Starting to write here

Last week I had a conversation that bothered me for two days.

A friend who's been thinking about leaving his job asked me a question I'd answered for myself, very clearly, about five years ago. He wanted my version of it. I started to answer. Then I realized something embarrassing: I couldn't remember the answer. I remembered making the decision. I remembered being sure about it. The actual reasoning, the part that had made it click for me, was gone.

I made something up on the spot. It was probably close to what I'd thought at the time. But it bothered me for two reasons.

The first was that I'd been wrong about something specific maybe a dozen times in those five years, and one of those wrong-then-corrected views had almost certainly informed the decision he was asking about. I just couldn't tell him which one.

The second was that, even if my reconstructed answer was technically fine, he had taken time out of his day to ask me. And I'd given him a polished version of a thought I no longer actually remembered having.

That's roughly why this site exists.

What I'm going to do here

Mostly write down things while I still remember them.

A lot of what ends up here is going to be about product and technology, because that's where most of my attention has been for the last few years. There'll also be a fair bit about the trade itself: building businesses, running teams, the parts of work that people don't usually post about on LinkedIn. I've been at this since I was sixteen, building things badly first and slightly less badly later, and there's a backlog of things I want to write down before they fade the way that decision did.

A handful of themes I expect to keep coming back to:

• AI inside real workflows, not AI as a topic on its own. Most of how my team and I work today already runs through it, and the interesting parts are much quieter than the discourse around them.
• Community and trust as substrate. Almost every durable thing I've worked on was built on those two long before it was built on funding. I keep finding that pattern in other people's stories too.
• What scales and what doesn't. I've watched a team I was close to go from seven people to a hundred and forty and back to about forty in three years. Some of what worked at one size completely stopped working at the next. I want to write that down too, while it's still vivid.

What I'm not going to do here

I'm not going to write the things-you-must-know post. There are enough of those, and most of them are written by people who haven't actually done what they're recommending.

I'm not going to write about things I haven't done. If a piece here sounds confident, it's because I spent enough cycles being wrong about the same thing first.

And I'm not going to pretend the answers are tidy. A lot of what I want to write about is unresolved on purpose, because the honest version is unresolved. Tidy lessons usually mean somebody is leaving out the part where they were confused for six months.