I was born with severe hemophilia B in Poland, at a time when factor IX concentrates were not yet available in the country. They came relatively late compared to Western Europe. For most children with hemophilia B born in Poland back then, childhood meant the same thing it meant for me: hospitals, rehabilitation, and home tutoring. Teachers came to my small room table. For years, that was my school.

I filled the silence with three things: a Commodore 64 (I wrote my first program at eleven), mathematics, and poetry. Code gave me a sense that I could actually affect something in a world where most things were out of my hands. Math gave me structure. Poetry gave me permission to say things I had nobody to say them to.

One moment stayed with me. I went on a bike ride through the forest with my cousins on a spring day. We were pedaling one behind another, branches cracking under the wheels, laughing so loud it felt like the forest was answering back. There were no adults with us, which meant no bans, no worried looks, no constant “be careful.” As a kid with hemophilia, I needed that kind of freedom badly, because every bit of play was always filtered through other people’s fear and every move measured on a scale of risk.

One careless turn and my wheel hit a stone hidden in the grass. The bike tilted and I went down knee-first onto hard ground. I was afraid to look at my leg, but when I did, the knee was slowly swelling into something the size of a volleyball. My cousins were standing over me and I could see on their faces they wanted to help but had no idea how. We were far from home and mobile phones didn’t exist yet.

I wanted to just stay on that path and wait for someone to find us. But a thought came through that sounded strangely adult for a child: “Adam, get up. Nobody else is going to save you today.”

Getting up took several attempts. I hopped to the bike on one leg, got on, and pedaled the whole way home with one foot, the other leg held out to the side because bending it was impossible.

After the hospital, I lay in my room staring at the ceiling. One thought kept going around: “this all has to mean something.” I didn’t know what, but I needed to believe it, because the idea that the suffering was just pointless was more than I could handle at that age. That evening I told myself, quietly, that I’d learn to live with what I got and that someday I’d be happy, even though I had no picture of what that could look like. It was the stubborn decision of a kid who refuses to accept that this is how his whole life is going to go.

I come from a poor family. After university (Technical Physics, Computer Science, and Applied Mathematics) I started my first company to change it. I had no money, no connections, no one to learn from. Everything I know about running a business, I learned by doing it wrong first and figuring it out from there.

Over the next twenty years, I ran my own companies, worked with clients across the US, Europe, Japan, Australia and Mexico, mentored startups in accelerator programs, and helped people with disabilities through the Polish Hemophilia Association, where I eventually became a board member and president of the Łódź chapter.

Six years ago, I joined Inwedo, a technology company, and more then 3 years ago become CEO. I think the management style I’d developed over two decades of building things while managing a body that fights you taught me something that proved useful: how to make decisions under constraints you cannot remove, how to plan around unpredictability, and how to build systems that don’t depend on one person always being available.

Under my leadership, Inwedo was recognized in the Financial Times FT 1000 ranking of Europe’s fastest-growing companies and in the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 EMEA. We earned a Great Place to Work certification and placed 3rd among the Best Workplaces in Poland. As far as I and researchers who’ve looked into this can tell, I am the only publicly known CEO living with hemophilia whose company has appeared in both the Financial Times and Deloitte growth rankings. There may be others who haven’t disclosed their diagnosis. I hid mine for years too.

I think the hemophilia community does a great job celebrating physical achievements, and that matters. But I also think we need more stories about building businesses, writing books, leading teams, mentoring others. Not because those things are more important than running a marathon, but because they show a different part of what’s possible.

Today, I’ve written five books, I host a podcast on leadership in the age of AI, and I completed executive programs at MIT Sloan. In 2024, the European Haemophilia Consortium published my story in their #ThisWay series. A lot has changed since then.

I often say that each of us has our own “hemophilia,” an obstacle that seems impossible to get past. What matters is not the obstacle itself, but what you decide to do with it. Hemophilia taught me that limitations are facts, but weaknesses are choices. You can’t remove the disease. But you can refuse to let it set the ceiling.