Me circa 2021 when I spent the entire year working from home out of various villas in the Riviera Maya.
My name is Nikolas. I escaped big tech (AWS) in late 2021, sat down at my computer to build a web3 business, and haven't stood up since.
I am:
A lifelong reader. I spent the bulk of my childhood sitting cross-legged on a large red chair, ripping through every piece of science fiction I could get my hands on. Favorites of mine include: Atlas Shrugged, Thinking Fast and Slow, Zero to One, Notes from The Underground, and Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
A competitive nerd. Every summer starting in 6th grade my parents sent me to the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth to take college courses - nerd camp. The better part of my teenage years were spent grinding out a 50 in Halo 3, getting rolled in Counter Strike by hackers, and climbing to Challenger in League of Legends.
A writer. I've been writing short fiction and poetry under a pseudonym for the last 6 years, and have built a small following of ~7,000 regular readers.
A business builder. When I was in elementary school I built a small Craigslist-style marketplace for office supplies denominated in Neopets currency. It was banned by the principal as a distraction. Since then I've built e-commerce businesses, seen a software (SaaS) company through an IPO as a sales leader, and when I left Amazon Web Services I was managing a $500M ARR portfolio of Silicon Valley cloud-native companies and 75 people therein.
My dad's an entrepeneur with an MBA from Harvard so I've got a point to prove, and I'm currently building an enterprise web3 infrastructure company called UTILITI.
A blockchain enthusiast. I bought Bitcoin in 2012 at age 17 while trying to procure LSD through the infamous Silk Road. At the time it reminded me of Neopoints, and I've held on since.
A needlessly verbose would-be philosopher. I've created this place to pontificate about business, technology, philosophy, and how I believe the future plays out.
Here are my other socials:
