About
Nedim Hadzimahmutovic
Cloud Engineer & Writer — Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina
I ran a web hosting company for over ten years. Built it from scratch, managed the servers, handled the customers. It was profitable but it never grew. I could not figure out the sales and marketing side, and eventually I closed it. That decade taught me more about business than any book — but it also left me with a question I could not shake: what separates the companies that scale from the ones that stay stuck?
That question led me to the origin stories of companies like PayPal, Netflix, Tesla, and SpaceX. I wanted to understand the actual decisions founders made — not the polished TED talk version, but the messy reality. Who almost went broke. Who got fired from their own company. Who bet their entire net worth on an idea that most people thought was insane. And what, specifically, they did differently from the thousands of small company owners like me who built something real but could never make it bigger.
Today I work as an IT consultant and Cloud Engineer (AWS, Terraform, DevOps) based in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. This site is where I publish what I find — long-form articles on startup history, talent management, and the culture decisions that shaped the tech industry. Every article cites its sources. I try to get the story right.
What We Cover
Startup History
Deep dives into how companies were actually built — the founding stories, pivots, near-failures, and the specific decisions that made the difference. PayPal, Zip2, Compaq, Netflix, and more.
Startup Culture
How companies think about hiring, firing, and everything in between. Talent density, the Keeper Test, what bootstrapped founders do differently, and why culture is a strategy, not a perk list.
Elon Musk
A dedicated research series on Musk's early career — from the family backstory through Zip2, X.com, and the PayPal merger. Sourced, fact-checked, and told in chronological order.
The PayPal Mafia
What happened after eBay bought PayPal for $1.5 billion. How one company's alumni went on to found YouTube, LinkedIn, Tesla, SpaceX, Palantir, Yelp, and more.
Also on Medium
Side Project
Explore Sarajevo
Plan a slow visit. The local way.
A hyperlocal travel journal and digital field guide to Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. Written by people who live in the valley and pay for their own coffee. Covering hidden gems, authentic restaurants, Ottoman and Habsburg architecture, mountain trails, and the rich cultural heritage of one of Europe's most underrated cities.
Visit exploresarajevo.com →Books Behind This Site
Elon Musk
Ashlee Vance, Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future (2015). The primary source for all Musk articles on this site.
Netflix
Reed Hastings & Erin Meyer, No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention (2020). The source for all Netflix culture articles.
First Principles
Eric Jorgenson, The Book of Elon (2021). Curated quotes and thinking frameworks.
Academic
Renz & Vogel, Elon Musk: Leader or Liability?, Journal of Case Research and Inquiry, Vol. 6, 2020.
How This Site Is Built
Platform
Static site built with Jekyll. No CMS, no database, no WordPress. Markdown files, version-controlled in Git.
Writing
One author. No guest posts. No sponsored content. No affiliate links. Every article written, researched, and fact-checked by the same person.
Images
Photos sourced from Wikimedia Commons (CC BY, CC BY-SA, or public domain). Every image credited to its photographer.
Corrections
If I get something wrong, I fix it and leave an editor's note. Accuracy matters more than speed. Report an error.