Published: 02/02/25
Today marks exactly 10 years since I left šŗš¦ for š¦š¹ and later š©šŖ
A little more than 1/3 of my life and basically my entire adult life.
I took the weird gamble of moving to Vienna without even visiting it first.
I was originally eyeing Munich. I went there to talk with the admissions office and was slightly confused by the enrolment process. In Vienna, on the contrary, it was dead simple.
I wanted to emigrate since the 8th grade or so, and initially was considering US, UK, and Canada, but those plans didnāt stand a test of reality in which my parents did not have diamond mines in South Africa like those of every self-respecting self-made entrepreneur.
I was lucky because one of my best childhood friends was 100% aligned with me on this. We studied languages together, we raced karts together, we travelled together.
The first year or two in Vienna were tough. My parents were helping me financially but the amount of help was sufficient only to cover a room in a dorm and groceries.
One of my most vivid memories from that time is when a friend invited me to Wiesn (~Oktoberfest) and I was going there knowing I only had ā¬21 left in my bank account until the end of the month. I could afford one beer max, better nothing. The feeling of humiliation was intense, sitting there knowing I wasnāt able to afford another round or food when everyone else was ordering sausages, beer was flowing in all directions, everyone was having fun.
Another hard part ā besides chronic lack of money ā was the FOMO and loneliness. For strategic reasons, I had moved to Austria after taking one year of uni in Ukraine.
Tough when your friends seemed to have had much more fun than you ā sitting there with your social circle reduced to a few people, sheer shocked by all things new, stressed and shocked by how much different and harder the new uni was, frustrated by how different the social dynamics at it were, crushed by how broke you felt at a new place.
I was already working on Mate Translate back then ā by myself. One of the first business ideas I had in Vienna was making prep books for those who wanted to enroll a medical university. My emigre friend was prepping for the big exam that usually defines the entire life of aspiring doctors. He identified a problem I donāt remember anymore in great detail and without much thinking we decided weād make our own textbooks. Heād compile the exercises, Iād help with the design, layout, printing, tech.
That idea didnāt stand the test of reality as the prep books were produced by the med uni itself, and were, of course, certified.
Albeit it might sound like nothing, now, in retrospect, I feel very proud of myself for even daring think I could do it. My initial exposure to the Austrian society humbled me, made me feel like a black sheep.
People at my new university were conventional ā going to classes, completing assignments on time, having a plan to get a job after graduation. Some place respected like BMW, Siemens, you know. Not that itās wrong in essence ā it made me feel I was wrong because I felt an incredibly strong resistance to such a life for myself, and I didnāt feel anyone around me had any understanding for me. Perhaps a byproduct of juvenile lack of confidence, but I felt people thought I was the weird one.
I was astonished I could de-facto choose classes freely. One had a suggested curriculum, but one could theoretically pick classes from semester 1, 3, 5 ā all in one semester.
Without much thinking, I decided semester 1 classes werenāt interesting enough for me, so I picked a class on building compilers that, as it turned out, was actually designated to master students, not freshmen. The system blocked me, so I went to the dean to get an approval. I told him Iād been building software for a while by then and was not interested in learning how to print hello world. He was nice, as far as I can remember. Not judgemental even in the slightest. Probably I wasnāt the first crazy Slav coming to him with such a request. He cleared me to attend those classes. To my embarrassment, I failed the very first assignment. I want to believe I could have made it ā it just turned out not interesting enough.
The very same thing I could probably say about the entire programme I had enrolled. Iād already had a taste of making things that were used by 100s of thousands of people. I had a very strong itchy feeling I wanted to build products for a lot of people and make hard cash with it.
I felt very restless in classes, and the feeling I was wasting my time never left me when I was working on assignments ā that were, admittedly, pretty hard. People who were getting good grades were spending 40-50 hours a week on uni. I was spending probably 5-10 max.
At 19, I went to the chamber of commerce to register my first business in Vienna. The sheer amount of new bureaucratic tricks I had to understand was immense. I was already making a bit of money by then (around 1k/mo) but I had never registered a business before. VAT, 30 different types of taxation, exemptions, etc. I had like 2 kilograms of various leaflets I got at the chamber of commerce. I still vividly remember one night in the summer of 2016 when I was sitting at home, table covered in leaflets and notes, trying to grasp the Austrian taxation and VAT.
Shortly after I could call myself a businessman officially, a tragic moment had happened ā my father died of cancer. It was pretty hard emotionally and logistically as I was flying between Vienna and Kyiv quite frequently to help take care of him.
Not too much later, after having completed around third of the uni programme, I decided to no longer suffer. I was so fed up that I didnāt even bother to let anyone at uni know I wanted to drop out. I just stopped going, and after two semesters or so, their system automatically unenrolled me.
