When I was 16 years old, I was thrown into a school in the middle of nowhere in Germany, and I would never have imagined that my future co-founder would attend the same classes.

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At the beginning of High School, I decided to attend a summer school in Germany to improve my German skills. I still remember clearly the morning I walked in front of the schoolyard, and I had imagined that it would be an international school with students from across the globe here to learn in Germany.

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I couldn’t have been more wrong… I had received directions to which room I should go to, and when I walked inside that room, I could only see local German students and not a single international student. Everyone was surprised that someone from Finland had come all the way to a tiny village in the middle of Germany; even the teacher didn’t seem to know I was supposed to be there. I was thinking in my head about what all of this would lead to.

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Turned out that everything went well. The three weeks that I attended classes in that School were invaluable because only a few spoke English, so I had to quickly learn German fluently to get anything out of the time there.

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Further, most importantly, I met and befriended Maximilian Wittmer, a local young talent in programming. It turned out that Maximilian had won programming competitions and had a curious mindset I never had seen anyone else have at that age.

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What was most impressive about Max was that he was of the most outward-going people I know, which I would argue is a rather rare sight for a programmer.

A couple of years later, when Calle Unnérus and I were brainstorming who we should take on board our startup as a third co-founder, we decided to reach out to Max since he had helped me a bit when I programmed in my spare time and during the years since I had met him at the summer school, his programming knowledge had grown massively as I had expected.

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After pitching the concept to him the first time, he was initially sceptical, but we decided he could jump along and see if we were a good fit. A couple of weeks later, Calle, Max and I got along like three brothers and shared the same vision.

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This is the beginning of how our journey started.

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