The Ländle 

When you grow up in Baden-Württemberg,  there's really only one path. Daimler. Bosch. Porsche. You see the houses, the cars, the security and you absorb the logic: good grades, technical degree, solid job. "Machst was G'scheites“ do something proper. That's not advice, it's a promise.  Follow this path and everything will be fine. And the tricky thing about promises that come from everywhere is that at some point you forget you never made them yourself.

At 16 I had a finished picture in my head: department manager, wife, camper van through Scandinavia. I didn't doubt it for a second.

1.3 GPA during COVID. Electrical engineering, Stuttgart. Everything on track.

But then: First day in the lecture hall, October 2021. And everything feels wrong. Not a little wrong. Wrong in a way you feel in your entire body but can't name at 19. Alone in the evening and then everything crashes down. The loneliness, the fear, the feeling of living a life that isn't mine. But you keep going. You function. You deliver. That's what you've learned to do.

In that first year, everything broke apart at once. Things about myself became clear that tore up the picture of the department manager with the wife and the camper van in a single second. In hindsight, the most important realization of my life. At the time it felt like an earthquake. In parallel, my parents' divorce. A process that would drag on for almost four years and end in the sale of the house I grew up in.

But from the outside: the 1.3-GPA Nils who always delivers. On the inside: everything in ruins. And still functioning, because that's all you know how to do.

In hindsight I believe this is the most dangerous skill the German education system teaches you: functioning under all circumstances. Not because functioning is inherently bad, but because it teaches you to see your own pain as weakness instead of a signal. For five semesters I felt every single day that I was in the wrong place and my only response was: work harder, perform better, deliver more. As if the problem was that I wasn't giving enough and not that I was giving everything to the completely wrong place.

Then came AI

Somewhere in the second semester there was this class, "From Zero to Startup in 6 Weeks," then I started working at the Institute for Entrepreneurship, met people who thought differently than anyone I'd ever known. For the first time I sensed there was a world out there that doesn't run on safety but on curiosity. But everything still vague, still theory.

And then this lunch break.

We're sitting together, talking about the new "tool," and my boss says: "We all need to improve our writing skills." Everyone nods. And nobody in that room, truly nobody, grasps what's actually happening.

What's happening is not that a new tool has appeared. What's happening is a reversal. The old path said: first learn, then do. Study for five years, then you're allowed to build. First the theory, then the practice. First the permission, then the act. AI flips that. AI says: just do it. Build it now. Tonight. And if it doesn't work, build it again tomorrow. The path is no longer preparation → permission → execution. The path is: execution. Period. Everything else you learn along the way.

That sounds like a small shift. But it's the biggest shift our generation will experience. Because the entire old path: school, university, internship, entry-level job, eventually you're allowed to make decisions,  that path is based on the assumption that building is hard and that you need years of preparation before you're allowed to start. What Altman and Amodei and all the others are setting in motion is that this assumption no longer holds. Universities are still debating whether students should be allowed to use AI in term papers while outside 19-year-olds are launching entire products. The world isn't changing despite institutions,  it's changing right past them.

The thought came in the evening, simple: if AI helps with writing, maybe it helps with coding too. And if it helps with coding, then maybe someone like me, no computer science degree, no programming experience, a lost electrical engineering student, can build something. Not someday. Today.

So I sat down and coded a game with AI. Just to see if it works. No plan, no course, no curriculum. Just doing it.

It worked.

And in that moment I felt for the first time in my body what "just do things" actually means. Not as a motivational quote, not as LinkedIn wisdom, but as lived experience: I had an idea, I sat down and a few hours later it was real. Nobody gave me permission. No degree prepared me for it. I just did it. And because AI back then was nowhere near as good as it is today, I basically taught myself everything along the way. AI wasn't the shortcut. AI was the proof that this path exists. But I had to walk it myself.

Out

From here everything moved fast. I started coding my first app – basically Tinder for travel, no revolution, but something that's now in the App Store because I built it. Not because someone showed me how, but because I started before I was ready. That's the real lesson AI teaches: readiness is overrated. The people who build the most aren't the ones who know the most. They're the ones who start the fastest.

I went to my first startup events and for the first time met people who don't ask "Is that safe?" but "What if?" For the first time this feeling: these people think like me. And the whole time in the background: AI keeps getting better and better. GPT-4 drops and can suddenly do things that were impossible six months ago. Anthropic launches Claude. Google follows with Gemini. And with every new model the barrier gets lower, the question gets louder: if anyone can build now, what are you building?

Then Code University. Software engineering, Berlin. Applied, accepted. And then the hardest decision I've ever made: dropping out of electrical engineering. Leaving the safe path. Everything I'd learned about "if you start something, you finish it" . Overboard. Letting go of the Ländle. That same summer I worked as a forklift driver at Daimler. Of all places, Daimler, the lighthouse of the Swabian dream, except I was standing in the warehouse instead of sitting in an office and doing engineering . A circle that had to close to begin a new one.

On August 16, 2024, my sister is behind the wheel and Stuttgart gets smaller and at some point road signs for Berlin start appearing.

Berlin

The city gave me something Stuttgart never could: permission to be myself. Completely, unfiltered. Code University became home. For the first time learning felt like something I wanted.

And then the Young Founders Network.

I joined the way you jump into cold water. At the 6.0, the event before Berlin began, I was too scared to go. One of the biggest mistakes of my life. But then: YFN members, first strangers, then companions. The Berlin team. The first team weekend where I sat in a room full of people who were just as driven as me, just as ambitious, just as unsure whether they were good enough. And for the first time I thought: I'm not wrong. I was just too afraid.

What I understood at YFN: AI gives you the tools, but not the courage. The technology makes "just do things" possible, but you have to walk through the door yourself. And most people don't need a better model for that, they need a room full of people who say: jump, we'll catch you. That's something no AI model in the world can replicate, no matter how intelligent it gets. The person sitting next to you saying "I believe in you“. That's not a feature on anyone's roadmap.

Brought YFN to Stuttgart. In the city I had left, created a space for people who feel the way I used to feel. Put 150 founders in a room, organized an EU hackathon. Became board member for Partnerships for the largest network of young founders under 25 in Germany.

No happy ending

The ending could be clean now. Kid from Swabia makes it to the capital, board member in his early twenties. But that wouldn't be honest.

Our generation is the first to grow up with a question that has never existed before: What do you do when suddenly everything is possible? Our parents' generation had clear paths:  degree, job, career, retirement. We don't have clear paths anymore. We have infinite possibilities and zero guarantees. Every week a new model, every month a new capability that was science fiction a year ago. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta.  They're building technologies that rewrite the rules, not in years but in weeks. That's simultaneously the most exciting and the most terrifying thing that can happen to a generation.

And I believe the ones who navigate it best aren't the smartest or the best connected. They're the ones who've understood that the only way through this new world is to just do things. Don't plan. Don't prepare. Don't ask for permission. Do. Fail. Do again. AI made that possible. But the courage that you have to find yourself.

I'm sitting here, 3 degrees, no sun, and I don't know what comes next. Three years ago that would have sent me into panic. Today it feels like a blank page.

And maybe that's exactly the right beginning.