Arian Abri thought the LinkedIn message was a scam. It changed everything.

The LinkedIn message was a real full-time offer from Spendesk, not a scam. A recruiter sent it to Arian Abri during his second year of university. He did not recognize the company name, and the message said only "job position", so he assumed it was spam.

Spendesk is one of the largest expense-management companies in Europe and a French fintech unicorn. Arian did not realize the role was full-time until the final interview, when he saw the salary. "I was like, okay, this isn't a salary for an intern," he said. "But I just didn't say anything. I signed the contract and started working."

He was twenty years old.

Key takeaways

• Arian Abri took a LinkedIn message for spam, and it was a full-time offer from Spendesk.
• He moved from Spendesk to Uber's enterprise team, and friends began asking him how to get into startups.
• He started GENZ4GTM (Gen Z for Go-to-Market) to place young talent in commercial roles in Germany.
• He used CodeWords' builder-in-residence program to automate the outreach that took him about four hours a day.

Before any of that, there was door-to-door sales in Leipzig.

Arian grew up in Berlin. When it came time for university, he enrolled in Business and Management at Lancaster University at their satellite campus in Leipzig, partly because of Covid, partly because leaving Berlin felt right at the time. He ended up staying in Leipzig for all three years.

He wanted to keep pushing himself, so he started working on the side, around his studies, almost immediately. His first job was door-to-door sales as a working student. "It was really a rip-off," he said. "But I learned a lot. I got confident at the door. And I really found out that sales was kind of my thing."

He stumbled onto LinkedIn around the same time and started building a profile, slowly and without much strategy. "My profile was kind of dead," he said. He picked up another door-to-door job. Then he landed an internship at a large solar energy company in Berlin, and he later learned that its name was a keyword recruiters in that market used to find candidates.

Then the Spendesk message arrived.

The whole process, from the DM he thought was a scam through several interview rounds where nobody told him the role was full-time, strikes Arian as comic, and he still talks about it with disbelief. "It was like a quagmire," he said. "I didn't know it was a full-time job and they didn't know that I didn't know it was a full-time job."

He worked at Spendesk for seven months. Then Uber hired him.

At Uber, his career moved faster

Arian joined Uber's enterprise team two days after turning twenty-two. He was surrounded by people a decade older, working accounts that demanded technical fluency and commercial maturity well beyond what most people have at that age.

"I made good money," he said. "But more importantly, I learned a lot."

What he also gained, without intending to, was visibility. Recruiters messaged him daily. His LinkedIn profile had crossed some invisible threshold in the algorithm, and the offers kept coming. He would send Snapchat videos to friends of the startup breakfasts and his Uber Eats credits. He didn't think much of it at the time, but his friends did.

"A lot of my friends asked me: 'Arian, how did you do it? How did you get in? I also want a job in a startup.' So I just thought, why not start placing young people if I know both sides of the world?"

Most of his friends were still in university. They were applying to fifty jobs and hearing nothing. They saw the startup ecosystem from the outside but had no way in. Arian had been on both sides. He knew what it felt like to get nothing, and he knew what it looked like once you were inside.

He started building the bridge himself.

GENZ4GTM (Gen Z for Go-to-Market) is what Arian is building now. It is, in his words, "Germany's youngest tech talent pool for commercial, sales, and generalist roles." SDRs, founders' associates, marketing managers. These are positions that exist in every growing startup but that most twenty-one-year-olds have no idea about and no path toward.

When he started, the work was manual. Every day, he would spend roughly four hours scraping job boards, cross-referencing listings, finding the right contacts, personalizing outreach emails, and sending them one by one. Join, Glassdoor, Indeed and LinkedIn: each platform needed a different workflow. The manual method worked, but it did not scale.

"I don't have any n8n or Make.com experience," Arian said. "Those are the more technical automation tools. CodeWords really surprised me in how simple it was, and that was really what I loved about it."

Arian joined CodeWords' builder-in-residence program with credits and a clear goal: automate the outreach. The outreach work that had taken four hours, the scraping, the email finding, the personalized messaging, now runs on its own.

The business is still early. The story is not.

GENZ4GTM is coming out of a three-month pilot. Arian is still in university, still balancing coursework with outreach and placements, still figuring out which parts of the business can be automated and which need a human touch.

The origin isn't a market analysis though. Instead, it's a specific, personal thing: his friends asked him for help, and he knew enough to give it. He'd been the youngest person in the room at every job he'd held, and he'd watched the algorithm reward him and ignore the people he grew up with.

He decided that knowing both sides of the world could help others get in too.

"I know what it's like to not get any job offers," he said. "50 applications and nothing. I also know what it's like working in a startup and being the youngest person there and navigating that world."