Venture Athlete & International Expansion Expert | Thriving as Generalist in a Specialized Economy

I’m Dominik, founder, athlete, & creator. A proud generalist. This is my story: 

For the last 7 years, I helped bootstrap one startup from 0 to 1M in revenue and built the international business from scratch for one of Europe’s fastest growing EdTech companies (50 -> 240 employees in my three years there).

All while competing at the highest level of the beautiful sport of Lacrosse, including an appearance for the German National Team at the 2022 World Games (the Olympics’ little brother).

While my professional achievements may seem more impressive on paper, representing Germany on an international stage is the feat that I’m most proud of.

I wasn’t very athletic up until my mid-twenties. Very little talent, but a lot of injuries to make up for it.

Until one day, I started working with a personal trainer. He helped me break down the fundamentals I needed to fix.

I worked hard, and I worked consistently. Showed up to every practice, every gym session. Did my recovery & mobility work daily.

4 years later, I made the national team roster.

The potential was in me. But it needed help unlocking.

Throughout my entire career, I’ve also helped humans unlock their potential, just in different ways:

- By teaching people in rural Rwanda and Brazilian homeless shelter how to make glasses for less than $1, and how to build a business around it
- By bringing unemployed nurses from Italy to Germany and teaching them German, opening a completely different career path for them
- By expanding the leading operating system for schools throughout Europe, so that education becomes more digital and thus accessible
- By writing about my experiences online and sharing them with the world

In late 2023, I made the decision to quit my cozy, well-paid, full-time job that fit my profile perfectly.

I'm on a mission to build my own portfolio career - and help others to unlock theirs. Join me on my journey towards building a portfolio of cashflow-positive, impact-driven businesses.

These businesses have one goal: help others unlock their potential. Just like my personal trainer did for me.

I wish that some of the best portfolio company owners turned creators had documented their journey from day 1, and not retrospectively.

So that’s what I’m doing.

I write for generalists like myself, who want to make a living in a specialized economy without specializing themselves. 

You can do more than one thing in your life. 
Let’s design that life together. 

Sign up for my newsletter here: www.dominiknitsch.com/newsletter

Dominik Nitsch

"Life is half over by 23" sounds like an insane take, but I think it has some substance to it. Here's why: 

When you're 5, each year represents 20% of your life. 
When you're 10, 10%. 
Etc.

With each passing year, the relative increase in experience slows down. I'm 32 now, so the current year represents ~3% of my entire life so far. And it's just gonna become less. 

So according to Sam, my life is already 75% over. Unacceptable. 

Here's what you can do about it: 

1/ Implement landmark events 
Some days, even some weeks, I ask myself: "wtf did I do today?" and can't really think of anything. It was just a normal workday with no specific things worth remembering. 

Chain too many of those days, and time passes by incredibly fast. 
But if you do something out of routine (like attending a sports event, traveling to a new place, meeting an interesting person, trying a new skill) – you'll remember that. And the more landmark events you have in a year, the longer the year will feel in retrospect. 

2/ Diversify, diversify, diversify 
If you just do one thing, it's much easier to get stuck in a rut. If you do several things really well, progress accumulates not just in your main job, but also in your side hustles. 

Subjectively, this makes life feel longer. You look back on a year and think: "damn, I did all this in three different disciplines? that's cool." 

3/ Engineer anti-routines into your life
I'm all for having a routine; the best work gets done in a familiar setting. 

But as with everything in life: "everything in moderation, including moderation". If you always stick to your routine, life passes by fast. So build anti-routines into it. These could be: 
→ setting an objective to travel to 2 new countries every year
→ consciously breaking your normal daily routine 1-2 days per week
→ meeting one new person every week 

Novelty makes life longer. 

That being said, Sam has a point. Life's short. Don't waste it doing things that mean nothing to you.

Founder @ Generalyst | building talent infrastructure for early-stage startups | 1,245 generalists read my newsletter to future-proof their career.

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Specialization is the most overrated career advice of the last decade.

“Pick a niche.”
“Go deep.”
“Become the expert in one thing.”

What sounds great in theory, doesn’t work in practice anymore. 

