The End is Nearly Always a Beginning:

All the best movies start at the end. And the end of something is usually the start of something else. After nearly a decade immersed in the social enterprise and corporate worlds, I'm stepping back into the entrepreneurial space where I can work across a far greater set of mediums and interests in a much freer, less regulated way. It's an unpaid adventure at this point, but one that feels necessary and exciting.

I've been deep into the corporate world for the last nearly 5 years helping to grow a tiny start-up in the healthcare space into a profitable and fast growing scale-up, which has gone through two rounds of private investment.

The experience has been incredibly educational—I've learned a bucket load about building teams, mentoring, and enjoyed working with an excellent groups ofpeople. There have been moments of genuine joy and satisfaction, alongside the inevitable challenges that come with any start-up journey.

But bureaucracy isn't deeply in my roots. The corporate world is built around things like values, virtues, alignments, and opinions - disagree and commit. However, what really matters to me is clear strategy, human centric management and understanding the customer and how to serve them in a way that benefits the business.

With a technological revolution unfolding around us, I wanted to be hands-on with it, but my bureaucratic role only allowed me to tell other people how to be involved. That simply wasn't rewarding enough, so the itch grew until it was time to part ways.

Learning

My corporate journey taught me invaluable lessons about team dynamics, leadership, and organizational psychology. I discovered that the best way to predict the future is to look at what hasn't changed for a long time—it's probably the only reliable thing. People still have problems to solve, and the emerging technologies are ripe to solve those problems. Businesses still struggle with being run by imperfect people with vague strategies, complex egos, and the inability to understand their own shortcomings.

The experience also revealed my unique position: having written code for 25 years and built thousands of products, then moving into management for 5 years while maintaining a burning desire to create and build. This combination of technical depth and leadership experience gives me a rare perspective on both the technical and human sides of product development.

Meaning

This transition represents more than just a career change—it's about aligning my work with my core values and creative drive. The opportunity cost of staying in a comfortable middle management role was too great considering what I might not achieve. While the decisions affect others, they weren't taken in haste. I'm aware of the impact on those close to me and those I worked with, but the pull toward hands-on creation and innovation was too strong to ignore.

The technological revolution happening now is too significant to observe from the sidelines. I want to be directly involved in building the tools and systems that will shape our future. This isn't about rejecting corporate life entirely—it's about finding the right balance between structure and creativity, between following established processes and forging new paths.

Application

My immediate plan is to dive deep into what I'm calling "Vibe Engineering"—a pretentious name for people who feel uncomfortable delegating code-writing responsibilities to machines. I don't share that discomfort. I'll upskill myself on the new software and tooling paradigms, mastering the modern JavaScript stack including Node, Next.js, and MongoDB.

The first step is building a blog and starting to build in public. While I'm not naturally a public person, I'll figure out how to share my journey and learnings while maintaining enough privacy and authenticity. After that, I'll focus on building consumer-facing products, starting with group decision making focused around individuals, couples, friends, and families.

The underlying potential lies in taking this technology and applying it to teams within businesses. Imagine being able to import your co-workers and bosses into a system, run ideas and pitches before them, and receive reliable indications of how they might approach choices. This could enable tactical positioning and better decision-making in complex organizational environments.

The journey ahead is uncertain but rich with possibility. Every ending is indeed a beginning, and this one feels like the start of something truly exciting.