Agency, Ten Years On

Agency has become quite the buzzword on tech Twitter/X over the past year or so. You see it as advice for founders, as praise for a specific kind of engineer, sometimes as a one-word verdict on a candidate. It surprised me when I started noticing it, because the word highlights something that has been running my career since 2012 and I had never thought of it as something other people would name. The first place I saw what it meant was the Stanford high school summer program, and the place that turned it from an instinct into a habit was the CDTM in Munich.

CDTM stands for Center for Digital Technology and Management. It is an honors program jointly run by TUM and LMU in Munich for students who want to work somewhere between technology and business, usually because they want to start companies. I joined in the fall of 2016 and graduated in the summer of 2018. This year is roughly ten years out from when I applied, which made me want to write down what stuck and how it applies now.

Quick disclaimer on the word, since “agency” on Twitter has drifted into something close to a grindset cult, where the proof is how early you got up and how visibly you suffered. The version I picked up at Stanford and refined at CDTM is more grounded and more useful for me: the habit of acting on what reality is telling you, before anyone hands you permission or certainty, and usually before the next step is obvious. Most of the time it does not look like much: sending the email, showing up somewhere you were not formally invited, starting something for which nobody is asking you.

The seed in 2012#

I was 17 in the summer of 2012 and spent a few weeks at a Stanford summer program for high schoolers. I had stumbled across it on my own while starting to research US colleges, and applied without anyone pushing me to do so. Partly because I did not yet have plans for the long American summer break I was still not used to — having grown up in Germany, where the longest school break was only six weeks. I lived on campus, took real Stanford classes, and ate in the same dining halls as the regular students. I was halfway through high school in Worcester, Massachusetts at the time, so I had already absorbed a lot about how American universities work.

What drew me in was not the classes. It was watching the actual Stanford students around me. They were starting companies, joining ones that two friends had started the week before, building things in dorm rooms, cold-emailing professors, walking into labs and asking to help. Nobody was waiting for someone to give them permission, and nobody was waiting for the path to look obvious before they started walking on it.

I went back to Worcester and tried to act like the Stanford students, and it stuck. I launched Anigmo.org with online “Tic-Tac-Toe” and “Connect Four” games that you could play against the computer and wrote my Worcester Academy capstone about it, which is still on the research page. A small anagram generator, a sudoku web app, and a screenshot tool called Screen followed, all still listed on the projects page. Nobody had assigned any of it, and that was the point. I simply got into the habit of having an idea and executing on it — for no apparent reason other than enjoying the building process itself — and taking it one step after another.

I graduated in 2013, moved back to Munich, and started at TUM that fall. I freelanced through most of undergrad and ran a small consulting company called CW Technologies on the side. By the time I applied to the CDTM in 2016, I already thought of myself as someone who builds things, but I had not yet seen what it looks like when a whole room operates that way.

CDTM: the proof at scale#

The thing about CDTM is that you are surrounded by other people who act. Self-selection does most of the work. Students apply because they want to build startups, the program filters for the ones who already start things on their own, and the result is two years of being in rooms where the default question is not whether something can be done but who is going to do it.

CDTM did not give anyone agency — everyone there already had it. What it added was a structured place to nurture that habit and point it at problems that mattered.

Not everything CDTM gave me was about agency, and the Trend Seminar is a good example of that. It was more about timing: how to read an emerging space and form a view on when something is ready to be built and accepted by a market. Different than the computer games I built as a high school student that no one really needed. You pick a topic, study it for many weeks, and write a report on it that’s printed and shared online for anyone to read. Our cohort looked broadly at diabetes, and my own subgroup argued that automatic closed-loop systems for managing insulin intake were the future. They were not yet a real consumer category in 2016, when the first hybrid system had only just received FDA approval and there was nothing you could really buy off a shelf. A decade later, automated insulin delivery is the ADA-recommended treatment for type-1 diabetes, with five FDA-approved systems on the market.

The point was less the report and more the muscle of taking a vague trend and turning it into something concrete that other people can argue with. I still use that muscle when I try to point remberg in a direction.

The other half of CDTM was the project work. MPD (Managing Product Development) is the course where a small team takes on a real product brief from an industry partner and runs with it for a semester. A European aerospace company gave my team a spec in 2016 for an internal assistant to help their engineers look up technical documentation. We put chat front and center, which was not the obvious answer at the time, well before LLMs made it the default interface for everything. One of my classmates had a deep NLP background and ran with that part of the stack.¹

In hindsight, what we shipped looked almost exactly like the AI assistants every enterprise is rolling out now, just with much worse intent classification and no real generation underneath. The point of MPD was not the chatbot, of course; it was that you spend a semester acting as if you actually own a product and a customer relationship, and after a couple of semesters built that way you stop expecting a syllabus to tell you what to do.

