Our CEO, Jan Sapper, on discipline, inheritance, and the work that shapes you.
In April 2026, in the middle of Guatemala City, an opera that shouldn’t really exist is taking the stage.
It’s Pagliacci at Teatro Lux. It’s a niche opera in a small Central American country, produced and performed by Karin Rademann, a woman who didn’t even start singing seriously until her mid‑20s. It’s one of her final major productions. And behind the scenes, Jan, her son and founder of Paperlike, is quietly helping to make it happen.
For Jan, this isn’t a marketing stunt. It’s something closer to a childhood promise coming full circle.
“As a kid,” he remembers, “I had this crazy thought: someday I will buy the Guatemalan National Theater and my mother will be able to sing there. I wanted to produce The Phantom of the Opera.”
He laughs now at how impossible, and slightly unethical, the idea was. Buying a national theater and monopolizing it is one thing. And Phantom is a musical, not an opera.
But the impulse behind that fantasy never left: create a stage big enough for his mother’s craft.
Today, he’s doing the closest version of that he can live with: sponsoring her own production, on her own terms.
“I told my team, sponsoring this production is a nepotism move,” he says. “I’m doing something for my family and I’m going to force this. Because I want to talk to the audience about what I experienced watching my mother pursue music.”
From the outside, it’s a concert with two performance dates, 22 and 24 April 2026, in a city most readers will never visit. But for Jan, it’s the visible tip of decades of discipline, practice, and stubborn love for a craft. It’s also a mirror for the work he does every day.
What people miss about high‑level craft
Ask Jan what people misunderstand about performing at that level, and he doesn’t start with opera technique. He starts with how easily we undervalue any form of serious craft.
“Artists in general are misunderstood,” he says. “If you’re a singer, a painter, a poet, a writer – it’s really easy for people to underestimate what got you there.”
He thinks of friends who design logos for a living. To an outsider, they’re “just making a logo.” To the friend asking for a favour, it’s: can you just do a logo for my company? Or worse: never mind, I’ll make one with AI.
“It took them years to get to that level,” Jan says. “So when someone comes and says, ‘Hey, could you just do a logo for me?’ they’re undervaluing not just the output, but the entire journey of getting good enough to make something that looks that simple.”
Opera is no different. What an audience sees is a few hours under bright lights, a voice that somehow hits impossible notes night after night. What they don’t see are the thousands of hours of practice, the muscle memory, the constant micro‑adjustments.
Jan is careful here. He doesn’t call himself an artist in the traditional sense, but he does recognise the same pattern in his own work.
“I pretentiously like to say that I’m an artist too,” he says. “My medium is not what you’d traditionally call art. My medium is creating products, creating companies, solving problems. And that has the same thing – it’s easy to underestimate what it takes to stay on top of things, to always iterate, to make the absolute best you can.”
Whether you’re designing a logo, singing Pagliacci, or building a company, it’s the same equation: years of deliberate practice + nuance + unseen labour. Tools can help, but they don’t do the work for you.
Growing up with discipline that didn’t look like “discipline”
If you ask Jan about discipline, he doesn’t start with schedules or self‑help frameworks. He starts with a feeling: how the word “discipline” used to sound wrong to him.
“As a kid – and even as an adult – I would have said discipline is something that gets forced on you,” he says. “You think of a disciplinarian teacher, a disciplinarian parent. It feels limiting, imposed from others, negative.”
The strange part is that his childhood was full of discipline. He just didn’t recognise it as such.
His mother started singing late, at least by the standards of classical music. She was in her mid‑20s. Jan was small, “maybe five,” when she began. His earliest memories are of being surrounded by musicians she brought into their home, creating the community she didn’t find elsewhere.
One of those memories is lying under a chair while a famous cellist rehearsed, feeling the deep vibrations of the instrument move through his whole body. Another is hearing his mother practice, every single day, treating her voice like what it is: a muscle.
“For singing, the voice is a muscle,” he explains. “You have to have muscle memory to hit notes. You have to have the voice in the right spot, with the airflow, to hit the spots. It’s a combination of airflow and muscle memory. So it’s essential to practice a lot.”
