Engineering Design Society
- ENG DES Talk Series: Dmitro Khroma Queens Building, LT 1.18 Tuesday 06-10-2026 - 13:00 until Tuesday 06-10-2026 - 13:50
ENG DES Talk Series: Dmitro Khroma
Follow Your Passion Is Bad Advice - Behind the scenes of building a hardware startup
Dmitro Khroma
At 21, Dimi Khroma deferred his final year of Engineering Design at Bristol to start an e-bike company with a guy he'd met on placement. He had no passion or experience with e-bikes and no idea if it would work.
Eight years on, Swytch Bike had shipped 100,000+ conversion kits, done $80M in revenue and grown to 75 people, and he'd done every job in it at some point. The passion and the growth came from taking action and building, not from searching.
He'll walk the whole arc: selling cookies in the school playground, founding the Engineering Design Society, finding his co-founder at Cambridge Consultants, the deferral, the early Swytch years, hypergrowth, burnout, and what he does now. Including the parts that never make the pitch deck.
Three things he'll argue for:
- Passion is built by doing, not found by searching.
- Nobody is self-made. Everything great gets built alongside awesome people.
- The only decision rule worth having at 21: pick whatever you'll learn the most from, even when it's risky.
Half the session is open Q&A. Bring questions about placements, start-ups, risk, money, direction or burnout.
Speaker Bio:
Dmitro (Dimi) Khroma is co-founder and former CTO of Swytch Bike, the world's best-selling e-bike conversion kit — built across the UK and Asia through record-breaking crowdfunding, a supply chain crisis and the downsizing that followed.
He's now a fractional CTO and NPI advisor to early-stage hardware companies, and coaches founders and technical leaders through burnout. He designs and delivers leadership workshops for the Royal Academy of Engineering and Deep Science Ventures.
Staying for the evening? Dimi and Ivey Norton are running Leading Under Pressure at 5pm — three hours, on your feet, working out who you become when things get hard.
Venue/Timing
Venue : Queens Building, LT 1.18
Type: Alcohol Free Events, Free, Society Events, Talks and Lectures
Start Date: Tuesday 06-10-2026 - 13:00
End date: Tuesday 06-10-2026 - 13:50
Capacity: 75
Location
Contact Details
engdes-committee@bristol.ac.uk
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