I have been in business since I was five.

My first company sold flowers that were not mine.

I grew up in Romania. Before I knew the word business, I was already in it. Five years old, out in the fields with my grandparents, learning that value is something you can see and touch.

I saved what I earned and lent it to my mother’s friends. When that felt too slow, I picked flowers from the neighbours’ gardens and sold them to my classmates at school. The margins were wonderful. Then my mother found out, and my first company closed that same afternoon.

I was heartbroken for an hour. Then I started thinking about the next one. I have never really stopped.

I went to become an engineer. I was too impatient to code.

I loved what technology could do far more than I loved writing it line by line. So instead of writing software, I built a company around it. With a few others, I co-founded an online school for children between three and nine, teaching them through play.

That is where it clicked. The value was never in the code. It was in what the code let a child, or a company, become.

A tech guy who learned business from the best.

Twenty-two years on the track, on both sides of the deal. Everywhere I went, technology was treated as a cost, and I was always certain of the opposite. Now I sit on the boards of technology companies, write for the Forbes Technology Council, and build my own.

I do not remember the straights. I remember the turns. The first one was a fistful of the neighbours’ flowers, at five.

I speak both languages, business and tech. That is where the value comes from.

Now I can read a business in a single meeting. Picasso drew a face in two minutes, then said it had taken him a lifetime to learn how. Mine took twenty-two years, in the best rooms in the world.

No slideware. The boy sold flowers that were not his. The operator delivers results that are, earned inside every one of those rooms.

So I built the company I had been preparing for my whole life.

Makers of New is that five-year-old’s instinct, disciplined by twenty-two years inside the deal. A value-creation studio in Luxembourg, built to do for others what I learned to do from the inside.

I chose Luxembourg on purpose. It is precise, it sits at the centre of European capital, and it takes value seriously. The idea felt at home.

Then I did the one thing a studio like this rarely does: I wrote the read down as software. The number itself is a model I publish in full, so anyone can check it, no black box. What is AI-native is the rest: the research, the diagnosis, the plans, the legwork that used to take a team weeks, I now do in days with AI on my side. That is deliberate. Let the machine carry the legwork, so the judgment I spent twenty-two years earning is spent where it actually counts, on your decision.

Run the business you have. Build the one you could become. Make it worth a multiple of what it is today.

Our logo is a watch. On purpose.

Three houses shaped how we build. Each gave us a discipline, and a colour. Together they are the instrument you are looking at.

A bezel that turns. A star at the heart. A red centre. Precision you can watch moving.

The operator, on the record

Where the judgment comes from.

Figures from mandates Cristian led as an operator. Keynotes for Microsoft & EY, UiPath Forward EMEA and Fujitsu Forum, on AI, automation and business transformation.