What struck him later wasn’t just how often she practiced, but how she practiced: self‑driven, not externally enforced. No one was standing over her with a stopwatch. No one was forcing her to do scales. She did it because this was her craft, her passion, her way of pursuing beauty.
“I did experience lots of discipline from my mother pursuing her passion,” Jan says. “But I never connected the word discipline to what she was doing. The value stuck, the understanding stuck – just not the label.”
That distinction matters. For many people, discipline feels like an external pressure: something you survive for the sake of a distant payoff. In his mother’s case, discipline was simply what it looked like to care deeply about something and to act accordingly, every day.
Inheriting more than a work ethic
When Jan talks about what he inherited from his mother, he doesn’t list techniques. He talks about posture.
First, there’s the willingness to do something niche in an environment where it doesn’t obviously “fit.”
“Guatemala is a small country in Central America,” he says. “Opera is not an obvious choice of passion there. It’s quite niche. Even 100 years ago, opera was niche. So imagine today.”
There was no established opera scene to plug into, no conservatory with a ready‑made network of peers. So his mother built what she needed. She hosted singers in their home. She invited teachers. She taught younger students herself. The piano in their house became a gathering point.
“She created a whole community of people around the passion of singing, of opera,” Jan says. “That’s something I also learned: bringing people together and creating a community when there is none.”
Second, there’s the standard she quietly set for herself, and by extension, for him. She wasn’t chasing some static perfection. She was always looking at the stage she was at and asking: am I doing the absolute best I can, here, now?
Jan does the same thing with his own work.
“At every stage, I want to be able to look back at my past self and say: I was doing my absolute best then,” he says. “And today, I want my future self to be proud of what I’m doing now.”
That doesn’t mean grinding himself into the ground. Opera taught him something else: recovery is part of the craft.
“With opera, you physically can’t push yourself too much,” he says. “If you overdo it, your voice breaks. You have to recover. So I indirectly learned that recovery is part of the process. Even if you’re pursuing the best you can, you also have to let go and recover.”
Taken together, those lessons have shaped how he builds and leads Paperlike: create the environment you need, ignore what people think of your niche, hold yourself to a quiet high standard, and respect your limits.
Talent, “merely good,” and the love of the process
Next, Jan takes a detour into talent. It sounds abstract at first, but it’s really another way of talking about discipline.
“In my opinion,” he says, “people with talent have a bigger difficulty than people with less talent to achieve greatness.”
It’s not that talent is bad. It’s that talent can delay the moment of struggle.
“For people with talent, it takes a long time until they start getting challenged,” he explains. “They can coast. Their peers have to work harder to reach their level. When the peers catch up and have an upward trajectory, those with talent haven’t built the muscle of striving.”
If you’ve never had to push, he argues, it’s difficult to suddenly start when you finally hit your ceiling. You might stay “good” indefinitely, but good is where you stop. The ones who started lower, who had to grind, often end up going further.
“So what separates someone who is good from someone who dedicates their life to a craft?” he asks. “It’s the trajectory of always striving for the best you can do.”
That applies just as much to founding a company as it does to singing. Talent might get you to a prototype, a first sale, a bit of traction. What carries you through decades is something else entirely: love for the process itself.
To sustain a high level of work, he says, you have to actually enjoy the doing. Not just the idea of having done it.
Practicing consciously
If there’s one thing Jan took from listening to years of vocal warm‑ups and rehearsal arias, it’s that not all practice is equal.
“Some people practice and they just do tone tests – la la la – and then they say, ‘I did it, check, check, check, done,’” he says. “But they have no check‑ins, no recording themselves, no listening back. If you don’t practice consciously, you can even make things worse.”
His mother didn’t just run through exercises and call it a day. She recorded herself, listened critically, and was honest about what didn’t work.
“She would say, ‘Oh no, I didn’t hit that note,’” he recalls. “I listened to all her practice, so I would notice that too and say, ‘Yeah, you didn’t hit that note, but the rest was perfect.’”
