Chance plays a major, underestimated role in shaping our lives. I was reading the interview given by Marcin Zukowski.
Are you saying that if it hadn't been for the mugging near the Rotunda, you might not have gone to the Netherlands, written your PhD there, and consequently not co-founded Snowflake in the US?
>> Exactly. Notice what a massive role chance plays in life. And how little we talk about it.
>> I think if I had stayed in Poland back then and not left for the Netherlands, I wouldn't have achieved what I did. There were more coincidences, by the way.
>> While still at the University of Warsaw, I didn't get into my dream master's seminar on distributed systems. I went with databases instead. At VU in Amsterdam, it turned out they didn't really specialize in databases. But there was a research institute - Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica - specialized in that field. There, they convinced me not to analyze theoretical problems - as I originally wanted - but to do something practical. I was assigned to a young PhD student, Peter Boncz. Peter advised my master's thesis, my PhD, and later became a partner in my first company, Vectorwise. We remain friends to this day.
>> If I had received that email two weeks earlier or two weeks later, the meeting probably wouldn't have happened…
Interview: https://polishtechminds.com/article/marcin-zukowski-snowflake
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