Quo non ascendam

Life doesn’t move in straight lines, and mine didn’t either.

There came a period when nothing made sense. When the path I was on stopped leading anywhere I recognised, and the certainty I had as a kid seemed to belong to someone else. I won’t describe it here. It is enough to say I came out of it a different person than I went in.

In that period, I came across the book ‘The Alchemist’ by Paulo Coelho.

Many people remember the book for its promise that the world helps those who truly want something. What stayed with me was quieter. Santiago, a young shepherd, leaves everything behind to pursue a dream no one around him understands. Coelho calls it his Personal Legend: the thing you are meant to do, which most people abandon long before they ever attempt it.

Along the way, Santiago works for a crystal merchant. A kind man, who has spent his whole life dreaming of a journey he never dared to make. It is from him that Santiago learns a word I have carried with me ever since.

Maktub.

It is Arabic, and it means: it is written.

For the merchant, it was an explanation for the life he had settled into. For Santiago, it became something else entirely. Not a reason to wait, but a reason to keep going. I have come to understand it the same way. Maktub doesn’t mean everything is decided for you. It means some roads were laid out long before you arrived. You still have to walk them.

At the end of his journey, Santiago discovers that the treasure he was searching for was buried close to where he started. But he could never have found it without leaving. The journey didn’t lead him to the treasure. The journey made him someone capable of finding it.

That idea rearranged something in me. I stopped seeing detours as wasted time. Every difficult chapter, every wrong turn, every lesson I didn’t ask for was part of the road. Nothing I had lived through was wasted. It was preparation.

I chose to study tax. Not because it was the obvious path for someone who built games as a kid, but because I wanted to understand how the economic world works underneath. Tax is where law, money and human decisions meet.

I went on to work inside some of the country’s leading tax practices. I learned the craft from excellent people, and I am grateful for every year of it.

But I also saw something I couldn’t unsee. A profession full of brilliant minds, still running largely on hours, paperwork and habit. Highly trained people spending their days on work a well-built system could do in seconds. Clients paying for complexity they didn’t understand, for answers that should have been accessible to them all along.

None of this is anyone’s fault. It is simply how the industry was built, long before the tools existed to build it differently.

When I stepped out on my own, it didn’t feel like a leap. It felt like the logical next step. I had seen the problem from the inside. The only reasonable thing left to do was to start solving it.

Every generation gets a handful of moments when the playing field is rearranged. This is one of them.

AI is not a trend, and it is not optional. It will change every industry built on knowledge, documents and process. Some incumbents will adapt. Most will wait. By the time waiting stops being an option, the work will already have moved elsewhere.

What excites me is not the technology itself, but what it makes possible. Expertise that has always been expensive, slow and reserved for those who could afford it is about to become available to everyone. The founder starting out with nothing will have access to the same quality of knowledge as the multinational.

That is not a threat to professional services. It is the biggest opportunity they have ever had.

I intend to build for that world. Not the one we are leaving.

I am building toward three things.

I want to change how this industry works. Not by a few percent, but so fundamentally that in a decade, people will struggle to remember why it was ever done any other way.

I want to make what has always been exclusive available to everyone. Starting and running a company should not depend on who you know or what you can afford.

And I want to be proof. For the kid in a quiet room somewhere, building something no one knows about yet. Proof that you can start with nothing but curiosity and stubbornness, and still go further than anyone expected.