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

The cool thing about a portfolio career: you can literally just do things. Like, star in a Prime Video series. 

The guys from Maxton Hall needed some people who actually play Lacrosse to play in the series. Shooting was in Berlin. So I took 2 days off and became the oldest high schooler you'll ever see. (and had to keep my helmet on at all times 😂)

Would I do it again? Probably not.
Was it fun? Absolutely. 

PS – wanna build your own portfolio career where you do more than just one thing? Download the Portfolio Career Playbook here: https://lnkd.in/dGZaPsrv

Founder @ Generalyst | building talent infrastructure for early-stage startups | 1,163 generalists read my newsletter to future-proof their career

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When I graduated from university, I was the perfect business-school cliché. 

Top 11% at TUM.
760 GMAT.
Ran a student org with 120 people.
Startup experience at a massively scaling company (Flix). 

What do you do as high-potential graduate? It felt like I had two options: 
1. Apply to McKinsey, BCG, or Bain. 
2. Apply to Siemens, Allianz, or BMW. 

That's what everyone did. It was the safe, high-status, well-paid career path. And at 22, I just didn't know any better. 

But here's the uncomfortable truth: 
Following the beaten path is intellectually lazy.

You don’t have to think about what you actually want.
You just copy-paste the life everyone around you is living.
Go to business school. Get a master’s. Work in consulting. Buy real estate.

But in the end, by doing so, you postpone the only decision that actually matters:
→ What do I want to spend my life building?

To answer this, you don't need more information. You need action. 

The beaten path is paved with other people’s dreams.
Build your own instead.

(Photo: me, fall 2016, on my way to a consulting interview)

Gonna be a busy week at Generalyst: 

- 3 startups pitching to a pool of ~80 hand-picked candidates (feels like quality on both sides is going up)
- launching a new product (in beta) on Wednesday 
- 10 in-person meetings with startups, candidates, partners 
- fully onboarding a new team member 

Guess the late evening sessions (photo below) paid off. 

LFG. 🔥

PS – 2 out of 3 of the positions being pitched currently aren't published anywhere else (in case you needed another reason to apply). 

PPS – just kidding, this was at 16:45, Berlin is just dark af in the winter

In 2025, Generalyst was just for full-time hires. In 2026, we’re adding internships. ⬇️

Starting today, you can hire interns via Generalyst. 
Why? 

Throughout my career, I’ve always had interns. Having them on board was awesome; some of them developed into close friends. 

Finding them was the difficult part. I remember vividly scouring university Facebook groups and posting my internship ad everywhere, with little resonance. If you don’t have a strong brand or infinite time, this intern sourcing can get kind of … tedious. 

I would’ve needed this back then. And I’m not the only one: when several companies started reaching out about hiring generalist interns, we HAD to do something. 

At the same time, throughout my studies, I would’ve needed to hear that it’s actually possible to build a career as a generalist. Even when I graduated, I believed that the only valid way to build a career was to go into consulting or join one of the Munich corporate behemoths. 

Little did I know that startups are a possibility, and that jobs where you can do a little bit of everything exist. 

Today, I believe the future belongs to generalists. This message needs to reach not just people actively looking for a full-time job, but also students. And by opening up the hard-to-navigate world of early-stage startups to them, I hope to spread the gospel of generalism. 

Here’s how it works: 

1. Aspiring interns apply to the Generalyst Internship Program 
2. We screen all applications and pick the very best (using our expertise from ~2.5k screened CVs)
3. Those create a profile in the Generalyst Internship Database 
4. As a founder, you can access this database (if you agree to our terms) – it includes everything you need to know and then some
5. You can request an interview with the candidate directly and set it up within 1-2 days 

From a company perspective: 
→ skip the entire job posting draft
→ skip the screening of 100s of applications (we do this for you)
→ skip the guessing game of who’s available now vs. later 

From an intern perspective: 
→ apply once, get several interviews
→ see companies you would’ve never found otherwise
→ access help from professional generalists 

Sounds too good to be true? Maybe, we’re just launching this thing. Probably will have a few kinks that still need to be worked out. 

