Julian is the cofounder and CTO of Divizend, a FinTech start-up helping clients minimze double taxation on foreign investment. He enjoys the creativity of coding and developing products that support people in their everyday lives. Personally, he is on a quest to explore genuinly expressed curiosity, compassion and self-expression.

Julian Nalenz is the co-founder and CTO of Divizend, a FinTech start-up helping clients to minimize double taxation on foreign investments through an automatized service rendering the originally long bureaucratic process of withholding tax refunds fast and simple. Today, Divizend has 15 employees, about 4000 active customers and is expanding both its services and locations adding company branches in Luxembourg, Switzerland, Singapore to its original branch in Germany.

Finance has not always been the primary focus of Julian. He knew early on that he wanted to pursue a career in computer science and has always seen coding as a creative craft, allowing him to build-up ideas and concepts from scratch while building useful systems for others.

Three years ago, as a student and at only 19, Julian participated in a professional meet-up event in Munich and met two people that introduced him to his current co-founder, a renowned serial entrepreneur and financial journalist in his 50’s. This unlikely alliance of an older visionary, who is in touch with the needs of clients and has extensive experience in marketing and business in the world of finance, and a talented, practical, down-to-earth realiser with excellent coding skills was a match made in heaven.

In the pulse of our time, Divizend has been built up remotely, the co-founders having met only a handful of times in person, but meeting each morning (online) at 7 a.m. to kick off the day and debrief. In the beginning, Julians work entailed mainly coding. However, as the company is growing it is becoming more strategic. The start-up has gotten international recognition and has received several renowned prizes in the FinTech sector. The future looks bright.

Parallel to his full-time work, Julian is also completing the last semester of his double degree Master’s in Computer Science at KTH. His clear priority is Divizend, but doing both simultaneously has taught him to delegate and create efficient workflows. While he really enjoys the uncertainty of the start-up world, he appreciates the safe foundation the academic degree provides. Even so, he is looking forward to moving on from academia, an environment he perceives to be conformist and devoid of creativity and inspiration.

Julian joined Blivande in April 2022 and describes his experience as transformative. Prior to moving in, he was new in Stockholm and not in a good place, feeling disconnected from usual student life, that included socializing through student parties and a lot of alcohol. He was longing for a community of trust and a place to have interesting conversations in, beyond a superficial “where are you from?”. Through Stockholm nightlife, he discovered a party organized at Blivande, visited the coworking space and joined promptly.

In his eyes, the house is the opposite of minimalism and a place where each object has its own story. He describes the place as playful and fun and as the opposite of student life, where people engage socially and build community out of passion and not just to polish their CV. Julian is also a part of Noden, a members-driven in-house organization, and has participated in many of their workshops, which are often highly experimental and relational in their nature. The Noden Manifesto resonates with his personal quest for genuine interhuman curiosity, compassion and self-expression.

The community around Blivande and Noden gives him a sense of belonging he had not experienced before and acceptance towards his creativity and curiosity instead of being met with ridicule or distance. Here, he can talk about space, wormholes, augmented reality and religion, in non-dogmatic dialogue and without the need of alcohol as social lubricant.

In the future, Julian would like to reconnect with his “teenage coder” that used to code ideas and projects creatively and just for fun. He is eager to join in-house courses on music, sound and light production and wants to spend more time in Blivande’s makerspace Studio Tau becoming more and more versatile. He is open for creative collaborations and would enjoy the revival of the dormant Blivande Academy as a place for high quality creative courses.