It locks 20-somethings in boxes they shouldn’t lock themselves into yet. Most people in their 30s don’t know what they want. How do you expect high school and university grads to know that? 

The best way to find out what you want is to sample different things. 

This allows you to:
→ build a broad foundation
→ find out what you’re actually world-class at
→ get pattern recognition 

Knowing what you’re uniquely good at via trial and error is the ultimate way of “sharpening the axe”. 

Yeah, you might be falling behind compared to someone embarking on a medical or law career. 

But down the line, you’ll have a life that works exactly for you. 

Maybe it’s one job.
Maybe it’s a portfolio of jobs, turning into a Portfolio Career.

The possibilities are endless, but just picking one thing at 18 and sticking with it for the rest of your life sounds like a pretty bad strategy if you ask me. 

PS: I wrote a few articles about building a Portfolio Career. If that sounds interesting to you, you can download my portfolio career playbook here: https://lnkd.in/dGZaPsrv

Founder's Associates exist on a spectrum – from being purely operational to being a proper sparring partner. The breakdown: 

Want your own Founder's Associate? That's our bread and butter at Generalyst. We work with A+ generalist talents of all the three levels listed here. Faster than your own recruitment process, cheaper than your headhunter. 

PS: Want me to do one for Chief of Staff, too? Comment below.

Simon Veithen and I sat down on Friday to discuss: 

→ what the hell a generalist is, and why it's the best way to prepare for the future
→ how you can acquire meta skills 
→ why job safety is an illusion
→ how to achieve non-linear results 

... and much more. 

Listen to the full 1h episode here: https://lnkd.in/dNdxH_9s

How to identify high-performing organizations: 

"The single best indication of a high-performing culture is the prevalence of former entrepreneurs. It usually portends a high-agency organization equipped with people mentally and emotionally prepared for a startup journey. Figure out what percentage of a company’s employee base previously launched businesses of their own, and try to understand why they’ve decided to forgo their independence to contribute to a new mission." – Mario Gabriele

It takes a lot as a founder to subordinate yourself again (been there, done that). When an organization manages to attract these kind of people, there's usually something special going on. 

If you're a former founder and wanna join such an organization – there's a few in the Generalyst client portfolio :)

The Demotivational industry with pragmatic questions

Chief Marketing of Respect for Foreign Markets

UnTitled...

PTSD recovery from workplace hazard
Pivoted from "Chief executive" to "chief marketing" - Who knows the difference in job descriptions anyway? 😉

Sadly it took a long time to recover my sense of humour and process grief (WIP) while also showing my journey - transparency - shame is a complicated problem.

I try everyday to share knowledge so people don't suffer from gaslighting as I did. Building supportive communities and hopefully repurposing the status quo use cases of "social media" with no accountability of outcomes or duty of care. - Workplace

IMO we don't need more published research. We need to have the courage to tell our stories without fearing intimidation and retaliation - supportive cultures and communities - not for fame but for people to know how to recognise it and not endorse it, act.

Titles and ranking are a problem for dignity and respect. Renaming something does not imply "respect" in practice sadly. 

Shared accountability

" Chief Marketing " of recovering from being bullied (Health break)

Sprinklr

Storyteller ❤️Marketing

B2B2C 


Designed and deployed a bidirectional modern channels CRM escalation framework for Microsoft, Salesforce and Zendesk connectors by incorporating data minimization and lawful basis for processing under GDPR


Culture (People) first: Growth
Learning and Empowered teams : 
Diverse and inclusive non-negotiable personal operating principle. 

GTM leader for CRM connectors. ( Zendesk , Microsoft Dynamics and Salesforce )
Blueprints designer. 

There is no point in research, if we cannot practically test our assumptions, learn and grow.

