We live in a simulation
Build like you believe it.
Build like you’re gonna raise a fortune.
like Pixel Vault, where I built the founding applications that raised $100M and their legendary digital collectables worth $250M
When I began at Pixel Vault, the company was brand new with just a few people.
Three artists and designers, among them Chris Wahl, a veteran artist from DC Comics.
The success of Wahl's art suddenly gave the owner a ton of homework in building out a massive technological roadmap.
That was great except they had no tech team at all.
I found this out in one, simple exchange:
“What do you want me to work on?”
“What can you do?”
The truth was I was so new that I didn't even know. All I knew is that I wanted to work on everything and they were offering it. However, users deserve a dedicated engineer handling their money, so I drew the line there. What that left was the entire web stack. I got to choose, so vanilla html, css, js, php, and postgres.
So the team of programmers consisted of me and one other guy for about a year. In that time we raised an absurd amount of money while receiving unprovoked accolades from users about how well our software worked. I remember one user asking if we were using an atomic clock to launch. They were close. I was just running a deploy script a couple seconds before the deadline so it would go live at the exact time. I'll never forget the thrill of hitting that deploy button. Nor the thrill of getting on a screen share with a user to work through an issue with them.
A little after that first year we had become a team of over a hundred people, many of whom are my friends to this day.
“What do you want me to work on?”
“What can you do?”
The truth was I was so new that I didn't even know. All I knew is that I wanted to work on everything and they were offering it. However, users deserve a dedicated engineer handling their money, so I drew the line there. What that left was the entire web stack. I got to choose, so vanilla html, css, js, php, and postgres.
So the team of programmers consisted of me and one other guy for about a year. In that time we raised an absurd amount of money while receiving unprovoked accolades from users about how well our software worked. I remember one user asking if we were using an atomic clock to launch. They were close. I was just running a deploy script a couple seconds before the deadline so it would go live at the exact time. I'll never forget the thrill of hitting that deploy button. Nor the thrill of getting on a screen share with a user to work through an issue with them.
A little after that first year we had become a team of over a hundred people, many of whom are my friends to this day.
Build for a bold new future.
The kind of future envisioned at Joii AI.
I was brought on to speed up a project that had begun to slow down.
Instead, I unified their team, became their CTO, and shipped a new flagship product.
None of that was my plan at the start.
Joii was working on an AI chat bot at the time.
Their twist on it was input was using audio/video as the medium of communication both ways.
It was a fun idea but each person building this was going a different direction.
Each of them were completely opposed to the next person's ideas.
So, I spoke to them all separately twice.
Once to hear their unfiltered thoughts about the team and again to share their teammate's perspective.
It was on that second visit with each team member, that I people began to make compromises.
Then I held an all hands meeting about the project and watched the dominoes fall.
Finally we had one idea and code began shipping.