ABOUT · JOCHEN SCHMIEDBAUER
I was born fighting for air. I've been connecting dots ever since.
My umbilical cord was wrapped around my neck. I didn't breathe for over eight minutes. My mother, an ICU nightshift nurse, couldn't hold me for three days.
From the first moment, nobody could do the becoming for me. I had to find my own way into the world. That turns out to be the thing I now help other people do.
I grew up with very little. My father drove trucks across Europe and was mostly gone. My brother needed all the attention in the room, so I became the calm one, the quiet one, the one who watched. My grandmother raised me. She had almost nothing and gave constantly. She bought me books. She let me be myself. Generosity, for me, isn't a strategy. It's the air she taught me to breathe.
At ten I got a third-hand Commodore 64 with no manual. I hacked it until it did what I wanted. A few years later, a second-hand Amiga. That's when it stopped being a machine and became magic. Constraints breeding creativity. "Build from what's real" before I had the words for it.
Twenty-five years across the full stack followed. Network engineering. Architecture. Data science. Product ownership. Mentoring. From the Amiga days to Agent AI. I built systems, solved problems, and carried all of it. The always-on fixer who called exhaustion a personality trait.
Then it caught up with me. 16-hour days. One or two hours of sleep, for a year. I'd built an impressive trap and locked myself inside it. Sound familiar? It's the exact trap I now help founders out of. I don't coach it from theory. I coach it from the inside.
The shift came from a system, a community, and the courage to actually show up. Stoicism gave me the lens. Marcus Aurelius, the idea that every moment is a chance to choose better. Bruce Lee, absorb what is useful, discard what is not, add what is uniquely your own. Anti-fragility, the idea that the storm can make you stronger if you let it.
I stopped trying to be the hero of every story. I started making room for other people to be the hero of theirs.
Three things hold me up. Anti-fragility, which you just heard: the storms are supposed to build you, and mine did. Generosity, my grandmother's: give before you count the cost, and connect the dots for people. And self-actualization, the slow work of becoming who you already are. That last one is the work I want for you as much as for myself.
I'm not a guru. There are no perfect humans, and I'm not the exception. I stumble like everyone. I'm a lifelong learner who happens to be a few steps down a road you're walking, turning around to say: here, watch this part, it's slippery.
I speak fluent tech and fluent human. I connect dots between systems, philosophy, AI, and what it means to be a person doing all of this. That's the whole job.
Off the screen: I'm a dad. My son is my human-in-the-loop and keeps me on my toes. I go for a walk every day. I still say please to my LLM, just in case the AI overlords eventually read the logs.
If any of this sounds like your kind of person to think with, and to take action with, let's talk.
Rock on. 🤘🚀🤘
