"At 18, I co-founded a cross-border agricultural trading venture operating across 20 or more countries in the middle of COVID. We ran out of capital before we could scale. My partner and I stopped pulling in the same direction at the worst possible time, and market conditions shifted faster than we could adapt. The company did not survive."
That failure taught me three things most people my age have not had to learn yet: never spend what you have not earned, timing is a strategic decision not a lucky one, and a head on straight when everything is going wrong is worth more than any playbook.
Every decision I have made since -- building Rise360 under 500 euros per month, flying to Iraq with no contacts, redesigning broken processes before fixing the symptoms -- runs on those three lessons. I do not need to learn capital discipline on your runway. I already paid for that education myself.
Everything you see here happened between 2020 and now. Some of it ran alongside a degree. None of it was theoretical.
DIRECT CONSTRAINTS
The venture failed at 18. I did not pivot -- it collapsed. What I kept: the understanding that capital is the only resource you cannot recover once it is gone. Every operation I have run since has been built around that constraint first.
MIDDLE EAST NEGOTIATIONS
LOCATION ARCHIVE
B2B Distribution & Commercial Negotiations
MIDDLE EAST FIELDWORK