I'm a builder. I taught myself to run servers because freelancers kept burning my money. West London, 2021. I was standing on a site holding a cup of tea that had gone cold an hour earlier, watching a crew argue about where a wall should go. That's my actual job. Schedules, suppliers, the kind of problems that only exist at 7am when half the crew hasn't shown up and the client is already phoning. But my head was somewhere else. I'd been chewing on an idea for a classifieds platform for months. Not a grand vision, nothing with a business plan and projections. Just a gap I could see — a way to connect buyers and sellers that felt easier and more global than what was out there. The problem was that I knew nothing about programming. And I mean nothing. I didn't know what a database was. I'd never written a line of code. My entire technical CV was "reasonably good at not breaking my own phone." So I did what most people in my position do. I tried to buy my way in.…