New Chapters

New chapters. This is sort of anticlimactic because there’s not a company announcement or update (spoiler: I’m building AGI now 😉). I’m moving on from the consulting work I’ve been doing in the past ~year (while still maintaining the personal projects and upstarts and growing those with a few friends) because I found a role that I couldn’t turn down, and I couldn’t be more excited.

I can’t talk about it fully yet, but it’s very exciting. It’s a new thing. A thing that’s never been done before 🙂. It’s something scaling where I can use my engineering / product / management skills, build something impactful, and work with people I’m very excited about. We should have something soonish on public updates.

I’ll probably write more about my learnings from the last ~4 years building early stage in the coming months. It was both the hardest but also most rewarding period of my life. I’ll forever be grateful for the opportunity to work with so many amazing technologists, customers, and entrepreneurs (and won’t be fully stopping!). This afternoon as I reflect on it it’s nothing but gratitude for the friends, mentors, and lessons learned. It made me who I am today and I’m so proud of that journey.

I think if I had one takeaway for the prospective entrepreneur, it would be this: do it for the right reasons. Money is a bad reason to do startups. So is personal growth or challenge. You should build a product (and resulting company) because you have so much conviction that there’s no alternative. It’s going to lead to both the most joy and pain you will ever experience. It’ll mean losing your ego, leaning into the feeling of “I don’t know, but I’d like to find out“, “failure“ (whatever that means), and the constant stress of building something you love so much.

At the beginning I could build technology and product, but the process taught me to be a better and more genuine human, how to judge markets, stand up for what’s right, follow my convictions, and never give up. Most companies become extensions of the people who build them, so feeling good internally is a good path to building something meaningful externally. This is how it should be but many of us get caught up in the race of who raised from who, who’s “crushing it“ and what the outward appearance is. Instead, find ways to be grateful for the journey, whether your company lasts 1 year, 10 years, or 100+ they all eventually change to the point where they can’t be recognized and in the moment it can be hard to realize how magic it is with that small team excited about an idea.

I will still be doing some things in indie projects, but mostly around things I’ve already built. There are a few (wrenchdesk.ai, slackmoji.ai) that are scaling without me, which is amazing!

If you’re in my network reading this: a heartfelt thank you! There are too many good friends to call out, but it’s been an amazing ride and I appreciate all of the support along the way.

Onwards.