Our story is one of migration and the clash of different perspectives. We come from three different countries and three different professions, merged into a new mass in Berlin: Ukraine, Poland, Bavaria – Katya, Mariusz, Martin.
Post-socialist hunger for life meets capitalist-market logic. Artist meets software engineer. Agile coach meets art director. Migrants meet crazy Berlin.
We asked ourselves, What makes this city so magical?
Our own story provides the answer: the clash of life histories, of perspectives—therein lies the special power of this city.
How do you unleash this creative power in a communication software? That was the question that drove us until we found a philosophical answer: multiperspectivity and dialectics. We set out to cast this abstract answer in concrete technology and UX design, building a system that invites all perspectives and develops its power precisely from that.
{Mariusz, Katya and Martin in different locations around Berlin}
We were outraged at how big social media has obviously morphed into echo chambers and hate reactors. We thought there must be another solution, another basic idea. On the one hand, the Silicon Valley networks were fascinating; on the other, we found the ramifications detrimental.
Then, in 2019, we founded an association with diversity in its name: DIVERSUS e.V. The aim was to investigate the knowledge building and innovative power of dialectics and build software around it. That’s when we built and tested the first prototypes.
After that, we decided to launch timz.flowers and make the principles we found in this experimental phase available to companies. Accelerated knowledge creation should be valuable to everybody, especially to companies that are in constant competition.
To learn the business logic better, we visited a pre-seed accelerator in autumn 2019, the Berlin Founder Institute. There we founded the company timz UG, and the hard work continued.
Katya, who originally studied art, transformed into an accomplished UX designer and product owner. Mariusz, the software engineer who has long since become an agile coach, returned to programming and tech planning. And Martin, who was an advertising art director in his former life, became a product designer, CEO, and digital marketeer.
We built an incredibly great remote team with engineers from all over the world. It was a journey in itself, learning how to onboard people during the COVID phase. But we maintained the firm conviction that we would use our own tool for everything moving forward.
We worked with people from China, Nigeria, Middle East, India, Italy, Portugal, New Zealand, Poland, Germany, and Argentina, always using the timz.flowers tool. Today, we are extremely proud of our team. Once again, our basic idea proves true: diversity furthers.
The pandemic confirmed many of our assumptions. We launched our remote-only company in 2019, developing timz.flowers as a tool for remote workers, unaware that COVID would switch the whole world to remote just a few months later.
Our story is a story of values. We see how the world is speeding up and how climate change threatens everything. Through the many phases of hard work, knowing that our software helps people build knowledge faster kept us going.
We know that our principle works and that it is needed. We are convinced that people can solve everything with their ingenuity, and we want to provide a small building block for this.
{Mariusz, Katya, Martin in the prototype v03 in 2020 during the pandemic}
Our journey to developing the tool, together as a group of three, began in 2015. We knew we wanted to further dialectics. We knew we wanted to accelerate knowledge creation and innovation through multiperspectivity. But we didn’t know that in the year we shifted to open beta, competitors would suddenly spring up everywhere with a similar positioning – async video conferences.
We’re excited about it, and we’re amazed at how things are happening. We are obviously part of a bigger picture and can only humbly accept that.
Many ask why we have chosen a flower metaphor. Well, the craziness of Berlin sparks cheerfulness, inspiring beauty in life, and we were influenced by the city’s festival culture. In COVID, much of that has been lost.
Knowledge creation is the most natural thing for people. So is the working world really such a serious, grey area? Or do people meet there who are joyfully building a new world? We consciously stand for a joyful work culture.
The flower metaphor is a fighting symbol against greyness, bureaucracy, and unnecessary hierarchies. Working together naturally, following your own intuitions and doing what interests you.
It is precisely this playful search – this desire for variety, the joy of collaboration, the belief in creative power, the longing for nature, the belief in the natural talent of human beings – that has given us the strength to build this incredible tool.
timz.flowers does not only consist of Katya, Mariusz, and Martin. We have a beautiful community of collaborators, friends, and supporters around us who have helped us create our paradigm. People who believe we can take our destiny in our hands, who believe that you can realise a vision.
We want to thank all of you whom we constantly get strength from. We thank the board of the DIVERSUS Association, the members.
We thank our friends and beta testers, the students from the Founder Institute period, and our LinkedIn community. Special thanks to our team who, like us, are convinced that this thing will hit.
Over the years, we have developed a lot of good ideas about how the story will continue. Stay tuned.
