Hello world

Hello everyone, it is very cool to be part of the ProductHunt community.

A little bit about myself:

I'm the father of 2 wonderful children, and the lucky husband of a smart and beautiful wife.

I've been living in Germany since 2012, having moved here to do research into high energy particle physics. This mostly involved programming a complicated game of 20-questions to search for the secrets of the universe.

Whilst that might sound super fun, it wasn't what I wanted to do with my life. I wanted to work on something practical, something that I could see in the real world, so I tried to get a job as a software developer, since I enjoyed all the coding I had to do in my research and I was really good at it... it seemed like an obvious fit.

I then proceeded to spend 6 months trying and failing to get a job. This is a story that you will have all either have experienced or heard before. I knew I had the skills to do any of these positions I was applying for, but mostly my job applications were ignored, or after an interview I was ghosted. The best I could hope for was an actual rejection with some valid, concrete feedback.

In the end, I was lucky and received an offer from a software consultancy firm, and I got to work on the Airbus systems for a while, but then my (future) wife got a job in Frankfurt, and we lived in Hamburg. So I had to move and consequently abandon my job (this was all before the time of Covid and working from home).

Exactly in this moment, I got very lucky. A friend of mine was starting a new business and asked me to join him, and for the next 7 years I was the CTO of a Fintech startup called Chintai (https://chintai.io). We started from nothing and built a B2B2C product that currently handles billions of dollars on behalf of the clients. The goal of the company was to make a fair and equitable marketplace for people to buy and trade in private equity.

At some point though, it was time to move on, and having seen the latest impacts of AI on the job market, and remembering the pain and depression of trying to find a job when unemployed, it was clear what I needed to do.

So I started TalentAid (https://talentaid.com), with the goal of creating a job-seeking copilot that can hold your hand and help you as you navigate the job market. I want to use it to make sure that people can actually achieve their goals and have the careers that they deserve, to help people make sure that they get paid fairly for their hard work, and to show people who feeling like they are struggling with no help in sight, that there is someone who can help pick them up and put them back on their feet.

This is what I needed all those years ago, and I was lucky in the end, but I never thought that you should leave to luck anything that you can take control of, and that is why I am launching TalentAid.