For most of my 20’s I was lost. I had an amazing time in high school - and then to save money went to a state school for college, and didn’t really find my people. I was stuck in scarcity mindset, and I didn’t believe in myself. For years I was depressed, without even knowing it. I always wanted to start a business, from a young age. But fear held me back. Read more...

I’m so lucky now that I’m able to meet a lot of inspiring people, many of them founders in some sense of the word. If they’re not now, they will be within a few years. This wasn’t true a year ago. Twitter really opened up an entire world to me, that I had been missing my whole life without knowing it was there. I’m lucky enough now to have friends doing incredibly interesting work. Read more...

This site is going to be a journal on my path to freedom from W2 wagie land. However in the meantime (and until we have our wedding next year), I do have a challenging day job. This past few weeks I’ve had a difficult problem - basically trying to use Amazon’s S3 as a real time time series database. Whole companies have been founded building this product! But we want to do it for cheap, which means no expensive Databricks contracts! Read more...

I attended a good panel on technology and government tonight. Michael Kratsios was on the panel and had an interesting perspective - you could see the Thiel in him. thiel has a certain way of imprinting on his mentee’s. The panel provoked two ideas in me: That I can’t do it alone Institutions exist and need to be manned I’m going to focus on the first - that you can’t do things alone. Read more...

How do you find problems to work on? There’s probably more content on this than anything else for startups. But this blog is about how I do things, and I’m eternally trying to favor action over reading. Reading endless content isn’t how you do something, action is. If you tell people you’re quitting your job soon, the first thing they’ll ask you - “What are you going to build?” In some ways “I haven’t the slightest clue” is a great answer. Read more...

I have a really good W2 job. I work on renewable energy, at scale. It’s both good for the world (I hope), and absolutely fascinating engineering. We use functional programming, and I love it. Completely changed how I think about programming. It’s the closest I’ve felt to playing Factorio IRL. My director and VP are amazing. My VP is the smartest person I’ve ever worked with. Insane recall. My director is the incredibly compassionate and excels at engineering strategy. Read more...