The designer-to-YouTube-gameshow-host pipeline is a storied, almost clichéd career path.
Except, it really isn’t. Max Tkacz, 32, may well be the first.
The German product designer was the third employee at Berlin AI company n8n, now valued at $5.2bn. He has since traded his lucrative job — which he held for almost six years — for what he insists is his true calling.
He's building Flowgramming Studios, a video production company based in a 350-square-metre warehouse in Berlin that will make gameshows for a tech audience.
“Rounding to the nearest million, we’ve raised zero million,” Tkacz says cheerfully. That’s not quite as little as it sounds. The company has €295k in funding, €40k of which came from Tkacz himself.
He wears his inspiration proudly. “I want to become a MrBeast for nerds,” he says. Tkacz has spent hours studying the Youtube megastar and concluded that, “he may not be the happiest guy out there but he’s a genius. There is a lot of intellectual horsepower behind what he does.”
His own ideas aim for the same mix of spectacle and internet-native absurdity.
Take, for example, the token-maxxing icebath challenge. “Contestants are given 100k AI tokens and they have to burn them in five minutes while sitting in an ice bath.” Tkacz is also keen on Fake Product Fridays, a weekly advert for an imaginary gadget.
Another concept blends Big Brother with Too Hot to Handle. “It’s called MVP mansion: we send five cracked youths to a villa in Greece — or wherever we can afford — and give them money to build an app. There'll be challenges along the way. Oh, and they’ll all sleep in one big room.”
The Agentic Arena
Why do any of this? “I got really frustrated that 18 year old TikTokers crush big companies with huge marketing resources,” he said.
Tkacz realised he had a knack for this last year, when n8n’s VP of marketing challenged him to come up with a viral idea during August, traditionally a snoozy month for online engagement.
The result was Agentic Arena, a one-on-one gameshow in which two creators competed to build AI agents.
“N8n tripled the budget I asked for and sent me to New York to film it.” Tkacz, dressed in a sparkly jacket, hosted the show himself. “I flew home with four terabytes of footage, edited it over about 15 hours, and we got 145k views within a few days.
“I was fucking shocked,” he says. The video delivered more than views: there were multiple enterprise deals signed because of it, he says. “Fortune 500 CEOs were DMing me. That emboldened me.”
N8n wasn't keen to lose him. “They offered me €200k to stay,” he says. “Which prompted my mum to ask, ‘Are you sure about all this?’” Instead, the company became one of Flowgramming's backers.
Becoming rich ‘is stressful’
After cashing out of n8n, Tkacz doesn’t mind saying it: he’s rich. This was a surprisingly stressful development.
“I felt an immense sense of responsibility,” he says. “It’s a very privileged position and I thought about whether I could turn this into intergenerational wealth. Also, I understand some people would think I’m an arse by talking like this.”
Around his neck hangs a chain bearing the Ukrainian coat of arms. “I have some family still in the country and some who got out. My dad's Australian, and he'd pretend not to speak English so I'd have to learn Ukrainian growing up."
Tkacz talks a mile-a-minute and was pacing almost constantly throughout the interview. But he wasn’t always this confident.
“I felt cloistered in my shell for a long time but after I got divorced at 28 — we married young — I did some soul searching. And I just decided I wanted to become my true self.”
This meant abandoning any self-consciousness. “I just decided to give less of a fuck about anything. So if ever there was a lull in conversation in the office, I’d be like: what do you think is the most evil organisation that has used our app? Maybe Al Qaeda?”
‘We should be more cringey’
Tkacz is still kitting out his warehouse and documenting it in a Youtube series called “How not to run a video studio”. In one video, he’s giving viewers a run down of his costs. “Someone quoted me €1,000 to clean the warehouse, bro, that’s insane. We’re getting a roomba.”
He’s made a few hires. “My first has the exact same name as me. I snagged a senior editor, his name is Max. Our lawyer, an old guy with grey hair, I shit you not: his name is Max too.”
Who is his dream guest? Not a tech person. “It’d be really cool to get Snoop Dogg. What if we could solve a real problem he has while sitting on a ganga farm and lighting up?”
And how will he know when he’s made it? “I follow a great adage: if we ever get a cease and desist from someone, we’ve made it, then we’ll cut a deal with them.”
Ultimately, Tkacz would like to see the industry cut loose a bit and take itself less seriously.
“I feel in Europe we’re less comfortable getting on camera or shouting from rooftops. We need to be okay with being a bit more cringey.”
