FBX.IO

Experiments in Progress ✨

• Project Neurecall, a neurosymbolic AI system (stealth)

iOS apps to help with AI-nxiety & sleep

• 🌧️ Rainlayer: The world's most advanced rain app
• 🎏 Windy Pro: Natural white noise in 3D with hand-painted 3D scenes
• 🌦️ Rainy: A collection of 3D rain ambiences
• 🍃 Away: An explorable forest with daytime transitions
• 🏖️ Sunny: A collection of 3D beach ambiences
• 🚣 Flowing 2: A collection of 3D river & waterfall ambiences + meditations
• ⚡️ Thunderspace: Most advanced thunderstorm simulator app (tmp N/A)
• 🌪️ Thunderspace Film: A look behind the scenes in Hollywood
• 💨 Sleep Better Fan: A simple white noise generator with real fan samples in 3D

My legacy portfolio still serves over 100,000 monthly users worldwide, helping them sleep better, sharpen their focus, and be less stressed. All audio is wide-spectrum binaural 3D and mastered to perfection. No synthetic AI samples. Genuinely recorded in some of the most remote places on Earth. I use them myself on a daily basis. These are some of the highest quality, most innovative nature audio apps on the market by a wide margin. They are on minimal life support while my main focus right now is frontier AI research and AI engineering for clients.

My Story

The Origin: I started programming C and C++ at age 7 on a Schneider PC with a monochrome monitor. I was obsessed with how things worked and enjoyed repairing all sorts of electronics. Once I got an electric shock that threw me to the back of the room. By high school, I was kicked out of computer science class for teaching students how to hand-code HTML, rebelling against my teacher's WYSIWYG curriculum.

💡 It's never too late to start developing new skills. Skills compound over time, and a diverse set of skills can help us come up with more creative solutions to problems. If you think painting is cool, go paint. If you think photography is cool, go do that. And if you feel stuck, try to follow your heart.

I spent much time inventing physical solutions to problems I saw around me. Some noteworthy ones: A gravity-stabilized spoon for Parkinson patients, a laser microphone to hear distant sounds, an electric curtain made from printer parts, an 8-wheeled robot designed to carry my school bag, an electric motor added to my bicycle to make my 30 minute uphill commute easier, and a barcode reading pen to make checkout easier.

💡 I think most of us do this naturally. We observe or experience some kind of problem and try to come up with a solution. Tackling small problems, even when there is no large addressable market for them, teaches valuable practical skills. It's perfectly fine solving a problem that only one person in the world has. At the end of the day, you made a difference and learned something useful. Most of my inventions and creations were miserable failures, economically speaking, but it's really hard to quantify the valuable problem solving skills I had built up through them.

I got obsessed with transmission holography and lasers after I was reading a science magazine while waiting for a scheduled phone call from my grandma. LASER stands for light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation.

The Hustle: We were poor, and I got bullied for wearing old shoes. I had enough and started a low-six-figure online business importing lasers and MiniDisc players from Japan. Eventually I moved into my own apartment right next to school to cut down on my commute and have more time for business & engineering.

💡 Yeah this is boring right... I mean, we all know those stories of people with difficult childhoods and how that gave them certain advantages later in life. Adversity can definitely fuel resourcefulness and determination, but of course there are some downsides to it as well. It's not something to glorify.

A few years later I developed my own products and had a CNC milling machine at home. I also got into 3D printing long before it became a thing, when stereolithography was still costing >$100k.

Meanwhile I was also coding various online platforms with PHP + MySQL. I obviously had no girlfriend and tried to solve that problem by creating a dating site, which got hacked after it reached 1k users and shortly after my first date. I also created a photo contest site that reached 1M monthly page views but went off the rails and got shut down, and much more.

💡 Pretty much all my web projects ended up being failures. But the experience and lessons learned came in handy many years later when I began doing more serious software engineering. The things you do that fail will most likely still benefit you in the future in ways you might not be able to see today.

