Viktoria Izdebska

In 2014 my parents' company went into insolvency. I was twelve.

DiTech had grown into one of Austria's best-known computer retailers: 22 shops, around 350 people, €120 million in annual sales. At our dinner table it was the main subject. I listened to every conversation and understood maybe half of them.

Then the conversations changed.

I remember the evening my mother came into my room and lay down next to me without saying a word. She didn't explain anything. She just stayed.

What I took from that year was not fear. It was closer to the opposite. A company could end, and the world would keep going. So would we.

At sixteen, still at school, I was selling five- and six-figure contracts to banks. UniCredit was one of them. I learned that the hard part of selling isn't the pitch. It's getting into the room.

A semester in the United States got me into the stock market. Back in Vienna I opened my first brokerage account, and by 2020 I was working in investment-banking sales at C-Quadrat, watching how financial products reach the people who buy them.

That year I started Profit2Go with four other young investors. We taught people our age how to invest and sold the programme through banks, Raiffeisen among them. ORF put us on television. Six-figure revenue in six months. In 2021 we sold the brand.

Distribution before product. That was the education.

In 2022, at nineteen, I founded my second company. It was called Salesy then and Octrace later. The idea felt like a secret: companies give off signals before they buy, and if you read them early enough, you know who to call and when.

It worked. Banks, logistics companies and energy suppliers paid us for that timing. We built a database of 48 million European companies. Twenty people at our peak, €1.3 million in revenue, a valuation of €20 million. EWOR took us into its fellowship; an a16z Scout fund and Davidov Ventures invested.

From the outside, we were winning.

From the inside, it was three years of almost. Good enough to keep going, never good enough to be safe. My team called around a hundred companies a day, and some of the people who picked up told us they were insolvent.

In 2025 I spoke to more than 180 investors. In the summer I moved to San Francisco to raise there. Just before Christmas, a five-million-dollar round with US investors fell apart.

In December 2025, Octrace filed for insolvency. This time I was the one telling customers.

I could explain what had happened. I couldn't yet explain why.

The answer came later, as one sentence: everything we could see, everyone could see.

We had built a good model on data that had no owner. A head start on public information is not a moat. The advantage belongs to whoever stands where the data is born, the tax advisor, the broker, the service provider, and sees it before it becomes public.

That sentence became a thesis.

In July 2026 I published it as The Prediction Economy. Software moved from selling tools to selling outcomes. The next step is owning the information advantage your distribution creates. The software is the sensor; the panel is the product.

Since January I've worked with about ten AI rollups and the investors behind them, and I write up what I learn at Dis·tribution. Some of it confirms the thesis. Some of it doesn't, and that goes in too.

I went into Octrace believing anything is possible if you work hard enough. I came out knowing it is possible if you see clearly enough, and then work hard on what actually matters.

If you're building a rollup, investing in one, or think I've got this wrong, write to me at viktoria@izdebska.com.