But as with the Generalyst Flagship Program (see what we did there?), we’re trying to create an offer that’d be stupid not to take. 

For aspiring interns: apply via the link in the comments below. 
For founders looking to hire: email me (dominik at generalyst dot de) and I’ll send you the sales deck. 20% discount on your first internship hire if you comment on this post. 

LFG.

Simple trick that’ll 10X your networking ability: the “to-see list”. 

I keep an Apple Note with different cities in the world. Whenever I meet someone online that I want to meet, I simply add them to the list. 

And when I eventually come to the city, I simply reach out to all people on the list. Usually leads to 3-4 in-person meetings that I otherwise wouldn’t have had. 

Feel free to add me to yours for Berlin. (Or shoot me a DM if you wanna be on mine :)).

In my bubble, it’s become so sexy to be an entrepreneur that it’s almost cringe not to be one.

That’s not healthy – it pushes people into entrepreneurship who really shouldn’t be in entrepreneurship for their own sake.

If you value security, sleeping through the night and not waking up drenched in sweat, being able to buy nice things and watching movies on an airplane (like everyone around me as I’m typing these lines), then being an employee is absolutely, perfectly fine!

At the end of the day, most entrepreneurs do what they do simply because they can’t be bothered to do anything else (such as being stuck working for someone else).

I’ve tried the employee thing, it’s nice to close the laptop at the end of the day and say “not my f**king problem”, to receive a salary no matter how good or bad your performance was.

I realized: I just f**king hate following instructions that I don't agree with. I don't want to sit in meetings where I shouldn't be. I will not make decisions that are beneficial to investors and bad for everybody else involved. 

This doesn’t make an entrepreneur better or worse than someone who prefers the full-time job.
It’s just .. different.

This is the story of how I accidentally ended up working for one of Germany’s fastest growing startups (and how you can do it, too): 

During my studies, I was so busy with running a student org, playing Lacrosse, bartending, and sometimes studying, that I somehow didn’t see the need to do an internship throughout my first four semesters. Going into my fifth semester of Bachelor’s, I still didn’t have one. 

And it started to become problematic: a lot of applications were rejected because by that time, I should’ve already done one. 

One guy from my enactus team mentioned that the startup he’s working for always hires interns. They did like, long-distance buses. Flix or something 

I thought, man, I hate long distance buses. But out of desparation gave it a shot anyway – and got the invitation to interview. 

For the interview (it was a business development internship), I thought about what else Flix could do. At the time, I was going to a lot of festivals, and thought: man, if you don’t have a car, going to festivals sucks. Why not implement bus lines? 

Cool. Did that. Went to the interview. 

Then, the interviewer walked in. 

Wrist full of FESTIVAL BANDS. 

Oh f**k yeah, I had struck gold. She loved the idea, I got the internship, didn’t do anything for a few weeks besides moving boxes around on PPT slides, and eventually got reassigned to a new division. 

Together with Dominik Eggert, I started building out FlixCharter - a bus rental company inside Flix. Kind of in a Founder’s Associate function, learning from an experienced founder. 

That, in turn, gave me the confidence to start my own company after my studies. But had it not been for this internship, I might well have been a management consultant today. 

A seemingly random internship changed the entire trajectory of my career. 
I got lucky to find the right startup at the right time. 

So now, I want to re-engineer that luck for others like me, early in their career, not sure what they want to do. 

That’s why last week, we’ve launched the Generalyst Internship Program. Application-only, and free. 

We’re reversing the internship search process: instead of you applying to internships, hiring managers reach out to you. 

Apply today: https://lnkd.in/dVe7TGR3

PS – looking to hire a generalist intern? Email me at dominik at generalyst dot de. 
PPS – thank you, Tamara Christoph, for believing in me back then and making that offer! 🤝

Advice for anyone who wants to become a Founder’s Associate / Venture Builder: 

The best thing you can do is to show that you can build something yourself. 

A side hustle. 
A website. 
A social account. 

Entrepreneurs appreciate other entrepreneurs who don’t just talk the talk, but walk the walk. 

Building something yourself is the best entrepreneurial education, no matter what business schools are trying to sell you. 