The humility to admit a miss, and the curiosity to ask what to do differently next time, is its own kind of discipline. It’s also a habit that transfers cleanly into modern creative and knowledge work: build, review, adjust. Don’t just tick boxes.
Sometimes it’s even better not to “practice” than to repeat something badly and encode the wrong pattern.
Learning discipline later in life
All of this raises a question: if Jan didn’t even recognise what his parents were modeling as “discipline” at the time, is discipline something you can only absorb early? Or can you learn it later?
He believes you can learn it, but the framing matters.
“I know enough people who categorically see discipline as a negative thing,” he says. “Difficult, emotionally expensive, limiting, constraining. They have a natural pushback against discipline.”
What made it easier for him was seeing discipline attached to something that clearly mattered to the person doing it. Not to an external checklist or someone else’s idea of success.
“If discipline is just ‘what you have to do because the checkboxes tell you to,’ it will feel limiting,” he says. “But if it’s you pursuing it, and it’s just the practice of exercising what you’re doing, that feels easy.”
He uses his own path to Paperlike as an example. Before there was an idea, there was a habit.
“The first thing I did before starting Paperlike was give myself a job,” he says. “Every single day, for two hours, sit down and do whatever I need to do to explore the question: what business can I start?”
He did that for months. No grand vision, no guaranteed payoff. Just a disciplined daily appointment with his own curiosity, anchored in the belief that building something was his medium.
Eventually, that process led him to a problem he faced for years and felt uniquely motivated to solve: going paperless on an iPad without losing the tactile control he needed to write. His own handwriting was bad enough on paper. On a slippery glass screen, it fell apart completely. So he set out to change the surface.
But the important part, in his mind, is what came before the idea.
“It didn’t start with a genius idea,” he says. “It started with discipline. With two hours a day, every day, into creating my own business – whatever that was going to be.”
A “positive form of nepotism”
In the Slack thread where this story began, Jan joked about what they were doing with his mother’s opera: “a positive form of nepotism.”
He means it. He’s clear with his team that part of this is personal. He wants to support his mother’s work while she’s still producing operas at this scale. He wants to celebrate what she achieved, in a place where opera was never the obvious choice.
“For me, it’s a very special privilege to be able to support one of her last opera productions in Guatemala,” he says. “It gives me huge pride to be able to do that.”
When he watches her perform now, he doesn’t just see a soloist under lights. He sees the long arc behind it.
“I see everything she created around it,” he says. “She’ll be on stage, but she’ll be surrounded by a lot of people who would never have been there if it hadn’t been for her. People who love opera. People who love someone in the production. A whole world that she created out of nothing.”
He also sees himself as a kid again, going backstage after performances and giving her feedback with the blunt honesty of a child.
“I’d say, ‘Hey Mom, you made a mistake here, but everything was great,’” he remembers. “And she’d say, ‘Oh, you noticed.’”
Those small scenes, the cello vibrations under the chair, the daily practice at the piano, the shared post‑performance debriefs, are part of what he’s trying to honour now.
And in the background, there’s a broader belief: that the pursuit of beauty in any form is worth defending. That opera singers in Guatemala, athletes in small towns, designers, engineers, writers, anyone who is quietly, stubbornly trying to make something better, share more than they might think.
“If you strive for the pursuit of beauty in whatever context you’re in, we have to celebrate that,” he says. “It’s more explicit with art, because the pursuit of beauty is front and center. But you can apply it everywhere.”
Coming back to the stage
Pagliacci at Teatro Lux will happen twice in April 2026. Most people reading this will never see it. That’s okay. The point isn’t to fill a theatre.
The point is that a woman in Guatemala decided, decades ago, to take her voice seriously. She built the environment she needed. She practiced with care. She created a community where none existed. And a small boy lying under a chair, feeling the vibrations of a cello, absorbed all of it.
Years later, that boy grew up, started a company, and is still trying to live up to the standard she quietly set: do your best with what you have, where you are. Create the context you need. Rest when you must. And don’t worry too much about whether your passion makes obvious sense to everyone else.
For Jan, supporting this opera is less about closing a childhood loop and more about recognizing where his own discipline came from, and where it continues to be shaped, every time the curtain goes up.
