jQuery prototype inherited 2016, rebuilt from scratch on React + Laravel · algorithm-driven EU261 eligibility, qualified cases routed to lawyers · 1M+ claims across all EU airlines and jurisdictions · €100M+ recovered · top 10 Hamburg startup.
Under EU Regulation 261, passengers on delayed or cancelled flights are owed up to €600 in compensation — and airlines are structurally uninterested in volunteering it. MyFlyRight built the machine that claims it for them. When we joined in 2016, that machine was a jQuery prototype: a proof that the idea worked, and proof of nothing else.
I led the engagement as technical program lead over a long arc — the prototype-to-platform rebuild and the years of scale that followed. The pattern was the one I've run everywhere: I curated the program, owned what got built and in what order, coached the leads, and kept the founders' legal-market strategy and the engineering plan pointed at the same target. PMs carried the routine; the decisions that would still matter in year five stayed with me.
Legal tech sharpens that role, because the product decisions are legal decisions. Every jurisdiction and airline pairing behaves differently, and encoding that reality is exactly the kind of work that goes wrong when engineers guess at it alone.
We didn't renovate the jQuery prototype — we retired it and built the platform from scratch on React and Laravel. The core is the claims wizard: a passenger enters their flight, and an algorithm-driven eligibility assessment decides in real time whether they have a case worth pursuing. Cases that qualify route directly to lawyers.
That triage engine is the whole business. Send lawyers junk and the unit economics die; reject valid claims and you're leaving the product's reason to exist on the table. Getting the assessment right — across all EU airlines, all jurisdictions, and the regulation's genuinely messy case law — was the program's center of gravity for years. It's also a perfect example of why the curation role exists: no single sprint ever makes eligibility logic better, but five years of consistent attention does.
The platform has processed over one million claims across all EU airlines and jurisdictions, and recovered more than €100 million for passengers. MyFlyRight became one of the top 10 Hamburg-based startups.
One million claims is the number I'd put on the engagement's tombstone. A prototype handles a demo; a platform handles the millionth claim the same way it handled the first, under a regulation that airlines have every incentive to contest. The distance between those two states is what the 2016 rebuild decision — scrap, don't renovate — bought.
Know when a prototype has finished its job. The jQuery version wasn't a mistake; it validated the market for the price of a prototype. The mistake would have been asking it to become the platform. Founders often feel the sunk cost — we made the call early that validation code and production code are different artifacts with different jobs, and the second one deserves its own foundation.
And in any domain with an adversary — and an airline avoiding payouts is an adversary — precision is the product. Features are negotiable. The eligibility engine being right was not.
Engagement: 2016 onward · jQuery prototype rebuilt from scratch on React + Laravel · algorithm-driven claims eligibility, direct routing to lawyers · 1M+ claims across all EU airlines and jurisdictions · €100M+ recovered · top 10 Hamburg startup.
