Having spent more than a decade in the United States, I learned new skills, met new people, witnessed a lot of talent. My obsession with wanting to run a successful high-value company, has made me study business management, become a software engineer, co-founding several startups that made reasonable exits, and more. The past still feels like practice.
Today, I try to solve painpoints for enterprise and consumers. I get the right people involved, decide on an approach, and execute.
I grew up in Stockholm, Sweden to an Iraqi family. We had moved to the country when I was two years old having fled the regime in Iraq in 1991. My first memories were formed in northern Sweden where the snow had compunded to be taller than my 2-year-old self. I remember telling my dad to lift me so I can find my little sister in the snow. This phase of my life remained the same as I learned Swedish values, pinned them against Iraqi Assyrian conservative traditions, and formed my moderate-centrist political views.
In my childhood, I began having many interests. Everything was interesting to me, and my curiousity has never wavered. While my childhood was marred in violence, constant insults, and constant fear. It was this focal point that brought about my vivid imagination. I used to dream of someday having my own money, penthouse, and car. As I learned more about life, my character evolved, and I started thinking philosophically.
Questions started brewing in my mind. Where did we come from? What happens after death? Does God exist? All the usual questions. I tried to create minimal viable knowledge in every area I was interested in. Space exploration lead to physics, physics lead to electronics, and electronics lead to programming commputers. This is also the time I began working out at the gym and tried my hand at boxing. I didn't know it yet, but I was becoming a jack of all trades and a master at none.
At ten years old, I tried the arts. Poetry, acting, dancing, and playing instruments. I discovered Reason and Logic Pro so I dived into making music, which landed me at Fryshuset (I still have the five remaining tracks from that time). Parallel to my musical path, I learned HTML, CSS, ActionScript (Flash), and C++. To make money, I began sourcing parts from second hand stores to build computers for people in the late 1990's when the internet was booming in Sweden and everyone wanted to be connected. This was my first entrepreneurial endeavor.
When I began attending Fryshuset, I put a pause on building computers, focused on music and picked up a job in Telemarketing. Between the ageas of 16 and 18, I found myself having more money than I'd ever saved before. I had saved €10,000 and was introduced to the concept of going to university. Due to my family situation (large family and a toxic environment), I elected to go as far away as possible. This single decision changed my life forever.
On January 23, 2010, I landed in LAX to begin school at Santa Monica College. For the next year and a half, I studied Business Management and attended classes for philosophy. I couldn't take exams in philosophy because I couldn't afford to pay for the classes. Effectively, taking over 16 units per semester, I was eager to become an intellectual. I finished my math at UCLA for good measure, and wound up receiving an A- in Business Calculus, which gave me confidence in my ability to learn. My academic years only got better.
In 2012, I transfered to California State University, Northridge. I instantly joined student organizations to get aclimated with my new environment. My grades where slightly above average, but my social life in CSUN exploded. I joined the Finance committee and two student organizations. MACSUN for business, South Asian Club for community, and co-founded the Finance Association, CSUN with my friend Gary. In 2014, I was part of 3 student organizations and the finance committee.
2015 was graduation, and my social life took a slight dip. I worked briefly at an office in Santa Monica for Uber, then wound up homeless for 3 months. The problem wasn't money, it was access to the correct resources. My brilliant plan of staying in my Prius and save up money to buy an apartment backfired. I only received relief when Gary returned to the United States from Sweden and rented an apartment with me at Sherman Oaks. This is where my life started taking a turn for the better.
January 17, 2017, I received a call from Sean, who had been in the solar industry with his partner Pablo. I met with Pablo to start at Clean Initiative as a Program Facilitator, yet three months later, I was a co-founder running all of IT as an interim-CTO. While at Clean Initiative, the company grew ten-fold. Furthermore, Clean Initiative began buying solar installers and entered the smart home race. The latter was pivotal to me as I had championed it.
Confident in my ability to sustain a technology department, I exited Clean Initiative to create a new consulting company, CaliberAlpha where a neo-entrepreneurial boom in 2019 brought a list of clients to the books. I had to quickly call friends and acquaintances to deal with the growth. We built marketing campaigns, MVPs, and two production applications for SMBs and startups. It all came crashing down in 2021 when post-COVID awakening turned most startups into dust. The boom we experienced only lasted until COVID had wound down a bit.
In 2020, I had built a foundation that I'll never forget. I began exercising at home with resistance bands, joind Wild Card in Hollywood for boxing, and began learning Italian. I also picked up reading again and was reading about two books a month. Every habit was intentional and lead me to be calmer and more confident.
Then began the most dreadful period of my life. Most of my money was gone, a crypto-wallet was stolen from me, and I had to leave my comfortable home in favor of a small apartment in West Hollywood. For the first time since 2016, I had to find a job, and landed one at QuayChain. Life was confortable for yet another year and a half. When QuayChain shut down operations, I was left without a job, and only savings to hold me up. Within three months, I had a new job in a language and framework I didn't know. That job lasted three months due to personal friction in my life.
I found myself at rock bottom at the age of 34 and none of my methods worked. It was as if someone had turned the world against me. After a long thinking session while buzzed on my balcony, I realized that IoT and embedded systems would be the next phase of my life. I had experienced it at QuayChain where I wrote device code for an edge device, and wanted more embedded work. With the advent of A.I. and and economic downturn, I decided to finally take the leap and upskill myself back home in Sweden.
Right now, I'm truly a Senior Full Stack Rust Systems Engineer and an Entrepreneur. It's a long title, not a glorious one. My mission is to create smarter cities, better defenses, and a society that doesn't buckle under pressure from outside threats. Ideally, an environment that can thrive, even at times of war, environmental disaster, and economic collapse. I want to see a new system that is technologically resiliant, which focuses on people and economic growth. It will be the blueprint for our future in space.
— Daniel