant mentors, Heidi Kakko and Ivo Remmelg among them, with real expectations I had to keep meeting. I was trying to teach myself marketing, finance, and every other part of running a business that no engineering course covers. My title said chief executive officer. What the days actually asked of me was chief everything officer. The cost was constant. If friends invited me out for an easy evening, I felt guilty, because some part of me was always certain I should be working on something instead. I did not really know how to rest for four years.
The lessons
The practical one I would give any founder: do the marketing a year before you build the product. Get the story right first, make people understand it and want it, and only then press play on development. It is like writing the novel before you make the movie. You earn the audience first, then you give them something to come and enjoy.
The human one took longer. Be patient, and trust that good people find you in the hard moments, because mine did. Have faith in that.
And I learned to treasure the knowledge that people handed me along the way. Kristjan Raude once asked me whether my product was a painkiller or a vitamin. I told him it was neither, that I was after the actual healing, because a painkiller only hides the problem and a vitamin barely moves the needle, but real healing brings the harmony back. Rain Rannu and Riivo Anton kept pushing me to narrow down, to know exactly who the work was for. And I met people who simply inspired me, like Jaanika Merilo, who spoke plainly and without apology about the Russian policies that led to war. Watching someone tell an uncomfortable truth out loud stayed with me.
The realization that changed my direction
Here is the thing Apogee taught me that I have not been able to put down.
No matter how good your product or your idea is, if a malfunctioning system decides it threatens the way things are, it can simply turn you down. I watched it happen to my own work. And I slowly understood the uncomfortable conclusion: the best idea is the one that can be written into a rule and enforced. It is better to help make the policy than to spend your life begging the people who hold the policy to make an exception for you.
I was not alone in seeing it. Two financial engineers I came to know, Christophe Diserens and Cyrus Fazel, wanted to bring a real change into the world and kept slamming into regulations that made no sense. In the end they did not beat the rules by arguing with them. They found the policy path that let them create value for a customer base of more than seven hundred thousand people. That is the lesson in miniature. The change you want to make has to survive contact with the rules, which means someone who understands both the technology and the governance has to help write them.
That is why I am moving from building inside systems to helping govern them. Apogee is where the turn began.
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