This interview is with Marco Kohns, CEO & Founder, MyPassion.AI.
For readers at Connectively.us, how would you introduce yourself as a CEO and founder working at the intersection of marketing, analytics, and AI-driven career discovery, and what you focus on at MyPassion.ai?
Marco founded MyPassion.AI after a decade working at the intersection of growth, product management, and applied generative AI.
He writes and edits every career guide on the site personally, bringing together real quiz-response data with published research on motivation, flow, and labor markets.
What path took you from growth marketing and product strategy to founding MyPassion.ai, including the inflection points that most shaped your approach to career fit?
I went through the “what should I actually do with my life” search myself, moving from an operator role at a Silicon Valley scale-up (Series A→B and active in 100+ countries) to applied AI research and, eventually, founding a project I am truly aligned with.
I completed my MSc at NOVA IMS Lisbon (graduated 18/20, German 1.0). My thesis on generative AI for growth was published in the Journal of Business Research (Q1).
I also enjoy teaching and regularly host executive education seminars on applied generative AI across Europe. I write about career discovery on mypassion.ai, which is my focus project as founder and CEO.
Building on your AI and predictive analytics background, what is one method you use to turn a person’s strengths and preferences into reliable career-matching signals that readers could mimic in their own self-assessments?
We always use data-driven approaches. We approach career discovery like a science. Instead of guesswork, we use data and controlled real-life experiments to find career matches that truly align with everyones unique personality, strengths, and character.
Once fit is identified, how do you bring in BLS and O*NET data on growth, openings, and wages to validate direction without letting salary tables drive the choice?
We do not want to suggest arbitrary or unrealistic careers.
Your future path should be aligned with past experiences and with real market demand—what companies are actually hiring for. Many people may have a passion for football, but the number of people pursuing this passion and actually making a living from it is less than 1%. We take this into consideration when creating a realistic roadmap that works in the real world.
Zooming into fields you know best—marketing analytics, growth, and product—what signals tell you a newcomer is likely to thrive in each?
From my perspective, it comes down to curiosity and how much this field aligns with the natural fit of the person working in it.
The way to find this out is usually whether you feel like something truly gives you energy while you are working on it, versus feeling drained afterwards. Combine this with genuine curiosity and apply it in real life either through an internship or a smaller-scale course; you will quickly find out if this career path is actually for you.
Can you share one specific career match from your platform that surprised you, what data shifted the recommendation, and what real-world outcome followed?
For me, I was surprised that mypassion.ai suggested entrepreneurship to me, as this was the exact path I am taking now. Looking back at my childhood patterns, I always created new systems from scratch. Reflecting this in my life today, I am not built to fit into existing systems and structures but rather to build new systems. Entrepreneurship is one of the very promising career paths that factor this in, and I can confidently say I genuinely enjoy what I am doing.
If you were crafting a five-question AI quiz to help a student shortlist career fields, what would be the very first question you would ask and why?
Looking back over the last week, what has given you energy, and what has rather drained you?
From a go-to-market and international teams perspective, what have you learned about keeping career-matching models valid across cultures, languages, and labor markets?
For now, we mainly focus on the U.S. market and Europe.
These Western cultures are very similar yet different in some ways. For example, Germans seek more security and stability, while some markets, like the U.S., have higher expectations to ‘make it big’.
For readers planning a career pivot in the next 90 days, what is the smallest real-world experiment you recommend to test fit before investing time or money?
The biggest lever is to actually try your potential “passion” path in real life. Only by actually doing it will you understand whether the path is for you or not.
Get out of planning mode and into doing — try it out there in the arena of real life; this is where life is being played.
If you realize this path is not for you, do not be discouraged; continue trying! Most valuable things in life require iteration and time until we get them right.