PS: Have built something, however tiny it may be, yourself? Consider applying to Generalyst. Link is in my bio.

Last October, I spent a few hours playing Lacrosse against pro players from Canada. Here's what it taught me about B2B sales: 

(like, actually)

Chatting with Owen Grant (first-team all-star in college, now field and box pro), he told me: “when I got to the pros, practice was completely different – the focus was much higher on nailing the fundamentals perfectly, instead of running complex plays or doing crazy stuff individually.”

Running a business feels very similar: it comes down to making something people want, and then telling them about it. 

This doesn’t mean that it’s easy (it’s not); just simple.

Stop using complex 17-step AI-based outreach sequences (that you have to comment, idk, “AI overlords” or something to receive in your DMs). 

Focus on nailing the fundamentals.

Carmine Paolino

Chat with Work

Founder and CEO

Freshflow

We’re reimagining the food supply chain starting with grocery retailers. Freshflow is a new way to manage fresh products in supermarkets. We do accurate order forecasting and recommendations that massively reduce food waste while still keeping shelves full. Doing that, we generate millions in savings for these businesses.

Today, more than 40% of all food produced globally is wasted. Besides the economic losses of $1.2 trillion/year that it causes, food waste is also the world’s third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, right behind China and the US. There’s waste before the food even leaves a farm; it is then shipped, processed and stored, only to remain unsold in a grocery store. A majority of this waste is entirely avoidable, were it not for the antiquated and inefficient food supply chain.

Traditionally, store managers would have to think about weather conditions, external events, holidays, typical demand patterns, etc. when making an order decision. We do that with Machine Learning.
We’re working with some of the largest retailers in Europe and recently closed a round of funding from a top investor.

Are you ready to shape our success story?

Co-Founder and CTO

Entrepreneur First

Selected as part of a group of 50 to found and build a high-growth technology startup. The programme is backed by Reid Hoffman (founder of LinkedIn), the founders of DeepMind and PayPal, and some of the top investors (Founders Fund, Greylock Partners, Lakestar, etc.) in the world.

Founder in Residence

The Alan Turing Institute

Technical Mentor, Data Science for Social Good

OLX Group

End-to-end Data Science workflow (problem specification, requirements gathering, data gathering and cleaning using Redshift/Presto SQL and Pandas, modeling, coding of the services and pipelines in Python + asyncio and SQS/Kinesis/HTTP, productionization with Kubernetes and AWS, monitoring with Prometheus and Grafana, documentation with Confluence and Sphinx) of the following models:
* Image quality assessment model (MXNet)
* Image sharpness assessment model (OpenCV)
* Interpretable listing quality model (XGBoost + SHAP)

Spoke at GHOSTDay: Applied Machine Learning Conference 2019 about Scaling Machine Learning System up to billions of predictions per day.

Interviewed candidates for data scientist positions.

Wrote patches to MXNet Model Server to export Prometheus metrics.

Senior Data Scientist

Prosus Classifieds' (OLX, Avito, letgo) moonshot team; designing and implementing the future of classifieds.

* Taught an AI course
* Conducted qualitative user research and analysis using service design principles
* Conducted quantitative research
* Conducted market research
* Supervised a Master student's thesis on Out of Distribution detection

Senior Data Scientist @ OLX^2

End-to-end Data Science workflow (problem specification, requirements gathering, data gathering and cleaning using Redshift/Presto SQL and Pandas, modeling, coding of the services and pipelines in Python + asyncio and SQS/Kinesis/HTTP, productionization with Kubernetes and AWS, monitoring with Prometheus and Grafana, documentation with Confluence and Sphinx) of the following models:
* Prediction of listings' popularity (Scikit-learn)
* Similar items recommendations with a hybrid collaborative filtering and content-based recommendation algorithm (LightFM + FAISS)
    * User-item recommendations with a hybrid collaborative filtering and content-based recommendation algorithm (LightFM)
* Multi-task image classification (TensorFlow)
* Image classifier with thousands of imbalanced classes (TensorFlow)
* Image quality assessment model (MXNet)
* Image sharpness assessment model (OpenCV)
* Interpretable listing quality model (XGBoost + SHAP)

Keynoted at IFIP WCC 2018 with a talk on Deep Fine-Grained Image Classification.
Spoke at PyData 2018 on Semi-supervised Learning with GANs

Supervised a student on her Master thesis on a novel Saliency detection algorithm.

