ENGINEER'S CARD · PERSONNEL FILE · CURRENT REV
Before you hand someone your raw material, you have the right to inspect his hands.
This page is not a CV. It is an engineer's card: the road, the scars and the rules — because a machine meant to fly for years is built with a whole life, not just a diploma.
kopec@workshop:~$ whoami --full█
Professionally, I was born underground: as an electrician in the Warsaw Metro, where I first saw systems in which a fault is not a line in a report but a danger to people. Then IT at PKO BP — the bank taught me that “works on my machine” does not exist: it works for everyone, or it does not work at all. And “does not work at all” means a bank closing its doors on its clients — so that was never an option. From there into enterprise architecture: 99.999%-class systems on IBM, EMC, NetApp, VMware and Cisco infrastructure, with a state security clearance from the Internal Security Agency (ABW) — a world where five nines is not marketing but five minutes of downtime a year.
And then I stopped building other people's machines and started building my own: integration of high-availability banking and corporate systems; a hard-coded CMS in the days when hardly anyone knew what a CMS was; legal-tech, energy, technology and business-development conferences, a software house. Six ventures, different industries, different outcomes — including one collapse, covered below, because it earned its own chapter. Recent years: a CEO seat in Dubai, fundraising, tokenisation — and the decision to return to what I do best: the workshop.
Long before we started hiring, my partner and I worked for years as just the two of us \u2014 and even like that we won tenders against the market's giants. Each of us was everything at once back then: from the cleaner, through the engineer, the architect and the pre-sales engineer, to the salesman and the CEO \u2014 every rung of administration, sales and management in two pairs of hands. That left me something you cannot learn from a single chair: I understand every level of a company because I have done each one myself. I can sit with a deeply technical engineer and with a board alike \u2014 I speak both languages and serve as the translator between them.
In those years I audited Poland's largest server rooms for a business-recovery firm \u2014 including one, at a retail chain, secured better than many a bank. I was also called in by the vendors themselves: when a rollout stalled at the point where the client said \u201ctake your gear and get out,\u201d they pointed to us to step in, win the client back and see the thing through. We rescued the giants' deployments because we could do what that world was short of: talk to the human being, not just to the hardware.
I got away with things unthinkable in that world at the time: I would ride up to meet the boards of large companies on a motorcycle, in leathers, a helmet in hand instead of a tie \u2014 and I had the sense it was actually appreciated. And legends went round about how fast we reached a breakdown. Because what counted was what I could do, not what I was wearing.
Thirty years on, I know one thing: the best decisions in my projects never came out of a single specialisation. They came out of crossings — the metro with the bank, the corporation with my own company, Warsaw with Dubai and London, and out of all my experience. That is why I look at your raw material through three pairs of eyes at once: technology, business, people.
In 2018 I went through official bankruptcy in the United Kingdom.
One of the companies I had built employed seven people, reached for the largest projects and won tenders against leading players on the market. It did not fall to the market, the product or the competition — it fell because I placed trust where structure should have stood guard. Construction was missing exactly where I had laid confidence. And when the blow came, I answered with emotion instead of engineering — and that was my fault, not fate's.
And I will say more than such stories usually say, because this is meant to be the honest truth: what fell deepest was not the company \u2014 it was me, and my whole personal life with me. The company simply ceased to exist. I came back from that bottom with a lesson that holds me to this day: it is not my guard that protects me, but my inner strength. That is why I can lower it today \u2014 and speak of this plainly.
I could hide this story. I keep it in plain sight for two reasons. First: it is the most expensive architecture lesson I have ever received — all the “defences against copying”, “division of responsibility”, “vesting always in writing” from my price list are not textbook best practices, but a scar turned into a checklist. Second: many of you have been there, or are there now. I want you to know that the man across the table knows the taste of the pavement — and that is why he so stubbornly checks the strength of every rope.
My workshop runs on a concept I carried over from childhood: the scraped knee.
As a child I fell and tore my knee open. Tears were already welling up — and then, right beside me on the ground, I saw a twenty-złoty note lying there. The crying stopped on its own; all my attention locked onto that scrap of paper. That was probably the turning point in how my perception of the world was built: if you have fallen and scraped your knee — look around, because there is surely a treasure here to find.
The same instinct opens stage 01 of the Method: the treasure usually sits in the piece its owner already calls waste.
A child who scrapes a knee receives two things at once: pain, and knowledge of where grip ends. Most adults remember the pain and learn not to run. Engineers remember the grip — and learn to run better. I learned both — and a third thing: to look around for the opportunity. Since that day a fall has been an opportunity to me, not a problem — and I always look for it. Because what matters is not that you fell. What matters is why you fell, and what you get up with.
The second creed I carried away from that knee: every fall makes me stronger. A phoenix, rising, shakes the ash off and returns the same. I do not shake the ash off — because in my workshop not one speck of it is waste; every speck is building material. Under pressure those specks sinter into carbonado: not an ordinary diamond, which has a cleavage plane and splits under one well-aimed blow, but a polycrystalline fusion of thousands of particles — with no such plane, impossible to cleave. At most it can be ground down — and a grinding is not a wound, it is a finish. That is why problems do not block me and have no way to break me: each one only adds another speck to the fusion. I get up harder than I fell.
Every scar in this biography has been through that treatment: the bankruptcy became a checklist, years of enforcing my rights against state institutions became the raw material for DwaPrawa, and a sudden hearing loss — which for a few months took 90% of my hearing and gave back a hearing different from the one it took — became the ignition of SoundDNA.
I do not collect scars and I wish them on no one. But since they are here — let them work. Nothing goes to waste in this workshop, nothing lies fallow, pain included.
There is a difference between a champion from the ring and a master from the monastery. The champion shines: the belt, the celebration, the cameras. The master from the monastery has no one to shine for — what he has is forty years of daily form, and students who survived. Both are real. I chose the monastery.
There were times when I shone: the stage, the headset mic, casting a “spell”. For a long time now, though, you will not find me on conference stages, and you will not see a “TOP 10 visionaries” list with my photo. You will find me in the workshop — and in the machines that fly. Karbonado, the black diamond, is the patron of that choice: it does not sparkle, and it does not crack. If you are looking for someone to dazzle your board with a presentation — I can, but I see meaning in building, so I would rather refer you to colleagues who craft brilliant slides. If you are looking for someone who will build and keep watch — you are home.
My competences live on three floors, and honesty requires showing all of them.
The ground floor is the craft of understanding people: years of work on how a person makes decisions, what they fear, what carries them — a competence I also earned on paths outside the corporate canon, and which I describe in my own words, because on this floor what counts is effectiveness at the table, not the name on a certificate. One floor up: the enterprise gold — architectures, certifications and clearances from the world of five nines, listed where they matter. And for those who like the full DNA — the third floor is a separate card with the complete, uncurated list. I hide nothing; I curate, because that is how a good workshop works — the tools on top are the ones you reach for daily.
Finally, a thing I discovered late, and which sounds as if someone had planned it. The surname Kopeć comes from the people who burned charcoal — from the smoking charcoal kilns where wood was turned into fuel. My ancestors stood by the fire and turned raw material into energy.
I went one step further: I turn carbon into diamonds. Karbonado — black, polycrystalline, with no cleavage plane. The kind that does not sparkle. And does not crack.
You have inspected the hands. Now show your raw material.
The first conversation costs nothing and promises one thing: I will tell you honestly whether I will build a machine that flies.