Year of Discovery

After exiting FirstQuadrant, I find myself at a crossroads that’s both scary and liberating. For the first time in a decade, I have a clean slate: I’m not pivoting, no longer racing against a runway, not trying to make something work; I can actually choose what’s next based on what resonates most.

I want to explore ideas. Carlo and I are spending a few hours every other day thinking about new concepts, talking to users, and validating problems. But this time, I’m not rushing to build. I need to find something I deeply care about, something that resonates strongly with me as a person, something worth committing the next five years to.

Secondly, I want to learn from people smarter than me. After a decade as a solo technical founder in a small team, I’m interested in other startups. I want to work with other really smart engineers, and I’m genuinely curious about what I’ll learn when I’m not one of the two people making every call.

Finally, I want to discover who I am without a company. For ten years, I’ve had a simple answer to “what do you do?” and now I don’t. That identity shift is stranger than I expected, and I need to sit with that discomfort. I want to explore interests beyond startups, read broadly without everything tying back to building a company, and do the internal work of understanding what actually matters to me.

Read the full blog post 2026 will be the Year of Discovery.