I've spent years studying platform dynamics and saw early how eBay and now the App Store were drifting toward collapse triggered by aggressive optimization that forces participants to burn excessive energy just to stay competitive.

💡 Trying to understand the systems around us, and the systems we operate in, is helpful. I always try to find out what the incentive structures and dynamics look like, which can help navigate. Generally platforms are designed to extract energy from its participants, and it's good to be aware of that. They tend to be great in the beginning, and draining in the end.

Building R/C airplanes and ships with rudimentary first-person view transmission was one of my hobbies at that time. At one point I tried to start an AI-enabled indoor R/C-toy theme park where AI would intervene to avoid collisions.

💡 There was a time where I thought I shouldn't really have any hobbies or projects that have nothing to do with making money. But later I realized that passion projects teach transferable skills which become useful for larger, professional ventures.

UI R&D: Fast-forward many years later, I quit my Java Enterprise job and went all-in on the first iPhone, knowing mobile would be the next big computing platform. I started by training engineering teams on mobile app development and got down to the bare metal of iOS and the hardware. Inspired by Tapbots, my aim was to create the most amazing, most robo-futuristic user experiences on the App Store. I took a break to study UI design, UX design, color theory and eventually 3D graphics in depth full-time for about a year, later followed by audio engineering & recording. I eventually engineered my own GPU-accelerated UI systems and audio engines from scratch to bypass standard limitations, leading to various innovations that Apple picked up on.

💡 I'm more of a deep generalist than a specialist. A cross-domain renaissance kind of person. For a long time, that felt like a handicap because jobs often force you to label yourself as "being this" or "being that". But I've realized in the age of AI that being a generalist with deep expertise in various fields is an advantage. You don't need to be the absolute best in one field to achieve extraordinary results. If you master 80% of three different domains and combine them to create a Venn diagram sweet spot, you have a rare edge that even three specialists with 100% mastery working together might not be able to match. The important part is to know what you don't know and to learn what you need to learn.

Up until 2014 I spent the majority of my time on UI R&D, building apps as UI innovation playgrounds. This led to my first app Holographium being featured in an Apple TV commercial, and later to weather app Haze, which featured a UI so groundbreaking that it got TechCrunch coverage and briefly outranked the game Angry Birds.

After Haze I partnered with Emmy-winner Gordon Hempton, and created some of the world's highest-quality nature audio apps. They were so innovative that Apple assigned me a direct contact to discuss roadmaps and promotions, leading to over 5 million downloads with not a single dollar in ad spend.

💡 Collaboration can amplify your impact if you choose wisely. My philosophy has always been that the things I create are just as good as their weakest component.

The Reset: My success story with Apple ended when they introduced App Store Search Ads. This was my platform decay signal to exit the race. After I tried an ambitious audio hardware startup that had a successful pilot but ultimately failed, I took some time off to deepen my studies of AI/ML, economics, business administration, fundraising and other relevant topics.

💡 Adaptability is key when good things come to an end. It was hard seeing my apps fall from the top of the charts, but it also pushed me to explore new opportunities like AI/ML. And yes, it helps to have a solid MBA foundation. If there was one thing I wish I had learned right after birth, then all that MBA stuff. Seriously.

I've always been engaged in trend research to uncover what's happening in technology and called many trends early, including the introduction of accelerators in datacenters and the emergence of LLMs. At some point I was advising VCs which led to significant investments, and as it later turned out, to great success.

💡 Early observation and analysis can create strategic advantages. It takes time to stay on top of what's going on and develop a sense for where things are going, but it's worth it.

The Present: When COVID hit, I moved from Germany to a small island in the Atlantic Ocean. Around that time I worked on Spot, a remote work platform in the metaverse. Nowadays I spend most of my time on frontier AI research and AI engineering for clients, where I leverage my diverse background to come up with innovative solutions to hard problems.

💡 Your environment shapes you. Choose wisely.