There is a particular kind of programmer who learned to code before a chatbot could do it for them. They tend to share a certain stubbornness, a comfort with sitting inside a hard problem until it yields. Akam Hamak is one of them. Long before AI assistants could write software on request, he was already shipping online projects as a teenager in Sweden, learning the craft the slow way.
“I started coding and building online projects at an early age, years before AI-assisted development tools became mainstream,” he says. The detail matters more than it might seem. Learning to build without an AI looking over your shoulder forces a different relationship with difficulty. There is no shortcut to paste, no model to ask. You build something, you break it, you read the error, and you fix it. That loop, repeated thousands of times, produces a kind of durable competence that is hard to fake.
One detail from those early years captures the moment he came up in. Hamak accepted cryptocurrency as payment for his work, partly because traditional banking and payment platforms were difficult for someone his age to access. What started as a practical workaround became a doorway. Taking crypto as payment pulled him into the ecosystem from the inside, as a user with a real reason to understand how it worked, not as a speculator watching a price chart.
That entry point gave him early exposure to Ethereum and the broader cryptocurrency landscape, an experience he says “helped shape a long-term interest in technology, investing, and alternative financial systems.” Timing counts for a great deal here. Engaging with crypto before it became a mainstream financial story gave Hamak a feel for the technology and its culture that latecomers struggle to acquire. He was there for the substance before the spectacle arrived.
His curiosity did not stop at building. It turned, naturally, toward how things break. Hamak moved into security research and penetration testing, the practice of probing software for vulnerabilities. He earned bug bounties for finding real weaknesses and disclosing them responsibly, the ethical path that rewards discretion as much as skill. It is a discipline that suits a particular temperament: patient, persistent, and willing to look closely where everyone else assumes things are fine.
Bug bounty work also teaches a hard lesson about reward. You are paid only when you find something genuine, and only when you handle it the right way. There is no participation prize for effort. That structure builds a results-oriented patience, a willingness to spend hours on something that may yield nothing, in service of the occasional finding that matters. Hamak carries that patience into the rest of his work.
The threads connect more tightly than they first appear. Coding taught Hamak to build systems. Security taught him to find their flaws. Crypto taught him to take a measured position on a technology before the world agreed it mattered. Each skill sharpened a different muscle, and together they formed the judgment he now brings to entrepreneurship and investing.
He resists framing any of it as a credential. “I treat them less as a résumé and more as a foundation,” is the spirit of how he describes those early experiences, the groundwork for evaluating new opportunities and reading where technology is heading. A founder who has built software, hardened it, and transacted in crypto has a richer mental model of the internet economy than one who arrived through business school alone.
That foundation shows up in how he allocates attention today. When Hamak considers an internet business to acquire, he is not only reading a spreadsheet; he is reading the product and the infrastructure beneath it. When he holds a digital asset, he is drawing on years of firsthand familiarity rather than a thesis borrowed from someone else. The early, unglamorous work compounds, just like everything else he believes in.
There is a quiet irony in his timing. Today’s new builders begin with AI assistants that can scaffold an application in minutes, and the barrier to producing working software has collapsed. Hamak came up just before that shift, which means he carries a mental model of how things work all the way down, not just how to prompt a tool into generating them. That depth is becoming rarer even as building itself becomes more common, and it gives him an edge in judging which technical businesses are genuinely sound and which merely look functional on the surface.
The self-taught route left him with something less tangible but just as valuable: a default assumption that he can figure things out. People who learn inside structured programs often wait for permission or instruction. Hamak learned that the path forward is usually to start, fail, and iterate, a disposition that transfers cleanly from code to business and from business to investing.
That same self-taught engineering now sits underneath his current company. Closr, the AI sales platform Hamak founded, leans on exactly the kind of full-stack understanding he built as a teenager: it generates a working demo website for a prospect in under a minute and handles hosting, domains, and publishing behind the scenes. A founder who learned how software works all the way down is well placed to build a tool that hides that complexity from the person using it.
It is also a quietly motivating story for anyone starting now. Hamak did not have the tools that make building easier today. He had a problem, a willingness to learn, and the patience to keep going when it was slow. The lesson he draws is less about technology than temperament: curiosity and persistence, applied early and consistently, open doors that no single tool can. His full background and current projects live on his official site.
Learn more: akamhamak.com | Connect on X
