In the summer of 2024 I was doing two things at once. I was interviewing internally at Red Hat for a management position, a move I'd been thinking about for a while. And at the same time, I was registering a company. Not leaving. Not launching a startup in the dramatic sense. Just creating a structure for ideas I knew I'd keep having.
The two decisions had nothing to do with each other and everything to do with each other.
The idea that started it
The specific trigger was OtterSource: a marketplace for funding open source work, with a split that actually compensates maintainers, not just contributors. I'd been thinking about the problem for years. I wrote about it, I watched bounty platforms come and go, and none of them solved what I thought was the core issue. At some point I realised I wasn't going to build the answer inside someone else's company. I needed my own structure to do it properly.
But it wasn't only OtterSource. The honest version is that I'd started noticing something about how my mind works. I'm constantly optimising things around me: processes, tools, workflows, systems. I find out-of-box solutions for problems that seem stuck. I genuinely enjoy that. At work it had always shown up as a useful trait. But I was starting to wonder whether it was also a signal about what I should be doing more deliberately, on my own terms.
So I registered Kopec InnoTech, a small s.r.o. (the Czech equivalent of a limited company). Not as a dramatic leap. More as a commitment device: a structure that said I was serious about this, even before I'd built anything.
Why not an MBA
For a few years I'd been thinking about an MBA. The appeal was real: I wanted to understand business more deeply, not just engineering. I wanted to know how to build something that actually works as a commercial entity, not just as a technically interesting project.
But the more I looked at it, the less convinced I was. I hate learning theory. I'm a let's-try-and-find-out type of person, always have been. The idea of spending years in a classroom when I could be building something felt wrong for how I learn. And I kept reading that an MBA's real value, at most schools, is the network: meeting the people who'll become your future contacts and collaborators. That might be worth it at the right institution. But going to school for the sake of a credential and some frameworks I could get from books? That didn't feel like the right move.
So I made a different decision: I'd build a real company and learn business by doing it. Pricing, positioning, finding customers, the gap between a good idea and something people actually pay for: an MBA course describes these things. A real company makes you live them. I wanted the reps, not the syllabus.
The parallel structure
In January 2025, I started as an engineering manager at Red Hat, a new team, a new role, a different kind of challenge than I'd had before. The first half of the year was completely absorbed by that transition. New team dynamics, new responsibilities, building trust from scratch. I had the company registered, I had the ideas, but there wasn't much time to act on them.
That's the honest reality of a parallel path: the two things don't always move at the same speed. Sometimes the day job needs everything. The side company waits. But having the structure in place meant that every spare hour had somewhere to go. I wasn't starting from scratch each time I found a window. I was continuing.
I'm not planning to quit. My work at Red Hat provides still a lot of learning, about people management, about how large engineering organisations function, about what it actually takes to grow engineers and not just ship code. That's valuable. The two paths aren't in competition. They're complementary, at least for now.
What I've learned so far that no MBA would teach
Building something on the side, even at a small scale, teaches you things differently than any course could. You find out very quickly what you're actually willing to do when nobody is watching and nobody is grading you. The tasks you procrastinate on are informative. The ones you do at midnight because you can't stop are more informative.
You also learn what 'shipping' means when it's yours. There's no sprint planning meeting, no stakeholder review, no definition of done that someone else wrote. The decisions are yours. So are the consequences. That's uncomfortable in a productive way: the kind of discomfort that teaches faster than a textbook.
What this actually looks like
Right now, as I write this, OtterSource exists as an idea and an early build. Kopec InnoTech is the entity I'll use to help small businesses figure out where AI can actually make a difference in their operations, another area where I think the gap between what's possible and what most companies are doing is significant. These are the first projects. They won't be the last.
The company is small. The ambitions are not. That's a gap I'm comfortable with. I've always found a way to close gaps like that.
If any of this resonates or you're navigating something similar, I'd enjoy the conversation. Get in touch.
Update, May 2026: OtterSay (a tool that turns any newsletter, article, or PDF into a summary or audio via email) is live. Kopec InnoTech is taking on its first AI consulting engagements with small businesses.