Born in New Jersey on 17 March 1974, to Albanian immigrants. Raised in the North, then Dallas, Texas from my early teens. In Stockholm since 2001. I've worked a wide range of jobs across several industries, from manual work to product ownership.
My parents came from the Balkans with little and built their living around an Italian restaurant in Dallas, where I worked from a young age. The business did well for a while, then it didn't. I married in Texas and moved to Stockholm in 2001, just as the dot-com market collapsed. I couldn't find the IT work I was trained for, so I took what paid the rent: data entry, cleaning a printer factory, making pizza. Over the following years I worked up to product ownership at large companies. That span, from manual labour to enterprise product, is the core of how I work.
My formal studies were in the humanities (philosophy, psychology, anthropology, rhetoric), not computer science. I trained in computers separately, at a computer institute in Dallas: PC building and repair, networking, hands-on rather than academic. That is when I moved into tech. The mix turned out to matter, because the hard problems in AI now are about memory, identity and trust, and code is only how you answer them.
I've spent most of my career as a consultant across many industries, without specializing. Working wide, across enough contracts, you start to see the same patterns everywhere: what holds up, what fails, and the gap between what people think matters and what actually does.
Two decades of that, always the consultant and never the executive, for companies whose names you would know and I won't lean on. In 2014 I started my own company, esali, and around 2019 turned it from selling my work to building its own products. The products live there. This past year, almost all of my time goes to V. The throughline across all of it: whatever I built, someone else owned the platform it depended on. That is the problem V exists to end.
