About
I rented carpets to restaurants for €700 a month.
Fifteen years later I was ranked first of more than 250 account executives globally at Deel and I hold a seven-figure portfolio that pays me a five-figure monthly income.
All of it built on a salary. That is the only interesting thing about it.
Deel EMEA sales kickoff. GOAT Award, Mid-Market AE, ranked first of 250+ globally.
Before the story, the disqualifiers
No inheritance
No company sold, no exit
No crypto windfall
€8,000 of share options across the entire career
A payslip and about five decisions. If any of the four above had been true, none of this would be worth writing down, because you could not repeat it.
How it actually went
The start
€700 a month, renting carpets to restaurants
I started knocking on doors in a town of two thousand people in South Estonia. Then five years renting carpets to restaurants, on about €700 a month. It is not a humble-brag origin story. It was simply the job and for a long time I assumed that was roughly the shape of a career.
Fiizy
One market, built to about €3M in recurring revenue
I moved into affiliate and partnerships and built one market to roughly three million in annual recurring revenue. Five compensation conversations across those years took me from about two thousand a month to twelve and a half. Nobody outside the company had heard of us and it did not matter. It was the seat where one person could visibly move a number.
Deel
First of more than 250 account executives globally
Mid-market AE. Quota at 120, then 171, then 178, then 201 percent. Best year was €243,000 against a €50,000 base. One contract worth €600,000 closed inside six months. I won the GOAT Award at EMEA sales kickoff, which is the trophy in the photo.
The part nobody tells you
The logo was worth less than the work behind it
When I left Deel, almost nobody cared. No inbound, no recruiters treating the name like a password. The unknown company made me the money. The famous one made the LinkedIn headline. That single observation changed how I think about which job to take.
The unglamorous part
About sixty percent of the portfolio is money I moved, not money that grew.
That is the sentence that makes the whole thing repeatable and it is the one nobody in personal finance wants to lead with, because there is nothing to sell at the end of it.
Most of what I have is simply what I put in. Compounding has not had time to do the heavy lifting yet. Which means the thing that decided my first decade was not fund selection or timing. It was how much I could put in and that came from what I earned and how I was paid, not from being better at budgeting.
I also got a chunk of this wrong. I spent about a year saving roughly eighty percent of my income and burned out in a way that took considerably longer to recover from than the money took to earn. The heroic version is not the effective one.
The exact numbers are in the book, not on this page
I keep the portfolio value and the monthly income off the public site on purpose. Lead with a net worth and you attract the audience that wants the number, not the method.
In the book I open all of it, line by line:
- The exact portfolio value and what is in it
- Which assets, in what proportion and why
- Real salary numbers at every stage
- Actual savings rates, year by year
- The payslip screenshots, unedited
- The five decisions, in the order I made them
You do not have to take my word
The career
Public and dated on LinkedIn. Every role, every date.
The companies
Both are on the Estonian public business register.
The payslips
Screenshotted in the book, unedited, including the employer cost.
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