A 2014 Interview with a Fourth-Year Student on Success and the Founding of PrestaRock

This post is going to be a fun one. I couldn’t help but smile while listening to my younger self from 2014 talking about success and how to achieve it. Too bad it’s only in Lithuanian. This was an interview from my fourth year at university! The video perfectly sums up my recent posts and, at the same time, lets you listen to other incredible people who have achieved even more online.

Young, slim, charming—listen up. I remember how we found a spot in one of KTU’s dormitory hallways and, together with the now well-known and popular Povilas Stankūnas , recorded this interview on a Saturday. I am immensely grateful to Povilas for this because 11 years have passed, and if not for this video, I wouldn’t remember myself as such a sweet and funny person! Thank you.

In my last post, I left off at my final university years when I was already working for a U.S.-based company developing PrestaShop services. I had learned and was living by American values, working with quality, and back then, I was living my best life.

Alongside freelancing for an American company, I noticed that even when I raised my hourly rate to an unthinkable 100 LTL/hour for Lithuanian clients, they still kept hiring me. So, I was working not only for the Presto-Changeo team but also freelancing for various other U.S.-based companies and brands and for Lithuanian businesses.

The biggest challenge, which I still remind my employees about today, was that sometimes I had no one to consult with while developing projects alone. For example, I remember that the most complex PrestaShop function was the getOrderTotal method, which had immense logic packed into it, all working differently under various conditions.

I remember spending an entire hot summer day trying to debug the code—it felt like an impossible mission. But maybe that’s why even today, after not actively programming for about 5–6 years, I can still recall that function’s methods by heart. When my developer colleagues ask for advice, I can still guide them to the proper technique or remind them of the standard logic behind PrestaShop’s functionality.

Even though working alone meant I had no one to consult with during the day, and sometimes I would spend an entire day stuck on a single error, pulling my hair out in frustration, I was still living a life that seemed almost impossible. This was my golden era—sometimes, I only worked 20–30 hours a week and earned an unimaginable amount of money for a student at the time.

I was finally experiencing what I had always wanted and dreamed of. In my mind, I was already living as if I owned an Escalade. I also immersed myself in Kaunas’ nightlife. Through the community at one of the most popular gyms, I realized what genuine human support truly meant.

I remember conversations with my peers and classmates—they often made remarks like, “Why are you doing this? It won’t work anyway,” or even strange comments like, “Why are you working?”

But I felt different among my new, older acquaintances. I not only understood the value of influence and networking but also the importance of support. When we sat together in the jacuzzi after workouts, they sincerely asked me, “How’s it going?” I started to develop a different mentality and understood how people who have money think and spend it—something I had never known before. I was learning by observing, absorbing their mindset, and comparing it with my own.

A saying is often found online: your income is the average of your three or four closest friends’ incomes. As cliché as it may be, sometimes it feels true. The people around you, their thinking, and their mindset shape you and influence your ability to learn and grow.

Meanwhile, I continued to actively contribute to blogs. We were not only developing the most prominent Lithuanian tech blog, nezinau.lt, but also creating FWD.lt, an IT news portal built by our community. Five or six of us were working to push Lithuania’s IT scene forward and generate quality content that traditional news portals lacked the expertise for.

I kept programming every day while studying at university, where I managed to complete my bachelor’s thesis on a PrestaShop LiveChat application. At university, I often doubted myself, questioning whether I would ever truly understand how to develop a project from A to Z. But looking back, I can confidently say that Kaunas University of Technology is one of the best. By the fourth year, I had managed to consolidate all four years of knowledge into practical application.

I gained insights into software analysis and architecture and discovered a new passion for programming and designing the most effective and efficient software architectures. Of course, my early work on large projects since my second year contributed significantly to this.

During a technical interview with newly selected developers and testers this week, someone asked me: “How did you decide to start your own company?”

The answer is simple. At some point during the summer of 2014, I realized that most of my day was spent not programming but answering emails, talking on the phone, and managing tasks. It dawned on me that if I continued coordinating tasks and communicating with clients, I wouldn’t have time to program. But programming was my core skill—the hours I could bill for. Something had to change: I had to find someone to communicate with clients for me, or I needed someone to help with programming.

And at that moment, the solution seemed simple—hire a fellow student for support.

I needed change. By this stage of my life, my self-confidence had grown. I realized this was my opportunity to fulfill my biggest dream—to become the founder and CEO of a multi-million-dollar company with hundreds of employees. To achieve my dream of not having to work! To buy that Escalade!

So I leaped. On November 13, 2014, I purchased shares of the company from individual shareholders and became its sole owner and CEO.

That’s when the PrestaRock journey began…