Should my father had been alive, I probably wouldāve stayed longer at the uni as he had a far bigger influence on me than my mum, and he was really fascinated by the idea of my getting a higher education. Perhaps, because he never succeeded academically. Despite spending his 20s in a Soviet research institute working on ways to make locomotives more efficient and having dozens of patented inventions, he had to switch to business in the 1990s, because, well, it was the only way to live more or less decently in a post-communist country. I unfortunately cannot have an honest, adult-to-adult conversation with him about this anymore to validate my hypothesis.
Summer of 2017 was when I started visiting Berlin frequently. It wasnāt my first time here but it was my first time when I fell in love with the city. My best friend and I went on a big trip around Europeās most interesting cities (according to us back then) ā Prague, Berlin, Hamburg, Brussels, Amsterdam, Rotterdam.
The feeling of fullness, excitement, and energy. Iāve travelled to dozens of new places since then but nothing ever trumped my visit to Berlin in 2017. My first time in Bali came close, but didnāt surpass it.
My writing and intellectual capabilities do not allow me to precisely distill what makes a place have a āvibe,ā but the Summer Berlin definitely has one. Quite few places in the world do, actually. Maybe itās a subtle combination of personal experiences and values eerily mixed in the air with those of locals, multiplied by the ambient such as urban design. But itās like you feel youāre not a lifeless decoration piece in the rush of life around you, but a very integral part of whatās going on around.
Berlin can be deceptive to visitors when they come in summer. It changes its mask for winter, and feels like a very different place. Long-term life here also makes a dent in that vibe with its mundane aspects like dealing with the illogical, failing, narrow-minded, and stupendous government and bureaucracy, but Iām pretty happy the positive feeling always makes its way back to me when Iām walking around the streets of this city in May.
By the time I moved here, I was living a more comfortable life in Vienna ā already making enough to be able to travel modestly and get a beer (and even a sausage if I ate them) at the Oktoberfest, but I still felt like a black sheep, confronted with a lack of like-minded people. People were too normal for me, city was too conservative and orderly. Even the black sheep find it comforting to have a few of their kind by their side.
At some point in 2018, I decided for sure, I had to move to Berlin. And in 2019 I did. First, I went there to register a company. It only took half a year to finalise everything and make it operational.
It didnāt occur as overly annoying to me back then. Two years ago, I would have been furious. Now Iād probably think āimbecilesā to myself, ranted to my girlfriend a bit, and simply chose to incorporate elsewhere. But then I didnāt flinch ā it was just what had to be done, also I had no idea I had another choice, anyway. Itās the amount of experiences one has been exposed to that makes people picky and snobby, perhaps.
I rented a 10sqm āsmartā flat over email to have as a strategic base and kept living between Vienna and Berlin at the end of 2019 until I finally found a proper flat. A flat Iāve spent the last 5 years in. That felt like a luxury when I was moving in. Now it feels like a normal flat.
I had most of my first-time experiences in Vienna: from going out to alcohol to drugs to dating to making money and taking care of myself (and even some members of the family) out of my own pocket. Vienna will definitely forever hold a special place in my heart. Itās the place that inspired me in some ways. Served an anti-example in other ways. And is certainly the place where I matured the most.
Berlin, by comparison, has seen my more gradual development. Most of the seeds that had been planted in Vienna just kept growing in me. Iāve gotten more nuanced and experienced in doing business, Iāve gained more like-minded people in my social circle.
The only novel thing is probably work on mindfulness. My striving for a complete letting-go of what others might think about me, and just enjoying the path Iām walking on. Not being desperately needy for the society around me to accept me. After all, if the resistance with the society around you is too strong, you can always change the surroundings. We, luckily for people like me, live in such a world where itās become almost too easy to move or live globally.
I went back to Vienna in September 2024 last time for a friendās wedding. And it felt great to be back there, but only for a few days. Like coming across some memory about a moment with your ex partner. If you isolate that memory from the entire experience, it can be nice and vivid and joyful, but there probably was a reason theyāre now ex.
I came up with an idea of writing a ātributeā to my immigration like this back in December, wrote a few paragraphs, and have only finished it today. Sitting by myself in a cafe in Koh Samui thatās going to politely hint me on leaving in 1 hour 11 minutes.
Somehow it feels like a tremendously important day in my life. More important than this yearās birthday or New Year that traditionally symbolise the start of āsomething new.ā
Itās as if I had 4 different lives in this past decade. It would be subjective to assume but I tend to think I wouldnāt have even a fraction of life experiences I had, had I stayed in my hometown.
But I could never fathom it, anyway. So cheers to life and enjoying every moment thereof! No matter if in your birthplace or a place you chose to be your new home.