Integrity is not negotiable.
Transparency is how I build trust.
Consultative and challenger leadership style
Marketing is a competency NOT a department 
Giving people opportunity is what brings me joy and satisfaction


- Product marketing
- Service Design
- Operational Design
- Systems Thinking
- Technology/ Business Translator
- Scrum Master
- Platform Architect
- Digital Business Consultant
- Digital product management
- Contract negotiation
- Global rollout proposals and execution
- Consultancy and solutions for department cross-functional unification
- Revenue generation exploration and new business models
- Benchmarking - Competitive analysis
- Crisis management design
- Influencer marketing and UGC consultancy and design
- Distribution strategy
- Workshop and learning and development facilitation 
- Integrations and GTM track record of scaling products globally 
- User research
- Track record of discovery, designing and implementing revenue generation solutions with AI
- Track record of discovery, designing and implementing digital-first risk management programs at scale across EMEA
- Identified audit and role definition gaps across CRM connector lifecycle, contributing to information security readiness strategies.
- Developed product lifecycle and compliance workflows mapped to ISO Annex A controls (incident management, human resources security)

Technical Programme Manager

JeffreyM Consulting

Digital Marketing Services Lead Consultant - Software Implementation Services

Team Lead Digital Marketing Services

Led the service design and implementation of a high-stakes ESG compliance programme for Uber EMEA, focused on real-time escalation of safety incidents to Uber leadership to be reported to law enforcement or mitigated via company policies for consumer protection. 
Integrated operational controls aligned with Programme requirements ISO/IEC 27001 A.16 (Information Security Incident Management) and A.18.1.4 (Protection of Personally Identifiable Information), ensuring legal reporting obligations were met across multiple jurisdictions. 
Positioned the initiative as a model for global Business Continuity Management (BCM) scalability.

Digital Marketing Services Consultant - Managed Services

Spredfast

International Enablement Onboarding and Education

EMEA Senior Customer Support and Success

EMEA Customer Support and Success

Oracle

- PMK
- Supported portfolio of Marketing content/references/ PR/ Events for Taleo (Recruitment - Talent acquisition) and all Oracle Managed Services value proposition

Goal: Develop marketing assets from existing customers to drive sales

Product Marketing Specialist

Roche

Diagnostics section - Diabetes care
Preventive marketing campaigns
Diagnostics medical tech and supportive services for critical patience (children and elderly)

Marketing and Product Service Assistant

Intell Psy Group

Front desk officer

Johnson & Johnson

Operations specialist

Customer Technical Support Agent

"Style is the answer to everything
Fresh way to approach a dull or dangerous thing
To do a dull thing with style is preferable to doing a dangerous thing without style
To do a dangerous thing with style is what I call art" - Charles Bukowski – Style

Holistic cross-disciplinary experience design : digital & analogue 

Accessibility advocate through engagement


All my posts, communication are:

A experimental style of conversational and engagement portfolio

Hypo: 
- support understanding of the candidate outside of the possibly gamified standard candidate user journey (signalling) 
- limited time to assess a candidate/partnership

An invitation for candidates to feel comfortable with who they are, their manner of speaking, their preferences. 

A celebration of self expression we should feel more comfortable with. 

A way to show how a candidate thinks. 

A style to have the courage to be wrong publicly.

A style showing how Linkedin engagement and conversation can be a new way to learn from a wide variety of communities: dialogue, questions, diverse creative references, essays of posts, refinement of market research with industry communities. 

Not limited to Conways Law to communicate and learn or express to colleagues/ other communities. 

Micro-learning:  test how we learn every day from people around us; should not be limited to learn only from companies we were fortunate or unfortunate  to work for. 

Emergence can happen in many contexts. We can learn from some of our favourite authors through dialogue.


 My profile :

- A reflection of my personal professional interests

- exploration of how people react or behave on social networks (especially a professional one)

- complementing practical know-how for domain expertise developed since 2015 for modern social channels and background studies on Foreign Commercial Economic affairs

Interests: 

Design Driven Development, MedTech, EdTech, Tech sector, business models, scalability, ecosystems, business development through crowdsourcing, changing the recruitment and operational design of enterprises.

Life-long learner

Use of language

Arts and sciences need each other. 

Consulted on social media strategies, internal operational design for multinationals  since 2015 in a wide variety of verticals and geographies. 

- sales growth-oriented
- sustainability
- learning and playing
- social anthropology
- behavioural economics
- policies at scale and pilots
- black markets , distributed systems
- experimental educational styles
- cross-domain integration, 
- platforms 
- philosophy
- market research




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🐈‍⬛ Ana Mariș

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