I should probably explain myself.

I am a Cloud Engineer. I live in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. My day job is Terraform modules, CI/CD pipelines, and arguing with AWS IAM policies. I have never founded a company. I have never raised a round of venture capital. I have never been fired from my own startup or crashed a million-dollar car on Sand Hill Road.

So why do I spend my evenings reading biographies of people who have?

The honest answer is that I got hooked by accident. A few years ago I picked up Ashlee Vance’s biography of Elon Musk on a friend’s recommendation. I expected a typical tech-bro hagiography. What I got instead was a story about a kid in Pretoria who got beaten so badly at school he was hospitalized for a week, who left South Africa at seventeen with two thousand dollars, who cleaned boiler rooms for eighteen dollars an hour — and who, two decades later, was building rockets.

That gap between the boiler room and the rocket fascinated me. Not the rockets themselves — I can read about Merlin engines on Wikipedia. What fascinated me was the decision-making. Why did he put $12 million into X.com when he could have retired at 27? Why did he stay calm when the board fired him on his honeymoon? Why did he split his last money between SpaceX and Tesla when putting it all in one would have been safer?

I started writing because I could not find articles that answered those questions in the way I wanted. Most tech journalism covers what happened. I wanted to understand why it happened — and whether the reasons were transferable to someone who was not a billionaire genius but a regular engineer trying to make good decisions.

What Sarajevo Teaches You About Founders

There is something about growing up in Sarajevo that makes Silicon Valley founder stories land differently. This city was under siege for nearly four years in the 1990s. I was a child during the war, and I do not write about it often, but it shapes how I read about adversity.

When Reed Hastings talks about Netflix almost going bankrupt, I understand the feeling of systems collapsing around you. When Musk describes his darkest year in 2008 — SpaceX failing, Tesla bleeding, his marriage ending — I recognize the emotional texture even if the scale is different. People in Sarajevo rebuilt their lives from nothing after 1996. We understand what it means to start over.

That is probably why the Musk family migration story grabs me more than the SpaceX launches. A mother packing up three children and moving to a country where she has no job, no network, and no guarantee of anything — that is a story I have heard versions of my entire life, from my own family and from my neighbors.

What I Am Trying to Do Here

Every article on this site comes from a book, an interview, a court filing, or a primary source. I do not make things up and I do not present other people’s reporting as my own. If I quote Elon Musk, I tell you which book the quote is from. If I get a date wrong, I fix it and leave an editor’s note.

I write because I believe that the stories behind these companies are more useful than the companies themselves. Knowing that Tesla exists does not help you. Knowing that Martin Eberhard built it, got pushed out, and then watched someone else get credit for his idea — that is something you can learn from.

I am not a journalist. I am an engineer who reads too many biographies and takes too many notes. This site is where those notes become something worth sharing.

If you have ever wondered why a Cloud Engineer in Bosnia writes four-thousand-word articles about what happened inside a Palo Alto office in 1999 — now you know.

Sources

• This one is just me.