Two of my three co-founders, the original introduction to remberg, and several of our best hires all came through the CDTM network. Being in the room with people who already act is most of what makes any of this work.

What shaped me further was the time abroad. CDTM had a connection to the chair at the Georgia Tech Research Network Operations Center, and that introduction was the only part of getting to Atlanta that came from the program. Everything else I had to figure out myself: the visa, the flights, housing once I got there, the research project I wanted to work on, and getting into the courses I wanted to sit in by just walking in and asking the professor. The semester after that I did the same thing at MIT, starting again from a single introduction and building the rest of the stay myself. Those two semesters are the closest CDTM ever got to formal training in agency, except that nobody framed it as training — it was just what you did.

I wrote about the Georgia Tech semester in Studying at the Georgia Institute of Technology shortly after it finished. Re-reading it now, the through line is plain: the research, the courses, the social side, almost all of it you have to build for yourself.

What it looks like now#

remberg is what came out of all of that. It started during my MIT semester in the spring of 2018. I was on a research track, writing papers, getting published, and starting to find academia intriguing. I was also interviewing with strategy consulting firms on the side, which was the other path that felt safe at the time. Then the offer came through the CDTM network: three guys back in Munich were building something together and were looking for a fourth person on the software side.² Saying yes meant not finishing my master’s degree, dropping the research track, and stepping off the consulting interview pipeline. Pushing against the path my family and broader society expected of me was a real struggle, and probably the hardest piece of agency I have had to find. I am very glad I did it.

We started with a hardware product called Wunderbox, pivoted quickly to an after-sales SaaS for equipment-as-a-service, and over time landed on a maintenance management system for industrial customers. Each of those pivots was, in retrospect, an act of agency: looking at what reality was telling us and changing what we were doing instead of waiting for permission to change it. There were many more micro-shifts in between, like in most startups, but writing about the evolution of remberg is another job in itself.

My own scope in those years stretched well past what a CTO normally owns. I leaned into finance, legal, and operations as well, making the calls in those domains rather than just executing the tasks. I had some prior exposure to those areas, and a family member in tax consulting I could ask when I got stuck. The rest I just took on, because on a four-person founding team nobody else was going to. Hiring a Head of Finance in 2022 took a lot of that load off, and bringing in a VP Operations more recently took even more. That has finally let me focus fully on AI and engineering again.

My job as CTO inside remberg has changed shape every year or two. 2018 was prototyping. 2019 to 2021 was being a software engineer. 2022 was hiring and being a more public face for the company while we grew from 15 to 70 people, a lot of that in product and engineering, which meant trading days of writing code for back-to-back hiring calls and being a more extroverted version of myself than I find natural. 2023 was organizational design and, at the end of the year, letting go of people across product, design, and engineering, a decision I think we came out of stronger. 2024 was building up the velocity in product and engineering. 2025 and 2026 have been pulled back to engineering, infrastructure, and architecture, with the Head of Engineering doing a tremendous job at running the organization. None of those transitions felt like a job description being handed to me, but like noticing what was missing, what the company needed at a certain time, and stepping into it.

Should you still do CDTM in 2026?#

I get this question occasionally from people who are deciding between top European programs in the AI era. The short version of my answer is a simple yes. The three things CDTM gave me that have aged well are the habit of self-organizing whatever comes next, the people I am still in the room with, and a sense of how to read where a market is heading. AI does not weaken the need for any of them. If anything, the surface area of what a small motivated group can build has expanded a lot in the last two years, and the bottleneck has moved further toward whether you actually start. Pick a program where the people around you act, and act around them.

If you cannot apply to a program like CDTM, the conditions are reproducible without one. Find a small group of people who already build things in their spare time, pick a deadline together (even one you make up), and ship something against it.

A second lever is unsolicited work: pick a question that an industry partner would pay to have answered and answer it for free. Volunteer in a lab, write to a researcher, run a one-day hackathon, take a customer call you have no business taking. None of that requires admissions, and most of the lift of CDTM came from doing exactly those things in a room where everyone else was doing them too.

Find me on X or write me an email if you have any questions.