Peter Steinberger spent 13 years building PSPDFKit into a bootstrapped powerhouse. Then he walked away, hit rock bottom, and found himself again - by building an AI agent in a single hour that would go on to attract 100,000 GitHub stars, survive a trademark war, and land him a job at OpenAI. --- Who Is steipete? If you were in the iOS development world anytime between 2011 and 2021, you probably know the name Peter Steinberger - or at least his handle, @steipete. Born in Austria, Steinberger studied Computer and Information Science at the Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien) before making a name for himself as one of the most respected iOS developers in the world. His open-source contributions were legendary in the Apple dev community. PSTCollectionView, a drop-in replacement for UICollectionView that worked on iOS 4.3, was used by thousands of apps. Aspects, his lightweight library for aspect-oriented programming in Objective-C, earned over 10,000 GitHub stars and became a go-to tool for method swizzling. But Steinberger's biggest achievement was PSPDFKit - a PDF framework he started as a side project in 2011. The name was classic developer humor: PS for Peter Steinberger, PDF because that's what it handled, and Kit because it was an SDK. Unlike most startup founders, he never moved to Silicon Valley. He stayed in Vienna, bootstrapped the whole thing, and was profitable from day one. Over 13 years, PSPDFKit grew from a one-person project into a global remote team of 60-70 people. Clients included Dropbox, DocuSign, SAP, IBM, and Volkswagen. Nearly a billion people used apps powered by its tools. The company didn't take outside money until 2021, when Insight Partners made a strategic investment of over EUR100 million. After the deal, Steinberger and his co-founder Martin Schurrer stepped back from day-to-day operations.

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