From there to here

I was born in Prishtina, into a middle class family. My father was a professor, and later a member of Kosova’s parliament through the most turbulent years of the country’s history. My mother gave her life to raising my brother and me, and to caring for my grandparents, who lived with us until they died.

About three and a half years after me came Etrit, my younger brother. Everything since has been shared and built together.

My father spent his career educating one generation after another, mostly without pay. He and his colleagues taught anyway. Summers he went abroad and worked, and what he brought back carried us through the rest of the year.

School itself was somebody’s house. Families gave up their homes, or rooms inside them, and depending on your grade you went to a particular house. There was a teacher, a curriculum, grades, and you moved up a year at a time. There was no school building, no bell, none of the feel of a real school. And underneath all of it, fear was louder than anything else you felt.

In 1998 the war started and kept spreading. We lost our house and everything in it. We got out of Kosova near the very end of it, and my parents decided we would go to the United States. There was a program for families from the war, and an uncle here who sponsored us.

My first experience of work in this country was going to a job site with my father and my uncle. My dad had been a professor and a member of Kosova’s parliament. I watched him do construction in screeching heat. That same week I went to pick my mother up from the factory job she had just started. Both days changed my life.

From that point on, everything was about finding a way to make a dollar and build something where neither of my parents would ever need to work construction, restaurants, or factories again. We moved into a two bedroom apartment. I started washing dishes at the local Italian restaurant, working weekends and school days around soccer.

For a while over there, we were all each other had. Etrit is my younger brother, and when the world got small enough that there was nothing else left in it, there was still him. Detroit didn’t undo that, it deepened it. Two kids in a country neither of us understood yet, both in school, both working, both running the same arithmetic in our heads about how many years it would take before our parents could stop.

What I understand better now than I did then is how hard our parents worked to keep that from swallowing us. Etrit and I had jobs and we had school, and somehow they still made sure we got to be the ages we were. They protected the ordinary joys of being a kid at a time when they had almost nothing left to protect anything with.

Somewhere in those same years, a person decided to take a chance on me for no reason I could see at the time. Hedley Williams was my first soccer coach. He gave me a shot on the field, believed in me well past the point where it made sense, and then years later gave me my first shot in real estate too. I cannot overstate what he has meant to my life.

A few years after that, Etrit, our parents and I bought a restaurant. The thinking was that it would fix the family’s money problems and give my parents jobs they owned instead of jobs they were given. It did neither. It lasted about a year. I’ve been part of more expensive mistakes since, but that’s the one that taught me the difference between a business and a wish.

It also produced the thing that actually mattered. Etrit and I became partners in that restaurant, and we have been partners in everything since. Every venture, every investment, all of it.

From 2008 to 2014 I worked in and around commercial and residential real estate. I learned how that world actually operates, from property and asset management through a decent amount about the systems and networks that keep buildings running. In 2012 I married Ariana, who became my biggest supporter and the rock that made it possible to build a family and start an entrepreneurial life at the same time.

In 2014, Marc Hudson, Randy Foster and I started Rocket Fiber. The goal was to build the best internet infrastructure in the world and put it under Detroit. Partly to serve the city, and partly to prove a point. That a real technology company could be started and scaled here, and that if we pulled it off, others would follow. Including the large telecoms and tech companies that had written off cities like ours.

Nearly everyone we explained it to told us it wouldn’t work. The exceptions were the three of us, our families, a few people who joined early and took the risk with us, and Dan Gilbert, who seeded the company with more than $31 million and let us go find out. That was my first real shot, and it came well before there was much evidence that we deserved one. Outside of my parents, Hedley and Dan are the two people who have taught me and backed me the most over the years, and neither of them had to.

The years that followed taught me most of what I know. How to raise money and structure a company. How to move quickly while operating inside the orbit of a very large organization. How to work with the public and private sectors at once. And how to scale infrastructure, which is a different animal from scaling software, because it runs on permitting, on streets that have to be opened, and on networks built inside hundreds of individual buildings. We laid more than fifty miles of fiber and did deals across the United States and into Canada. Everstream acquired Rocket Fiber in 2020.

While Rocket Fiber was getting off the ground, we were also trying to help Mergim Cahani start Gjirafa in Kosova. Mergim is another person who stopped being a business partner at some point and became family. Gjirafa is the first true venture backed software company in Kosova and continues to grow through the region in and around Kosova now.

Among other ventures along the way, Etrit and I started Reozom with a partner. The idea was to take the buying and selling of a home, which is the largest transaction most families will ever make, and strip out the parts that no longer earned their cost. No agent required, a fraction of the price, and a fraction of the time. We exited in 2016.

My first son, Kaon, was born during my Rocket Fiber years, within a month or two of the day we started KODE Labs.

By 2017, Etrit and I had each spent years around buildings from different sides. He had gone deep on building systems and smart buildings. I had come up through property and asset management and then through networks and smart infrastructure at Rocket Fiber. Between us we had seen enough of how badly buildings run to know we were looking at the same problem from two ends. So we decided it was time to build our big one together, the thing we would give one hundred percent of ourselves to.

We knew we needed a partner who was a software wiz and whom we could trust without reservation. That was Gentrit Gojani, and he founded KODE Labs with us. We got creative and found a way to start without raising outside capital. Not long after, an Albanian legend, Lorik Cana, joined the family and backed what most people considered a crazy idea. Changing how buildings operate, while doing as much good as we could in both Kosova and Detroit.

The platform we’ve built at KODE Labs is now used in thousands of buildings by hundreds of clients, including some of the most secure and sophisticated organizations in the world. Among them the United States government and the United States Army, the two that literally saved our lives during the war.

The company takes as much pride in what it does for its clients as in what it does for our team, their families, and the places we live and work. That isn’t a slogan. It’s in the name. KO for Kosova, DE for Detroit.

I’m a father of two now, Kaon and Orik. Everything in my life centers on those two dudes, who are the absolute joy of Ariana’s life and mine. Whatever small success I’ve had would not exist without Ariana. She has put up with seven day work weeks, twenty hour days, hundreds of weeks of travel, and holding the kids and the house together while I was gone, pushing toward a dream that had long since become our dream rather than mine. She did all of it while building her own career and working the whole time.

My parents have believed in Etrit and me from the beginning, and they’re a huge part of why we got this far. They worked hard, they never gave up, and they consistently did the right thing rather than the easy thing. That is the foundation everything else sits on, and it’s what I’m trying to hand to my kids.

That’s the story to this point, and it keeps going. I’m grateful beyond words for what I have, though gratitude has never felt to me like a place to stop. If anything it’s the reason to keep pushing. I want the next stretch to count for more than the last one, and I want Kaon and Orik and whoever comes after them to inherit a world in better shape than the one we were handed.