Look What I Built

For most of my career I built what other people told me to build. Then I started building what I actually needed, and stopped asking permission first. Five companies later, the best summary I have of the last few years is three words: look what I built. Not as a brag. As proof.

Proof beats permission

There’s a moment in any reinvention where you’re waiting for the green light, the credential, the someone-in-charge to say you’re allowed. I waited a long time. What finally moved me wasn’t confidence. It was deciding that the surviving had to count for something, and the only way to prove it was to build.

So I built the things I wished existed

• A media brand for people who’ve been written off and refuse to disappear.
• A reset app I wanted for my own health. No supplements, no hype.
• A directory for the kind of intellectually serious events I could never find in one place.
• A weekend lifestyle tool, and a membership for people doing the work in real time.

None of them started as a business plan. They started as a need I had and assumed other people shared. They did.

The point isn’t the five companies

The point is that I’m the same person who spent years in a hospital waiting room, certain my building days were behind me. They weren’t. Nothing you survive is wasted, and the most direct way to believe that about yourself is to make something and watch it work.

You don’t find out what you’re still capable of by thinking about it. You find out by building it.

What would you build if you stopped waiting?

That’s not rhetorical. The thing you keep almost-starting is usually the thing. Build the smallest possible version this month, then point at it and say the three words. And if you want help getting it out of your head, that’s literally my job.