while I never have been known for regular updates and timelines keep changing I today would like to talk about a major change in my professional life that also will have profoud effects on my ADOM activities.
As some of you know I am one of three CEOs of a German IT company called QuinScape. QuinScape specializes in enterprise software development in the areas of data & analytics and business applications for large companies. I have been joyfully working in this position for the past 18 years and just recently we decided to make the next big move forward by onboarding a growth investor into the company (link to German page, only, sorry - but Google Translate should be helpful). This investor will allow us to grow the company to the next level and ensure that we can sustain our unique culture, deeply humane view on people and energetic approach to innovation and progress for a long time onwards.
Despite IT markets being pure gold right now, competition for small- and medium-sized companies becomes harder and harder and there is a big trend towards concentration and consolidation rocking the markets.
Often this means being devoured by much larger companies who wreck your own unique culture, just look at numeric ressources and cost synergies. This can ruin a life of work spent on building a unique company culture in a matter of months. We decided that QuinScape is not going to be a company someone else will devour. Instead we want to build a truly unique company group of similar minded organizations that also subscribe to our core company values of openness, competence, fun and loyalty.
With out new partner Auctus we have found a growth investor who takes the same view on how to develop healthy and growing companies while deeply understanding the benefits of a strong employee-oriented culture and holding to values we believe in.
So QuinScape now is facing a very unique opportunity to grow from a single location in Dortmund, Germany, to many locations spread over Germany and the nearby foreign countries... and maybe much further in the more distant future.
I am very happy for myself, the company and our employees that we have been granted such a unique opportunity and want to take it with all my energy.
Both me and my two founding colleagues now are very much focussed on continuing to grow the company to new dimensions - together with our new partner.
But this has a downside: I will have to focus my energy and resources even more and will have to get rid of distractions faster. Also I do not want to sacrifice my family - both my beloved wife and our daughter Hannah, almost 18 months old by now, deserve all the time and love I can give. So focus really has become even more important in my life.
Is ADOM a distraction? Not by any means - it is one of my three big loves (family, company, ADOM) and thus ADOM will not be sacrificed to this new development. But I will have to focus my activities to get by doing a satisfying amount of work despite more limited time resources available to me - which in turn will affect ADOM, ADOM RPG and Ultimate ADOM.
As this is the ADOM blog I will lay out the consequences for ADOM Classic immediately:
- Updates (which have been scarce in fecent months) will remain scarce. But they will continue as the investment into QuinScape also means that I have more personal funds at my disposal that I can invest privately into Team ADOM. Still pace will remain somewhat slow.
- Communication will also remain on a somewhat barren level until we have big things to announce.
- Our prime focus will be the development of Ultimate ADOM (which has made huge progress internally - we just need to be able to finally start showing things).
Feel free to ask questions. I'm deeply committed to the ADOM community and will try my best to keep the flame burning. As this whole situation is new to me, too, I will use the next three months to sort out matters and see where we can take this with my new life arrangements.
Both the ADOM RPG Kickstarter and the Ultimate ADOM blog will receive separate updates.
Thanks for listening & Axes High!
Thomas Biskup
ADOM & Ultimate ADOM Maintainer
