Payment Expert’s ID Check: Payments Professionals offers insight from industry leaders and experts on how they got their start in the financial industry, from their early years in education, to how they have been able to climb the corporate ladder.
This week, Jarek Sygitowicz, Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Authologic, always knew he was going to be working within tech and applied his teachings from learning under professional experiences to become the founder he is today. He also suggests why you should follow the agency, taste and craft model to carve your own lane in tech.
Where did you go to university and what did you study? What impact did this have on your current journey?
I studied computer science at the Warsaw University of Technology. There was never any question for me that I’d end up in tech, even if I could never have predicted landing where I am now.
This was the 1990s, so the academic scope was much narrower, and computer science was the natural choice. Everything I do is still connected to that initial passion, and to wanting to build the most sophisticated programs possible.
Were you part of any sports clubs or societies at university and has this influenced your educational and professional development?
I was involved in creating and shaping a Polish Linux User Group organisation. The OpenSource movement is close to my heart to this day.
What was the first job you had in the industry and are there any lessons from this you still draw on?
My first major job was as a consultant for empolis, an information management company. These days their primary focus is on AI, but at the time my work was more concerned with knowledge management and semantic networks.
Beyond empolis, I had a run of formative professional experiences in the 2000s, all of which prepared me to be a founder. Seeing how other people ran a business was an excellent lesson. Nothing teaches you how to manage quite like being managed.
Who was your biggest role model – inside or outside of your industry – who continues to inspire you in your current career?
I’m a huge fan of Steve Jobs. He’s a legend for a reason.
When was your first big break in the industry? Why was this such a significant moment for you?
Working first as a sales representative and then as a strategic alliance manager for EMC was a years-long crash course in how big tech actually works—its promise, its pitfalls, its pace, you name it.
What are some of the skills you deem essential to starting in your industry and how have yours developed over the years?
I always joke that the right mix of ignorance and arrogance can help you build anything. But in reality, the most important skill is perseverance. Never give up. No exceptions.
Jokes aside, there are three qualities I value most in people I work with: agency, taste, and craft. I don’t know if agency and taste are skills, per se, although both require concentrated cultivation.
Craft, on the other hand, is the endpoint of dedication to a skill. Everyone talks about ideas in tech. Coming up with ideas is essential to this business. But those ideas are useless if you lack agency, which is the ability to implement them as you see fit, and taste, which is the ability to determine if they’re actually worth implementing in the first place. Craft is the ability to make an idea look and work as well in real life as it does in your head.
There’s no shortcut to developing any of these. I’ve developed my taste by absorbing feedback from people with better taste than me—learning to see as they did, essentially. Agency comes with experience and age. First you learn to trust yourself, and then you learn to tune out the noise.
Craft is also a product of experience. You put in those ten thousand hours, which will inevitably be split between failures and successes. In short, I developed these skills by doing the work.
Lastly, what is some advice you would give to an aspiring person looking to get a start in your respective industry?
Fintech, like most aspects of tech, changes faster and faster these days. It’s important to be skeptical but never cynical in the early days of potentially big developments.
Don’t be afraid to bootstrap either. People get hung up on VCs, but the economy is changing and funding will change with it.
