I get ten ideas a day. Nine are nonsense, and that’s me being optimistic. My companies and a few people around me live off the tenth. Please don’t look for a pattern here 😃
Serving in the Czech ArmyEither I ignore a thing completely or I dig in until I know more about it than your average guy in the trade. There’s no in-between, and I’ve stopped looking for one.
I’m from Slovácko, a wine region in South Moravia. At twenty I moved to Brno to study. “Study” is doing some heavy lifting. So: passable Czech, three sentences of Polish, and I mumble the rest.
While studying, I sold gift boxes of theater tickets for a shady little outfit. Five hundred crowns a pop, on the street or door to door. An hour of sales training every day, then out into the field. The toughest and best business school I could have asked for. Minus the diploma.
Then I landed in corporate sales and learned two things: how it works, and that I’m practically unemployable. Employers had suspected the second one long before I did. Next exit: the hell known as running your own business.
In between: some short-lived ventures (they flopped, but sounded great), a pile of books on sales and psychology, and first stabs at a business of my own. One laptop (bought with borrowed money, a solid foundation for an empire) gradually grew into a group of companies.
Hold my beer.
Hundreds of ideas a year, one percent survives. Some make money, some land me in trouble. I’m keeping the ratio to myself.
And a company that one day runs without me. So far I’m about halfway there on both. Honestly, more than I expected.
That obsession has a name: building. A company, an app, a portfolio, doesn’t matter.. I’m in it for the process, not the trophy. Work is a game to me, and a hundred-million jackpot would ruin it. It’d be like playing life with cheat codes on, and that would kill me.
500+projects · 300+municipalities
Engineering surveying. The group’s second company, a work in progress since 2021.
ingsite.cz ↗ 02Municipal asset mapping and Digital Technical Map data across the Czech Republic.
naspasport.cz ↗ 03A plain-language guide to the Digital Technical Map. Because official texts shouldn’t hurt to read.
digitalnitechnickamapa.cz ↗On the side
Modern websites for small municipalities. Fast, simple, no clutter, which on the Czech internet counts as a surprisingly bold combination.
An app for planning and managing unit training. I was missing a tool, so I built one. Classic case of a weekend project that somehow ended up with its own domain.
A QR system for reporting faults. Interesting idea. Bad timing. Life goes on.
A number on every pole, grave, manhole and tree. 3D printed tags for municipalities. It exists because my printer at home was sitting idle, and I can’t leave that alone.
Because wealth can be built too. How long have I been investing? Long enough to know better than to bring it up at parties.
A prefab apartment block in Veselí nad Moravou. No achievements, no plans, but I screamed my head off. That habit stuck.
New town, new friends. My father, an architect, bought a derelict old waterworks building and turned it into a beautiful house. That’s where I grew up. I still went to school in Veselí, in the sports program.
After the national team’s golden hat trick, I got hooked on hockey. Uherský Ostroh, Uherský Brod, finally Hodonín. The NHL never noticed.
A total mistake. Took me about a month to figure that out. I stayed another four years anyway.
The construction high school in Hodonín taught me nothing except how to hate early mornings. I’m a humanities type, but I followed in my father’s footsteps. I was the only one there who liked essays more than descriptive geometry.
At nineteen, my first run for local office. I also ran for parliament and regional councils. The voters bravely resisted.
We sold the house in Bzenec and I moved to Brno, where I still live. Same year, my first semester at university.
Direct sales, and I was hooked on selling right away. Then selling cars at AAA Auto. Next, a temp job making aluminum windows. Day one, a broom. A week later, a drill. A meteoric career rise in a crew of old, tired, washed-up guys who were hitting the bottle before lunch. That’s where the plan was born: financial independence and freedom.
Knowing nothing, I started as a sales rep for a company building GIS systems. I scraped together gas money somewhere and drove from one town hall to the next. Very unsuccessfully. Then something clicked. I broke away and founded my own brand, Náš Pasport. The brand dates from 2013. The limited company had to wait until 2019.
Where it beganSmall, rented, on the outskirts. But mine. The work kept coming, clients started rolling in on their own, and for the first time the whole thing looked like a company, not a side gig.
Economics degree done, an MBA added later. Because I was young, dumb and ambitious. Plus a library of sales and psychology books, a school cheaper and more useful than the other two combined.
Revenue outgrew the sole-trader setup. A company was the logical next step. And the same year, that Active Reserve application. The two best decisions of my life, both in one year, both against everyone’s advice. I’ve treated advice as a rough guide ever since.
