PERSONAL PAGE / 2026
STANDING BETWEEN THE MAKERS AND THE BUSINESS.
Peter
Schmidt
LOCATION
Copenhagen, Denmark
WORK EXPERIENCE
IT Distribution
Fintech
FOCUS
Bridging specialists and business
Building products
Backing the team
STATUS
Building the next thing
I stand in the middle, with a foot in each camp.
Two types of people rarely show up in one person. There are the makers; the artists, designers and engineers who care whether the product is actually good. And then there is the business side; the finance people, commercial leads and executives – the people making sure it will sell. I've spent my career in the space between them, so I understand both sides well, and how to keep them talking, so the work moves in one direction instead of pulling apart.
What I do is hold the whole picture. A product is a hundred decisions made by specialists who can't see each other's constraints, and someone has to keep the shape of the thing in view while they work. That's the part I'm good at, and it's what I care about, because I know how much better people work when the direction is clear and the people deciding get it.
"I want my team to be more than the sum of its parts."
I want to be the one who helps my team get there, and get ahead.
I had a stable life in IT sales, in the city I grew up in, near my family and friends. I left all of it and moved across the country, put my own savings in, and founded a game studio on my own. For nearly two years I built the whole thing, from the company to the creative vision, the prototypes and the funding proposals that made me consider ambition and financial reality at the same time.
Then the prototypes told me the truth. The scope didn't fit the money, and not on any timeline I could actually win. So I stopped. Not because I'd lost faith in the work, but because I'd rather trust the numbers than the vibes, and the numbers were clear. Choosing to stop was harder than choosing to start, but it's also a decision I'm certain was the right one.
A — PEOPLE FIRST
Care personally,
challenge directly.
As written in Kim Scott's Radical Candor, they are words I strongly agree with. People do their best work when they feel the people around them genuinely care and dare to tell the truth at the same time. I want to personally know the people I work with, what they're good at and what's getting in their way, because that's what lets me actually help them.
B — SYSTEMS BRAIN
Design it top-down,
then build it out.
If I'm given something vague and unshaped, I'll look at its individual pieces, work out how they fit, and create a plan to act on. I dig into a problem until I understand it, and then I move. The research is worth doing if it ends in a decision, and that's what I like the most, the moment it stops being a question and becomes action.
C — UNDER PRESSURE
The harder I'm pushed,
the harder I'll go.
I'm at my best with a real deadline and something concrete to ship. If I'm given accountability, a clear thing to drive toward, and a team around me and an office to do it in, then that's when the work gets sharp. Open-ended and undefined is what wears me down. A clear finish line is what drives me forward.