From college dropout to Ironman CEO in 7 years, this Gen Z founder found ‘no pain, no gain’ from a trip to China and the Shaolin monks | Fortune

“Basically I work in marathons and sprints,” Germanavicius said, describing something far beyond the typical “996” workload of 9am to 9pm, six days a week. For Germanavicius, it’s more like two months on and two weeks off. “Two months I work, 24-7, seven days a week, then two weeks off. This two weeks off doesn’t mean that I’m fully offline, but I try to relax and put a lower gear.”

The 27-year-old is proud that his current business, InRento, is on course for its third profitable year. And even though his first business, an artificial intelligence (AI) startup named WellParko, did not work out, he’s proud that one of his investors made a profitable exit, and that they both backed his current venture. “Actually, last month, I bought out two of their funds, so they made a serious profit, because we are at this stage that we are growing profitably.” But Germanavicius was quick to add that he doesn’t exactly enjoy being his own boss.

“I think it’s much more stressful, to be honest,” the strong-jawed, long-haired Lithuanian tells Fortune, “because you have all this pressure, you know? Like, what if I’m wrong? What if my assumptions are wrong? What if my decisions are wrong?” Germanavicius said he doesn’t like “this whole concept of like having no boss is easier.” When he started WellParko at 18 years old, he added, “I wasn’t ready. So I had to go through all the pains, go through all this pressure.” Now that he’s managing a €50 million portfolio, “this pressure is insane,” and he’s learned the hard way how to manage. “It’s not about being free to be your own boss. It’s about serving the customer to get a good business off the ground. Like, it’s not stress-free to be your own boss.”

When Fortune offered that his work sounds like the old expression “no pain, no gain,” Germanavicius grinned and offered an anecdote from deep in Shaolin, China. After WellParko exited, he said, “the first thing I did, I booked the ticket to China and I went to train with the Shaolin monks.”

Germanavicius waved away suggestions that this was some kind of homage to Wu-Tang Clan, the Staten Island rap group obsessed with the concept of Shaolin from old 1970s kung fu movies. “No, no, no, no,” he said, “for me, mastery is one of the key values in life.” He said that despite the monks speaking no English and communication being limited, he learned two mantras from his Shaolin master: “He always said two things: ‘No pain, no gain,’ and ‘practice makes tired.’ Not perfect, but practice makes tired, no pain, no gain.”

The Profitable Contrarian

Germanavicius called himself a “contrarian” who was always entrepreneurial, recalling that he launched a bicycle buying-and-trading business as a middle schooler. (He loves Ironman because of his lifetime love of cycling, he added.) He was an entrepreneur before he was a college student, and he only went to university (the prestigious ESADE) for a few months before deciding that it was a waste of time, “delaying” the start of more meaningful things. “The opportunity cost was too high and I was feeling like I’m underperforming in life.”

The founder told Fortune that he had a pivotal conversation with his mother when he decided to drop out. “I wasn’t confident at first, because at first, of course, it was like a great university and great opportunity, and I had a scholarship.” He said he always remembers what she told him: “Listen, it’s your life. You live it how you want, because you will have to live it. Not me, not not anybody else, just do what you want.’” Germanavicius said this was the “trigger” for his decision. He also disclosed that his father died when Germanavicius was young (almost precisely the time he started selling bicycles). “It was hard, but at the same time, I think it got me to this understanding that no one’s going to take care of you, you know, and you have to take your own actions, and you have to take the responsibility for them.”

A crowdfunding platform that allocates capital to real-estate projects, InRento is active in markets beyond Eastern Europe. They are active in six markets including Poland, Italy, Spain, and Ireland. “We take all the edges of Europe,” he told Fortune jokingly. “I feel like we go to the markets where financing is inefficient,” full of bankable projects and clients, who can’t get traditional bank financing. This doesn’t mean they are sketchy, he said, explaining there are many family owned companies, often in hospitality, which need to raise a few million euros, but most banks in the market uninterested in loans smaller than €10 million. For example, he showed Fortune plans for a former Harry Potter-themed tourist attraction in Poland that needed renovation.

Germanavicius added that InRento is fully regulated and supervised by the Central Bank of Lithuania, with a license issued by the European Central Bank. He said they are fully audited, do annual reporting, and comply with all the applicable laws and regulations of financial institutions in the countries where they operate. “We also publish audited accounts and audits publicly to our clients,” he said, “transparency helps to support reputation and our reputation is our biggest asset.”

What he’s like to work for

Fortune spoke to Bernardas Preikšaitis, InRento’s Chief Operating Officer, to get a feel for what it’s like to work for this beyond-996 founder. Preikšaitis credited Germanavicius with giving him instant trust and the space to grow, training him beyond legal counsel into a business-oriented leader, and offering swift upward mobility rather than locking him into a narrow role. According to Preikšaitis, Germanavicius asserts high expectations with a direct, almost intimidating manner but balances this intensity with tremendous trust in his team.

Despite perceptions that employees may be afraid of Germanavicius due to his high standards, Preikšaitis affirmed that those who stay are deeply motivated by this environment of trust and responsibility. In practice, the leadership style avoids micromanagement, largely reducing communications to updates and priorities. Preikšaitis noted, “Everyone knows what to do. There is no box-checking, no need to report back constantly. It’s about prioritization and getting things done—deals and investor safety above all.”​

He described this as an odd tension between trust and distrust. “From day one, he basically gave a lot of trust to me,” but at the same time, Germanavicius always stresses an edgy kind of work persona, almost a paranoia. “He always tells me, ‘You know, never trust no one.’” Thinking it over, Preikšaitis described the approach as: “I trust no one, but I give 100% trust in you and what you are doing, and I believe in you, and I will enable you at any cost.”