Lead teams that won several hackathons with the following projects:
* Suggest improvements to listings using interpretable machine learning (Scikit-learn + ELI5)
* Semantic search using feature embeddings from a hybrid recommender system (LightFM + FAISS)
* Real-time chat moderation (MXNet, transformer models)
* Create a listing by snapping a picture (TensorFlow)

Created a cookiecutter data science project structure with pre-setup Makefile, CLI, Sphinx documentation, automatic coding style using yapf, autoflake and isort, etc.

Interviewed dozens of candidates for data scientist positions.

Wrote patches to the following open source projects:
* MXNet Model Server
* sqs-requeue
* aiohttp-prometheus
* async-kinesis-client
* kinesis-python
* google's cld3

Data Scientist

Capgemini

Project Leader, Lead Architect and Big Data Engineer: Sport Innovator, VU, HvA, KNZB (Royal Dutch Swimming Federation) and KNRB (Royal Dutch Rowing Federation) were looking for ways to improve performance of top-level athletes through clever use of data. I led the team technically, architected and engineered the Big Data solution based on Hadoop, Spark, HBase, NiFi, Knox and Ranger, planned and assigned tasks in a Scrum team, communicating with the Product Owner, Scrum Master, Project Manager, Infrastructure team, and Partners, developed the first demo version of the front-end in AngularJS and D3.js, deployed the solution on Amazon AWS.

Big Data Developer, Train the Trainer program successfully completed, giving me the possibility to train other developers in Big Data technologies.

Senior Data Scientist and Big Data Engineer

Owlin

Developed a topic clustering algorithm, developed data visualizations, developed a bayesian spam-filter, refactored entire software projects, designed the company's current OpenStack cluster, developed software developers productivity tools for python and go developers (available at http://github.com/owlin), deployed software with Ansible, developed the company's authorization, authentication and OAuth provider, advocated the use of testing, continuous integration, continuous deployment, and containers, and selected the company's current bug tracker based on the company's needs; all in a Scrum team with bi-weekly sprints.

Data Scientist / Software Engineer

Gentoo Linux

Administered GNU/Linux machines, configured servers, deployed web applications.

System Administrator - Italian Community

Studio di Ingegneria Solare

Developed a solar panel installation recommender system from idea development to requirements gathering to user interface to implementation of a prototype.

Web Developer (Intern)

My journey in technology began at age 5, writing scripts to launch games – a simple start that sparked a lifelong passion for building solutions through code.

This drive to create led me to become deeply involved in open source, serving as Vice President and Technical Officer of the Italian Gentoo Linux community during my teens. It carried me through Computer Science at the University of Bologna, where my research on distributed systems and large-scale social network analysis was published by Springer, and then to studying AI at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, where I worked with an alumnus of Geoffrey Hinton on combining deep learning with my love for music.

Over the past decade, I've helped scale AI solutions at companies like OLX and Capgemini, led research teams at the Alan Turing Institute, and contributed to open source projects including MXNet Model Server and Theano. My work has ranged from building recommendation systems serving millions of users to developing novel approaches for data processing and analysis.

Currently, I'm founding two AI companies:
• Chat with Work - Making workplace knowledge instantly accessible through AI
• Vettr - Reimagining how VCs evaluate startups

Previously, I co-founded Freshflow, an AI company helping supermarkets reduce food waste through intelligent forecasting and inventory management.

When I'm not building AI solutions, you'll find me producing electronic music, DJing house and disco in Berlin's clubs, or exploring the world through photography.

Technical expertise: Deep Learning, Machine Learning, Distributed Systems, Python, Full-stack Development, AI System Design

Languages: Python, C++, Ruby, JavaScript
Frameworks: PyTorch, TensorFlow, Ruby on Rails

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Dominik Nitsch

Carmine Paolino

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