# Marko Bradic

After the exit, I went back to where I do my best work: the lab. This time, legal.

I kept asking why law firms charge what they charge. It is not the intelligence. It is the trust. Someone who will absorb risk, sign on the line, take the fall. AI drafts faster and researches deeper, but it cannot be held liable. That is not a limitation. That is the entire opportunity.

An AI first law firm. Machines for speed. Humans for accountability.

Then Claude Code happened. A decade away from the terminal and suddenly I was building again. First small experiments. Then real systems. Now the whole team ships legal solutions at 10x pace. Not slides. Not strategy. Actual product. The future showed up early.

After xPortal acquired Alphalink, the next chapter went global fast.

I joined as CPO to scale an abstraction driven crypto platform into a daily utility people actually depend on. I owned product, design and engineering across a 30 person team, but most of the real work happened outside the building.

I spent the year moving between Europe, the US and the Middle East. Sitting with users. Walking DeFi flows with builders. Meeting investors in New York, San Francisco and Dubai. Watching how people use crypto when speculation disappears and reality kicks in.

In under six months, the platform grew from 1.5M to 2.5M users. We unlocked over $2M in revenue through consumer growth and B2B protocol integrations with Sui, Stellar and Base.

We shipped things that changed behavior. Cross chain trading that removed mental overhead. Crypto debit cards that made onchain value usable in the real world. AI powered wallet assistance that reduced fear for non native users. Stablecoin yield and DeFi access that finally felt understandable.

The goal was always the same. Make crypto boring, dependable and useful at scale.

I still believe crypto is the future of financial rails. But AI was moving faster than anything I had seen and I wanted to be captain again. The lab was calling.

Alphalink started with a problem I couldn't ignore.

After years at Trade Republic I became convinced that crypto would become the rails for the next generation of financial infrastructure. Not speculation. Infrastructure. But the UX was hostile. Fragmented. Built by insiders for insiders. Too many wallets, chains and concepts standing between users and value.

We raised a €1M pre seed and went after one idea obsessively. Make blockchain invisible.

We were five people. Two founders, a product designer and two engineers. Small enough to move fast. Tight enough to stay aligned. We built abstraction layers that removed chains, gas and protocol complexity entirely from the user experience. No jargon. No cognitive load. Just outcomes.

From a blank slate to acquisition by xPortal in twelve months. Simplicity does not just scale. It wins.

This was pure hypergrowth.

When I joined in 2019, Trade Republic was a handful of people in a Berlin courtyard with a dangerous belief that Europe deserved radically better financial infrastructure.

I joined as the first product hire and employee number 25, reporting directly to CEO Christian Hecker. There was no playbook. We were building one in real time.

We scaled to 8M customers across 17 countries and over 100B in AUM. Revenue reached roughly €190M annually. We built a fully regulated bank from scratch, including securing a full BaFin banking license, while shipping at startup speed.

I hired and led 12 across product and design, built core product foundations and lived through the chaos of scaling teams, systems and regulation at the same time.

The journey culminated in a $900M Series C led by Sequoia and Founders Fund at a valuation north of $5B.

It was relentless. It was intense. It permanently rewired how I think about building under pressure.

This was my builder's bootcamp inside the enterprise machine.

I started as a frontend engineer and moved into product, working on large scale digital and mobile transformations across Europe. I saw firsthand why big organizations struggle to change and how hard shipping really is at scale.

A defining chapter was working on Apple Enterprise Next initiatives, bringing Apple grade mobile experiences into highly regulated legacy environments. Design, technology and strategy had to align or nothing shipped.

I learned structure, scale and institutional reality. I also learned when to ignore process and just build.

Everything I have done since sits on top of this foundation.