A shift into microshifting

Germanavicius told Fortune he was “still learning,” and after all, he has never had a boss himself. “I still think I’m not very a good manager, to be honest.” He said when he first began working, he assumed others would be wired like himself, but he encountered a more standard mentality. “What I realized was that people from these very deep corporate backgrounds, when you give them all this freedom … for a lot of people, it was weird.” He said his workers “couldn’t comprehend” an environment without traditional hours where key performance indicators (KPIs) were the only thing that mattered.

At InRento, he said he tends to hire “self-starting” people. “They don’t really care about hours. The whole company culture that we build is that we don’t limit holidays. Like, if someone wants to take holidays, they can take as much as we as they want. And basically there are no work hours.” He said he trusts his team to set their own schedules, be responsible for their own work. “It’s very KPI-driven. We are a financial institution where everything can be measured, and all the performance can can be driven to numbers.”

The description of going beyond 996 is familiar to startup founders across the world. Day One Ventures founderMashaBucher, an early backer of 12 unicorns and over 30 exits, told Fortune that the Silicon Valley culture is nonstop. “People I know, close to me, work seven days a week, from 6:00 or 7:00 am with a break for sports until like midnight or 1:00 or 2:00 am.” She said 996 is a catchy phrase, but isn’t representative of what she sees at all because it far undersells the situation. Like Germanavicius, Bucher said she’s always had that work ethic herself, since age 14. She said it’s “flexible,” but “I don’t remember when I was on vacation and what vacation is. I think when you do something you love, you don’t feel like you need vacation.”

Bucher also said that she views hard work “like a talent” and that not all smart people have it. “One of the saddest things in life is that some of the most intelligent people in the world that I know of, they just don’t work hard, right?” She also insisted that the Silicon Valley community is taking care of itself and working sustainably, despite the long hours. The founders she sees “are not unhealthy,” she said. “In fact, they’re healthier than many more people that don’t live like this.” She said people need enough sleep, some kind of exercise of sports routine, but not necessarily vacation.

There is another word for what Germanavicius and Bucher are describing: “microshifting.” A permanent shift to the workday created by remote work—workers dividing their days into many small, flexible blocks—is becoming the norm for younger generations in the workplace, often befuddling people from more traditional corporate backgrounds. Priya Rathod, Indeed Workplace Trends Editor, told Fortune that the biggest risk with microshifting is “blurred boundaries,” and “if you don’t create a structure around this, some workers feel like they’re always on.”

Rathod said there was a special need to “protect personal time” with this shift in the workday. “In the work world we’re living in, we’re working across time zones, which means you may be taking calls and not just in that 9 to 5 time period. So if you’re doing that, you need to protect other time.” She described microshifting as “kind of a partnership between the employee and their team and their manager to make sure that they aren’t doing this to the point of burnout.”

Germanavicius is one of the managers adopting an entirely new kind of management style for the world of microshifting/always on/996-adjacent schedules. He told Fortune that he encourages people to take vacation and “don’t experience the burnout, because it’s very hard to recover.” He also said he takes care to set up people who can support him, because “the company must not be dependent on me. If it’s dependent on me, then it means I’m doing a craftsmanship, not a business. The business needs to work for you, you shouldn’t work for the business.” There is a price to pay for the microshifting world, though: availability and adaptability.

No pain, no gain

“Just to be perfectly clear,” Germanavicius added, his eyes narrowing, when he takes his two weeks off after sprinting for two months, “it doesn’t mean I’m not working. It’s just that, you know, I sleep in, maybe I have out-of-office on my email,” but he’s still monitoring. He said the business is cyclical, with “peak” and “low” seasons. “So what I always ask from my team: Don’t pretend that you’re working. If you don’t have, let’s say, nothing meaningful to do. Go spend time with your family, but when we have a big fish, then we need all hands on deck, we need to be sprinting.” He said that it’s just like his Ironman training: “If I work, I work. If I do sports, I do sports … I would rather push myself to the maximum and then take some time off, and then push again.”

“No work-life balance” is the reality Preikšaitis sees at InRento—not out of negative pressure, but from a shared sense of mission. Preikšaitis credits Germanavicius as the model: “You either live with your work or there is just no balance.” He said the results are in the KPIs: zero defaults and millions of dollars in deals. Preikšaitis said he is inspired to work so hard from his parents’ stories of living under Communism. “My father, he was a director at one of the tax authorities in Lithuania. He was earning basically 20% of what I’m earning right now. And he was 45, 46 years old.”

At the same time, Preikšaitis said the distribution of wealth is getting “ridiculous” in Lithuania: “there’s a huge separation between the middle class, upper class, and the lower class” and it is very hard to live in Vilnius unless you’re a member of the professional class. yeah. “I think this is the tendency for the whole of Eastern Europe … if you want to make out a living, and you want to have at least a decent apartment, and I don’t know, let yourself travel at least two times a year, you need to work your ass off.”

Germanavicius claimed that he has gained some self-knowledge in his short but profitable, and intense-sounding career. “I am not this kind of person that takes the easy choice, and in general in life I notice that the more pressure I have, it’s easier for me to move forward.”

[This report has been updated to clarify that as of press time, Day One Ventures founder Masha Bucher was an early backer of 12 unicorns, not 11.]