Company + armyI spent the Covid year learning to invest and bought my first stock: Tesla. That’s how it started. What’s grown most since is the number of opinions I keep to myself.
The group’s second company. The vision: in-house surveying, from field to handover. Founding a company takes an afternoon. Building one is another matter. Still working on the second part.
Overnight, the market flipped from asset mapping to the Digital Technical Map (DTM). New laws, new software, new rules. Nerves, stress and months of learning. We pulled it off and today we live off it. Exactly the moment we’d unknowingly spent ten years training for.
Industry resetA stable group of companies, instruments in the field, surveying taking off and more projects growing around it. The main task: a company that works even without me. Turns out the hardest thing to delegate is yourself.
As a kid I was scared of two things: weddings and the army. Then came 2019 and one lonely evening that went a little too well, glass in hand 😃 A few days later, an unknown number called. Parked badly again..? No, it was the recruitment office, asking me to come in and sign up for the army. And sure enough, there in my inbox was a completed Active Reserve application, typos and all. To this day I don’t remember filling it in. I went to the recruitment office “just to hear what it’s about,” and before I came to my senses, I had a start date. That just leaves the wedding. Guess I’ll have to pour myself another one.
Basic training? The worst six weeks of my life. And in hindsight, the best thing that ever happened to me.
I started from absolute zero, yanked out of a comfortable life. I came back from every early exercise sick, once with pneumonia. My body handed in its notice. Request denied. Today it’s routine, and I’m building for others what they once built for me.
For the record: the Active Reserve is ordinary people with civilian jobs who put on a uniform and train for part of the year. Tradespeople, managers, students, business owners. Nobody made any of us go. And that’s exactly why it works: you’ll meet the best people I know.
And a bonus I didn’t see coming: when the CEO vanishes into the woods for weeks with no signal, the company has to learn to run without him. The army is my toughest training in delegation. There’s no pricier leadership course, and this one even covers my meals.
For the first time, I was in charge of more than myself. A rebel by nature, I sometimes push the limits, but that’s just me.
I help rookies who are where I once was: shaking like a leaf and one step from collapse.
We train under the same conditions as the pros. Back then I’d never have believed it.
For me, the army isn’t about weapons. It’s about responsibility, trust and friendship. And being ready to defend my family and the people I care about. Roughly 12 weeks a year, voluntarily, on my vacation days.
Photos
Outdoors
Moving
Break
Active recovery
Field
Quick stop
Cold? So what
March
Onward
Camouflage level 100
Kilometers in my legs
A moment to myself
Everything on my back
Crew
And done
Water obstacle
Dry feet weren’t an option
Logistics
Waiting
Group photoThe goal? No monument. I’ll be happy if my friends one day say:
“Fun to be around. And he answered the phone at 3 a.m.”
An obituary won’t fit much more anyway.
I have more ideas than time. So I built an AI that helps me sort the ones worth doing from the nonsense. A slightly absurd way to run my own life, but it works. When friends ask how I juggle two companies, the army and the mountains, I tell them: don’t ask me, ask Sabina.
Sabina is an AI built to fit the way I think. She knows the companies, the plans and the system I generously call thinking. She runs my calendar, polices my priorities and writes proposals, strategies and this website with me. When I’m stuck, I message Sabina. When I’m bored, same. My friends have given up and just say: “ask Sabina.”
P.S. Yes, you’re talking to her right now.
When my head fires off a hundred ideas a day, I need someone to catch them and tell me which ones are nonsense. An emergency service for a man who forgets things in real time.
When an idea sounds brilliant at six in the morning, I let Sabina shoot it down at ten. Saves me money and my self-respect.
Sabina keeps the office running while I’m away. I come back to three tidy questions instead of two hundred unread messages.
Quotes, contracts, invoices. The AI scans them in a second and flags where someone’s trying to rip me off. So far, it’s always paid off.
My calendar is full. The important stuff isn’t in it. That happens somewhere else, some other time.. out in the wild, by a fire or in the mountains, etc. I have two operating modes.. either perfect prep with scenarios and checklists, or “it’ll work out somehow.” The unsettling part: both work equally well.
I’m not exactly a people person. In some mysterious way, I just spend most of my free time with the people I care about.
Dolomites
Summit, finally
Istria, Croatia
Rocket to MarsInstead of the usual “about me,” a few operating notes that say more about me than any bio.
Sunset, Moravian Karst
Alps
Sunday ritual
Therapy includedGood today beats perfect never.
me
Thanks 😃
