“Ah, you’re Michael Zorez, and you want to be a [insert role].”
I heard some version of that in every interview I had in Sweden. Or, "Ah, you're here to interview for chief digital officer. How exciting." I heard that one last year. Or a product manager. Or a technical project manager. Or a senior consultant. Or any other job title, for that matter. Pick a box. They don’t see me for who I actually am.
Not for love or a job
When we came to Sweden in 2019, it was not for love or a job, like everyone. We were already in love before we moved, but for years I told people it was for a job anyway. It was just easier, and it spared me a long and painful story that isn’t really suitable when you meet someone for the first time. The truth is that our businesses had collapsed, and there had been a death in the family. All bridges were burned, and we had only one way to go, and that was forward.
We sold everything we could. What money was left, I had in cash, not knowing that it wouldn’t do me any good in Sweden. We had three big bags with all our stuff. My wife, Angelika, was seven months pregnant, and we landed in Stockholm on 13 February 2019. Our first daughter was born at the end of April that year, and all that time I was applying like crazy. Klarna was the only company that called back.
Four times in seven years
For the first eight months I worked in debt collection, put my head down and did the work. After the probation period I was chosen for the six-person project team that moved the company off Salesforce.
We moved around Stockholm three times. By mid 2020 the migration was done and what was left was maintenance and a little growth. What I could see from watching the job market was that jobs in the electric vehicle industry were all around Gothenburg. As a family with a young child, we also wanted a more stable living situation than renting second-hand in and around Stockholm gives you. So in the middle of the pandemic we moved to the Swedish west-coast, into an apartment we had never seen except in a Teams meeting (call me crazy, but it made sense at the time).
Then my employment was ended over a clause about commuting distance, which is ridiculous in itself during a pandemic, when everybody was remote. I was furious, and I let them see it.
Family and living conditions come first, job comes second. So I applied, applied, applied, and Lynk & Co called back with an offer.
It was great work with amazing people, on interesting projects and infotainment services like music, streaming and navigation. Lynk & Co also helped me learn Swedish, and there is a lot I have to thank them for. But I wanted to work in charging and electric vehicles, and Lynk & Co was mostly into plug-in hybrids. When E.ON offered me work directly in charging infrastructure again, bridging Germany and Sweden and allowing me to use my languages, I took the chance. I stayed with Lynk&Co until the last day of my notice period, because I didn’t want to let them down.
Then I hopped on a train to Stockholm eCarExpo the next morning and my first working day at E.ON meeting most of Swedish new colleagues. It was crazy stressful but I liked it. We did a ton of fantastic projects, with great colleagues in a team working from all around Europe: the Netherlands, Germany, the UK, Denmark, on and off Norway, and me from Sweden. It was really fun.
I reported directly to the market director of the Swedish e-mobility department. Then the Swedish E.ON grid company replaced him, and the new one wanted the global affiliation gone and the focus on local, grid-related work. The people reporting 100% to Germany were to go first, and I was one of them. After two meetings it was clear there was no future.
I went to the bathroom and called my wife, not to ask her, but to tell her I had made up my mind. Then I handed in my resignation.
That was the point where it stopped being about feeling sorry for myself. I started seeing the jobs for what they are, and seeing myself for what I can do. Not for what any hiring manager sees in me in that particular moment.
What I had already proven on multiple occasions is that I can do the work and do the reps. That’s one of the things I took to heart from Arnold Schwarzenegger’s training advice, and the one thing the gym teaches you. The iron doesn’t judge. You only compete against yourself. So do the reps, and get better every day.
After a couple of months of stressful applications, the next job, at 1KOMMA5°, landed. Reporting to Germany while working in the Swedish market: sound familiar?
It only lasted six months. After I completed my first project, I was transferred to another team. On a Thursday in February 2025, I was told they had to end my contract. I smelled the bullshit, and that made me even more furious. But this time, I didn’t show it. I said “aha, okay”, closed the meeting, and returned my laptop an hour later.
I kept remembering that moment many times in the months to come, and sometimes couldn’t believe how far I had come since Klarna.
A week later the Swedish CEO called and told me honestly that it was a business decision he couldn’t justify. I still respect him for that.
The next tab
I gave myself one day of being furious and letting it show, privately. Angelika has always been my rock and my anchor, and I think at that time she was even more stressed than me. For me it was just: okay, yeah, that again.
The next day I sat down at our kitchen desk like nothing had happened, opened my laptop, and opened my application tracker, a spreadsheet with a tab for each year I’d had to do this. I added the next one.
Name of the role. Name of the company. Date applied. Comments. Then the progress columns: confirmation email, called back, first interview, case study, second interview, offer. A full application template. It came to be because in the years before, I sometimes got a call, “Hello, this is so-and-so from such-and-such company”, and had to ask myself which role that was again. So at some point I started tracking what I had sent out. At times it saved me.
It was the fourth time in seven years. It is what it is.
What started that week
I’ve been an entrepreneur basically my entire life, for better or worse. As I occasionally tell people, if you have the entrepreneurial gene, you can’t shut it off. This time, in February 2025, I said to myself: the conditions on the job market aren’t great, I’m aware of that. And if nobody would hire me, I would just start something up on my own again.
A few days in, in between applications, I read about Lovable on LinkedIn one morning, around ten or eleven, and made an account. The first thing was a landing page for an ebook idea. Then a trading education tool about reading technical signals. I burned through about 3,000 credits in the first couple of months, because I wasn’t good at prompting at the time. I published several websites and smaller tools, and started exploring Supabase as a backend, back when you still needed a separate account for it.
It was my training. I thought: this is the next thing. And it was. Then it was: failed commercially, failed commercially. No distribution. I can’t get any followers on X. I hate social media.
None of it really caught on. But it helped me learn the tool, and then really push it in the months that followed.
It was never either/or. I kept applying, 133 applications in eight months. ES Group was number 133. A permanent job was still the main income. The building ran in parallel.
I didn’t really plan for what the building would turn into.
A job can be refused, or taken away. Something you have built and own cannot.
Everything I built, I built mostly for myself. During the second half of last year I started noticing, also with feedback from my wife, that some of the tools could be really useful for other people, and I started thinking about publishing them. There are ten or fifteen tools behind the way I build now. All of it was triggered by finding Lovable.
As a founder, I had always struggled to find the right technical people to build what I had in mind. That is now within reach, and it wasn’t in the past.
They see me
After eight months I joined ES Group. They were recruiting for a partner manager. In my second interview, with the two founders, I told them that if they had advertised a sales manager role, I likely would not have applied. Anything with sales attached already gives a certain impression of what the job is going to be like, and that’s not me. What I like is storytelling, strategic partnerships, and establishing a fair deal for both sides. That was exactly the understanding they had of the role too.
I was the first full-time hire on a new team, working on eye level with the founders, the CEO at the time, and the CTO. The company had AI in its plans, but only on a spreadsheet. I came in with the better part of a year of building and publishing my own tools, and really kick-started it.
The working culture is almost like running your own business. I have autonomy, I have trust, and I have good people working beside me. We’re pulling in the same direction, and everybody brings their own expertise. I keep building both inside and alongside it, which makes me better at the job, more invested in it, and brings out creativity I didn’t know I had.
That’s the point. Every interview in Sweden saw me boxed into a job title, and never me for who I am. This company sees me.
If you’re hiring, the word in your job advert decides who you will meet. One word nearly meant they never met me.