Things I Believe
Principles and convictions from building products and working with startups.
Ship before you're ready
The gap between idea and v1 is where all the learning lives. Perfection is procrastination in disguise. I've seen teams spend months polishing something nobody wanted, while a rough prototype could have told them that in a weekend.
Learn fast, adapt faster
Working with 10+ startups taught me one thing: the people who win aren't the smartest, they're the ones who learn and move first. Speed of learning is the ultimate competitive advantage.
Build in public
Share the process, not just the result. The messy middle is where trust is built. When you show your work — the failures, the pivots, the ugly first versions — you connect with people who are on the same journey.
Small steps > grand plans
Every product I've shipped started as a weekend experiment. Start small, ship often, let the work compound. Grand plans feel productive but they're usually just procrastination with better packaging.
Tools should feel invisible
Good software gets out of the way. If people notice the tool, it's not good enough yet. The best products I've built are the ones users don't think about — they just work.
Read widely, build narrowly
Books, articles, conversations — pull ideas from everywhere, then focus the output. The best product ideas often come from connecting dots across unrelated domains.
Optimize for learning, not outcomes
If you only work on things you know will succeed, you'll never build anything interesting. The projects that taught me the most were the ones where I had no idea what I was doing going in.
Simple beats clever
The most maintainable code I've written is the code that looks boring. Clever abstractions feel great to write and terrible to debug six months later. Choose clarity over cleverness, always.