You know what they don’t tell you about the cloud? It sits on your chest at three in the morning while a dashboard refreshes and your runway gets shorter.
The Problem
That’s where this story starts. Back when Laur and I were involved in a previous startup, trying to outrun a €20K monthly bill like it was a debt collector with a baseball bat. We were builders. The real kind. The kind who believe if you push hard enough, refactor long enough, migrate far enough, the universe eventually blinks first. So we went cloud-surfing, months of deep tech trench warfare. No sleep, high stakes, architecture held together with willpower and Slack threads. Not a pivot. A full-body transplant. And the meter kept running.
See, numbers like that? They don’t just hit your bank account. They mess with your rhythm. They change how you talk in meetings. They turn product discussions into survival strategy. They make you look at every deploy like it’s a roulette spin.
Laur went into optimization mode the way a hitman goes quiet before a job. Workloads, configs, infrastructure, he hunted inefficiency like it had insulted his family. Did everything right. Still, the company died. Not because we were wrong. Because the system was heavier than the builders.
For most people, that’s the end of the movie. For Laur, that’s where the voice-over kicks in. After the shutdown, he kept thinking about the cloud. As a crime scene. A structural problem. Something that could be redesigned if you had the nerve and the brainpower.
The Manifesto
Then one day he slides me his manifesto. No drama. Just principles, clean and sharp: deploy what you already run, no rewrites, no lock-in, no platform magic tricks. And developer experience put on a pedestal. Reading it felt like opening a briefcase in a diner and seeing the glow. Not hype. This was revenge for every builder who ever got slowed down by the thing that was supposed to make them fast. So we took it to the streets, talked to people, posted it, stress-tested it in public. And the reaction? Not polite nods. Real heat. Builders leaning in.
The Co-Founder
Then comes the scene. No music. No speech. Just Laur asking: “Wanna be my co-founder?” And here’s the thing, it wasn’t a decision. It was a reflex. Because trust like that? You don’t model it in a spreadsheet. I knew who he was. A man with values, with follow-through, with that rare combination of determination and genius that makes impossible things feel scheduled. So, I said yes.
My first move?
Antler
Drop us into the arena with people trying to solve problems that actually matter. We applied. Got in. Berlin.
Berlin became our laboratory. In that city, restless, layered, unapologetically forward-looking, we immersed ourselves in the discipline of building fast, thinking globally, and refining the narrative of what we were creating. The kind of environment where your idea either becomes a company or dies on the table. And we lived to fight another day. We got funded. First Romanians to do it. Not as a flag-planting exercise, but as proof. Talent from our part of the map doesn’t need permission. It just needs surface area. We are not an exception. We are an early signal.
Enter the Dutchmen
Hidde and Michiel, new characters, same frequency. No corporate choreography, just instant alignment. The merge wasn’t a deal. It was a band forming. Azin. Like The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, or Led Zeppelin, we are four distinct energies that become truer, louder, and more alive together.
The Solution
Now the plot opens up. Startups moving fast without hiring a DevOps army. Companies shipping without praying to pipelines. Developers staying in flow instead of YAML purgatory. And under all that, community. European in values. Global in ambition. Built on trust, not lock-in.
Momentum
So when people ask me about “becoming a co-founder,” like it’s a promotion, I kind of smile. Because there was no single moment. No coronation. It was a series of recognitions: this problem matters, this person is the real deal, this is the hill…
The cloud that once tried to bankrupt us is now the canvas we’re painting on. The company that died is the origin story. The frustration became the fuel. And the sky we used to pay too much to touch?
Yeah.
Now we’re rebuilding it so it stays open.
_
This whole ride? It doesn’t happen in a vacuum.
It goes on courtesy of Laur, Hidde, and Michiel, who show up and raise the stakes.
It is possible because Antler opens the door to a room where the game is played at full speed and nobody’s pretending. Big thank you, Christoph, Alan, RJ, Job, and the whole team.
And all the rest, the advisors, the believers, the early “yes” people, the ones who leaned in before there was proof, they’re the unseen cast that makes the job work.
Roll the credits however you want, but this journey? It’s a group operation.