For two years, my CV looked quieter than my life actually was: no new employer, no new city, no neat title upgrade.
I spent one year at home finishing my master’s and showing up for family, then another re-entering tech, learning to build with AI, and testing what kind of work I wanted to make mine.
From the outside, the years were hard to explain. From the inside, they had a clear logic: finish what needed finishing, learn what I needed to learn, and get closer to the work I wanted to do. I stayed in my childhood room, wrote my thesis from the same desk where I’d done my homework as a kid, read obsessively about AI and startups, and let the straight career line break for a while. When things stabilized, re-entry was deliberate: ecosystem trips, coffees, coworking, hackathons, AI meetups, and small building sessions with friends.
Along the way, I said no to paths that would have been easier to explain: junior VC, a PhD, and startup roles that mostly put me back into operations, sales, or growth. They were good paths. That was the hard part. But none of them made the work feel more like mine.
What changed
- From title to proof. I stopped optimizing for a cleaner story and started collecting proof instead.
- Closer to the work. I built prototypes, took an AI engineering course, worked with retrieval, evals, agent workflows, and systems that had to hold up beyond a demo.
- Shipping as feedback. I shipped projects and explored ideas around parliamentary data, fundraising, dating, govtech, home cloud, utility apps, community products, Mini-Me, and Just Move To Europe.
- A sharper thesis. I became more thesis-driven around AI, context, trust, memory, reviewability, and products that make powerful systems easier to understand and live with.
The through-line is simple: I want to work where AI, product, and people meet. Practical enough to ask who cares, technical enough to build, and clear enough to explain, sell, or teach.
Those two years gave me time to show up for my family, rebuild my own foundation, and become harder to shake. Confidence did not come first. It came from small pieces of proof: shipping something, surviving the doubt, doing it again, and choosing the same direction before there was much external confirmation.