My First Blog Post: A Bit About Who I Am and What I Do
Hello there stranger (or do I know you?)! I'm Serdar Salim.
Let's start with a short bio: I was born in northern Türkiye, in a place called Ordu. In the region where 75% of the world's hazelnut is grown. If you love hazelnut or Nutella, chances are that you've eaten some of the hazelnut that grows in my very village or even the hazelnut field. Curious how that village looks like?
I moved to Austria, to Tyrol out of all places when I was 8 years old. Coming from a remote coutry side to somewhere that famously been called "far away from Europe" was a culture shock. Tyrol is one of the most beautiful places in the world and pretty underrated and unknown for some reason. Most people outside of Europe don't even know where Austria is, as they keep confusing this small country with Australia. Folks, Austria used to be part of a major empire (the Habsburgs) and even infamously started a World War. No joke, one time I went to the Austrian Embassy in Malaysia and there were signs that show they're not affiliated with Australia. Yet, there were still some people on that day who came to the embassy thinking it's the Austrlian one.
I studied Transcultural Communication at the University of Graz, because of my fascination with languages, culture, and how people connect. I always had an affinity with technology, history, finances and global affairs. I guess you'll see that a lot in my blog.
After Austria, I moved to Ireland to work in tech. My dream was to work at Google or some big tech company, where they work on cool things and lots of smart people roam around. Google kept shooting my applications down for some reason. I was once close to landing a job at YouTube. My first major role was as a community manager at a video game company in Dublin, and from there I landed what I thought was my dream job—working at Twitter in 2013. I spent 9 incredible years at Twitter as a Program Manager. My primary role was onboarding and training global teams, especially content moderation agents across East Asia. That role took me around the world. Since much of our work was centered in the Philippines, I relocated there for two years to be closer to the heart of operations.
Eventually, I returned to Ireland—briefly—before giving in to the magnetic pull of Southeast Asia. This time, I moved to Singapore, where life took an unexpected and beautiful turn: I met and married my wife. Shortly after our wedding, I was laid off from Twitter after nearly a decade. I'm still letting that sink in. But in all fairness it was exactly the push I needed to do something new. Thanks to my my financial planning obsessions I figured that I had enough runway to keep me going without corporate jobs for a few years. So we traveled. For 2 years. 25 countries. And then traveled some more. Learned and told countless stories. Had lots of fun!
And now? I’m building. I’m very involved in working with AI and to create useful tools. Things that solve problems. Things that help others like personal finance trackers and tools on Google Sheets. I believe that spreadsheets and exceptional personal finance planning make lives easier and I'm advocating to do those. I am also a big fan of living with a purpose and I believe that I'm here to advocate that as well.
- Serdar Salim