**What is the most impressive thing that you have achieved in the last 2 years? ***

I have spent the last eighteen months co-building the tech startup Knit (Knit Technologies Ltd, www.knitvideo.com) in London and Warsaw. We challenged the idea that Zoom-alikes were good for all types of social interactions. Knit solves the social aspect of remote education. It was a big tech challenge to deliver high quality video calls and differentiating features, especially on a browser-based app and only one techie on the team. The venture was initially a success and we managed to help 10k students and academics at top universities to socialise during the pandemic. Our clients included top academic institutions such as CDTM, Oxford or Eurecom. Despite the initial success, we got outcompeted by better-funded players.

**Provide an example of something you have done, built or created that demonstrates your unique skill or ability (something that most people could not, or would not have done) ***

When we started Knit we couldn't get first customers because we lacked credentials. No one wanted to trust our tool which was at the MVP stage. I had the idea of starting our own conference, which was easy because I had the experience. This way we could experiment on our users and run technical stress tests. We used the success of the first conferences as proof of our tech (250+ simultaneous videoconference guests) and UX (high guest satisfaction). Shortly thereafter, we acquired our first big customers: Durham University and the Technical University of Munich. What's even better, the conference series lives on as an online community (1.8k members) and will soon be registered as a charity.

**Give an example of a time you have persuaded someone senior to you or a time you have brought people together to work towards a common goal. ***

I worked as a researcher for the UK Parliament and my focus was methodologies for stress testing eurozone and UK banks for capital adequacy. I realised that a lot of effort was expended on understanding complicated risk-weighting models which added little to our understanding of the macro-perspective, for which simple leverage ratios were the most important. I ran a couple of simple simulations using simple leverage ratios instead of more complex metrics and the results were the same as with far more complex models. This saved us weeks of work and the results were the same.

**What industry are you best positioned to build a company in? Why? ***

Ed-tech, especially B2B with a subscription model (e.g. SaaS), because of the experience gained during my time as CEO at Knit which is B2B SaaS.

**What random but surprisingly useful or interesting thing should we know about you? ***

I co-founded a yearly blues dance festival that’s attracted guests from all continents.