Short brief of myself

I am a electrical engineering student from Germany and startup co-founder, highly interested in electronics, cars and tech companys.

My Journey to BoardForge

I started studying in 2020, and in my second semester I saw a race car standing at our university campus. As I went there and talked to the guys, they introduced me to Formula Student: a club of students building race cars and racing against other universities. Sounds great, right?

I was excited from the first second. I joined the club immediately in March 2021 and it was pretty clear that I would join the electronics team that season. From the first day I gave everything I had to the club and was there 5–7 times a week. (My fellow students did not see me much in that time.)

Since one season always goes from September to September, I was in charge of leading the electronics team just 5 months after I had joined. I did not know what that meant at the time. I did not have much prior experience in electronics. I was just highly motivated and super enthusiastic about building the car.

As the electronics leader I was responsible for the 14 different PCBs. That meant I managed the entire lifecycle of these boards, from schematic to layout, ordering components, production, assembly, debugging (a lot of that), and of course the most important part: managing the electronics team!

In that year I practically lived in our workshop. I was there nearly every day until late at night and skipped all my classes. I just wanted to give the best version of myself to the team and bring that car to life so badly. We achieved some milestones. The first time driving was an insane feeling. All the pain of the last weeks and too little sleep (we were awake for two days straight when the car drove for the first time) was blown away.
It felt great! And we pushed further into the season.

We attended 3 events that year. This is where you meet Formula Student teams from all over the world and drive against each other. Sadly, our car could not drive at one of the three events due to technical issues. So our season ended pretty disappointingly.

But I realized something interesting. For me it was never only about the car and seeing it drive. Don’t get me wrong — it’s damn cool to see something moving that you’ve worked so hard for. But I think what I really loved about Formula Student was building the thing itself. The journey to get there. All the ups and downs with your team, when something finally works out and then breaks again. That was the real force that kept me pushing so hard, even when I was completely exhausted.

Funny enough, sometimes I even wondered if I would have invested the same amount of time if we had been building the fanciest washing machine instead of a race car. And honestly, I think the answer for me would still be: yes.

In that year I also met my co-founder. He was a technical lead in the driverless team when I joined, and he wrote a lot of firmware for me during my season. The year after, we started thinking about doing the same stuff we did at the race team — just for money. Simple thought, right?

And then November 2025 we founded our company: BoardForge

Now we are building hardware and software for our customers, and always try to keep alive the fire we caught in the racing team!

What this Blog is about

On my journey so far I’ve made plenty of mistakes. I believe in learning through trial and error, and I don’t think any topic is too complex to tackle. That’s why I want to share some of the lessons and critical views on things I’ve learned the hard way. Maybe one or two topics can help others with decision-making or avoiding mistakes.

I want to share my views on topics that are either business, startup, tech-related, personal growth, or just random things that don’t fit into any of those categories but I still think are interesting to talk about.

And lastly, this blog is for myself — to capture my journey and growth.

Matthias