Patrick Sbrzesny

Hi future Hypertext Bootcamp Alumni and proud owner of your own 6 figure business.

I am Patrick Sbrzesny, one of the founders of Schwarz auf Weiss AG and responsible for the Hypertext and Application Development department and general management. If you consider to apply for a place at this school in these fields you might be interested in knowing a little bit more about the background of your future lead teacher.

I am from Stuttgart Germany, enjoy skiing since I am two years old and started to press buttons as soon as I figured out that I had thumbs that I can move (and can magically make light and darkness). My parents called me "Knöpflesdrücker", which is swabian dialect for "little button presser".

So of course they wanted me to become an engineer, which I kind of did later. But my passion since girls became more interesting than Lego, besides the girls, were computers. When most of my friends got a C64 with color graphics, sound and lots of games to copy, I luckily got a black and white 64x48 pixel ZX81 with no games at all from my grandfather. Because there were no games for my computer to copy, I had to teach myself programming, to make my own games.

At that time I also figured for the first time, that the education system provided by the state of Germany in 1986 was crap, and it didn't get better since. I wanted to write a program that paints a circle on the screen. Yes, of course the ZX81 at that time had no function to paint a circle. You could only place dots on the screen. So you had to figure out yourself, how you write a programm that places a lot of dots on the 64x48 pixel black and white screen in a way that you'll end up with a beautiful, kind of circular, circle. I was quite sure that I should find a solution within mathematics, since we talked about circles mostly in mathematics in school. But I couldn't, so I asked a mathematics teacher from my school, that also was a friend of my parents, if he could help me to solve this problem. He replied, that he unfortunatly could not help me, since we would learn the math necessary to solve this problems in 9th class, and I was just in 6th class. First I was really angry, because of course this was neither an explanation nor a good reason for not to tell me how to solve the problem, that I knew, he knew, how to solve. But then I figured, that he basically gave me the answer unintentionally anyway. I went to the library of my school, got a schoolbook for the 9th class and found the solution to my problem quite fast. I didn't understand everything about sinus and cosinus that I read in the book, but enough to make my computer draw a circle as good as it was possible with 64x48 pixel. My parents thought I was a genius, I was very happy and proud of myself and very unhappy and disappointed with, and angry at, public school. Most of the time the established education system was just stealing my time.

From 12 to 22 I wrote some games, simulated the movements of planetes in the solar system, created algorythm based 3d graphics and programmed a microcontroller so I could control anything in the house with the remote control of my stereo system from my bed watching Star Trek Next Generation. These kind of things I did for fun. The first commercial computer system I created was made for a Mercedes-Benz research facility. It was a 3d web based responsive cockpit simulation system for the Smart compact car. It was basically what you get now, 20 years later, as the latest innovation of Mercedes as MB UX. But my version could be updated instantly over the air, a feature which Mercedes is trying to put into production since 20 years. And it was 3-dimensional. That's one reason why I also was disappointed by Mercedes-Benz and eventually quit my job there.

I started to become a business owner in a part time job at the age of 24. I teached Java Enterprise Edition for IBM learning services in 1998, when I took holidays from my Mercedes Job. In one week training I made more money than in 4 weeks at Mercedes. Another reason to quit the job at Mercedes. I signed my first fulltime freelance contract to create a portfolio management and analysis web application. After three month I had invoiced 72.000 DM, which at the time was an unbelievable big amount of money for a 25 year old kid like me. I kind of felt rich, bought my second Porsche, and then my life went downhill.

As a lot of people found out, money is like any other drug. It's fun to use, but you basically get used to any amount quite fast. After you've spent everything on Porsches and Mercedes just to save taxes, you get a surprise letter from the tax agency and then you end up on withdrawal ... okay the actual story might be different and with other drugs unless you are Al Capone :)

Anyway, I eventully got bored by money and computer programming and my girlfriend left me, so I ended up in a life crisis. The next contract that I got offered had nothing to do with programming. The IT supply department of Mercedes-Benz just needed someone with knowledge about the IT departments that I was working in when I still was a Mercedes employee. It was good money and something different, so I took the job. At this job it was the first time that I got to know freelance collegues that had no university degree at all and where still earning more than 100.000 € per year. All of them had their unique story, how they got their first freelance job when they where still studying at university or wasting time with some other crap. Finding the second job was easy for all of them, when they showed the reference of the first one, to their social network from the first job. No client asked about a university degree ever. What all these self made experts had in common is, that they just did not see any more reason to continue wasting time at university. That was the first time that made me think, if it would be possible to kind of fabricate the circumstances under which talented people get to their first 100.000 € contract, without wasting 4 years at unversity where most of the things you learn are useless and most of the important things you would need to know to earn money, aren't tought to you.

The job in the supply department itself was boring. But I also didn't know what else to do, so it took me 1,5 years until I finally quit the contract. Just to do nothing afterwards. I had no plan, enough money and no perspective. Eventually a friend of mine took me to a trip to Amsterdam which changed my life. Since the things with the girls started I always had my problem with 42. In Amsterdam I had an experience, which made me reasearch again what science has to say about "life", "knowledge" and "consciousness" from a new perspective. Over some detours I found a definition of life, knowledge and consciousness in the book "Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding" by Humberto Maturana and Franscico Varela that really blew me away. Since most of the people don't know this book, I give a little bit of background to this masterpiece.

The way I found it, was by researching about learning theories and pedagogy, beeing frustrated by the current school and university system. What I found out is, that all of the current science about learning is based on a philosophy and theory that's called "constructivism". I analyzed these books on https://beat.doebe.li/bibliothek/b00014.html, where, at the time, you could visualize which books cite which other books. There I found out, that almost all the books about learning where citing "Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding". So this book is actually one of the roots of all modern science about learning, knowledge, constructivism and systems theory. The interesting thing I found out was, that science, in theory, knows a lot about much more effective learning processes, but is not able to implementing them itself. This really puzzled me and of course my obvious following question was, why?

Later, when my wife and I studied childhood pedagogy, we also experienced this paradox at the public university where we studied it . There are all these really great concepts in modern science, about how to learn best. But none of them was implemented at the unversity itself, where we were studying them.

How could that be?

Before answering this question, I want to introduce the second fundament of this business school. Which is the concept of the World Wide Web as intended by its inventor, Sir Tim Berners Lee.

The Invention of "the Internet"

What some people know is that Tim Berners Lee invented the World Wide Web, which is the technology behind all the linked webpages of the internet. The muggles just call his invention "the Internet" (which of course is completly wrong, since the Internet is just the communication layer of the World Wide Web).

So you could think that he was quite successfull with his idea.

What most people don't know is, that he, and with him a lot of other people including myself and some business partners of mine, completly failed in solving the problem that he originally wanted to solve at CERN with the invention of the World Wide Web. In order to show you, what the World Wide Web was originally invented for, I have to change the technology. For further reading please follow this link to The Original Idea of the World Wide Web.