Startups are complex. There is a fuck ton of money, pressure, and time spent together. Some people resonate cohesively, and others explode, and will take you out with them. You need to really know who you’re getting in the plane with — who you’re trusting your company with, and how they think about what you need to do to make this worth their while.

I fell in love, like anyone does. By seeing Vivienne Westwood earrings on the internet 2 years ago. My first thought was, “oh my god, these earrings look like tiny planets — they’re perfect for my completely space themed wardrobe." My second thought was, “Jesus fuck — these earrings are $300”.

Searches for people are about time and how to best manage it: it’s not only the search process itself, but the passing of information, onboarding people, admin of social media, and so on. It’s a job on top of a job managing an incredibly stressful situation. But, there’s unique pieces of this puzzle that have yet to be meaningfully solved.

I used to think that the pinnacle of my life was to do something with pain, and now I know the real answer is to accept it without letting it rule you. The goal is to not try to banish the pain from the room, but to give it a place. There is no running from pain, there is no endpoint to suffering. There is just finding a place to put it down.

Social media has been evolving into another form of weaponry for school shooters. Schools now simply shut down when an anonymous account posts vaguely threatening messages, or pre-existing shooters are turned into figureheads within online communities. We have to confront the fact that the cycle of violence is enabled more easily with technology. But, the solution might not lie there.

I’m doing something harder than restarting a company: forcing myself to take a break. Dreaming up technical diagrams could happen in my sleep, because that’s not the hard part to me. The true hard shit is knowing I have this immense desire that’s been burning since I was 13, and not seceding to it.

Every day, the inner sanctums of humanity become more and more barren. More cruel, visceral, laced with torment and pain. Humans are animals, and no greater than any other animal at that. Yet, we live, thrive, and have spread everywhere. You know what else has? Orcas.

Back in the 2000’s, the internet stood for freedom of movement, speech, information, and access. Everything could be changed because everything on the internet was available. You wouldn’t have to go to school, or memorize multiplications tables, you would just simply learn things on the internet or go to it for answers. It’s 2024, so how is the dream of internet intellectual freedom holding up? Uh. Well, about that.

I lost my childhood dream that I started at 16 of helping millions of people have better lives through tech. And then I did shrooms.

There is a certain brutality in creating a company. Business is not about economic transactions as much as it is a framework for making decisions. That framework is rather simple: get money, buy stuff that makes you money, sell the things, cut back on what you buy if you’re not making enough. It’s a framework that standalone makes sense, but it’s also a framework that when viewed in isolation leads to dehumanization. These are the perfect conditions that cause harm.

You know about them. Maybe you’ve been in some. These are the rooms where people talk to people and make decisions that affect the lives of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of people. I didn’t want power 3–4 years ago. I thought it was corrupting, self-aggrandizing, and a path to a seat at human reality I didn’t want to experience. Now, I still think all of those things. But I know I need it.

As CTO, I sit through and I minimize someone’s entire work history and intelligence into a paper that tells me if it would fit into our business needs. I do what I have to do for the sake of the company.

Similar to the US government, instead of making moves towards AI safety, Google has announced a roadmap to accomplish AI safety. There is a difference in between achieving something, and saying that you are doing things to achieve something. It is amazing we have tangible examples of frameworks. But it is also not enough.

TikTok threatens the one thing our government cares about more than dunking on each other for donor brownie points: self-preservation, and the continuation of American cultural dominance. The real fear from TikTok isn’t in the security risk. It’s the ability to uncontrollably determine who sees what, in a world where we can’t see it all.

How we used simple UI/UX changes to convince homeowners to prepare their homes for disaster.