September Update
No plan survives contact with reality
A few folks have asked how Customer Development is going for Tetra Compute.
As I was researching the What the Hell is an MHP post, I was also:
Talking with a bunch of folks at existing MHPs, competitors included. I wanted to get a feel for their products and engineering perspectives - what makes them special? Talking to your competitors before they’re your competitors is an underrated hack for developing Customer Development questions
Learning how to be dangerous with Apollo and Instantly for automated email outbound. I didn’t have time to spam LinkedIn or Twitter, or to carefully research my target demographic and send high quality emails. I was willing to have poorer quality CD results in exchange for a smaller time investment.
Spinning up up the email infra to use those two platforms. Surprisingly annoying! I had many fun side quests learning about email sending at scale. A topic for another blog post.
I was ready to start aggressively churning out emails and taking calls after work.
And then something interesting happened - my role at Canary finally materialized.
I was hired in January to take lead on our AI infrastructure, but throughout the year enterprise deals shook our roadmap and spawned projects that continued to push back the priority of the role I was hired into. These setbacks have been understandable at the organizational and strategic level, and the environment has been fascinating to learn from.
Still, a gap developed between my original expectations for the role and reality. This gap created a lot of angst, which became my primary fuel for Tetra Compute.
But…. an opportunity emerged.
In August, our team at Canary was finally given the green light to build a major upgrade to our AI infrastructure. This turn of events was expected insofar as we literally planned this project on-and-off for months and it was on our roadmap. But roadmaps are surprisingly fluid in the face of demanding enterprise deals.
I decided to throw my full weight into the project and mostly pause on Tetra Compute.
Fast forward to now. It’s been ~6 weeks.
The project is done and getting ready to go into production.
Riding on the tailwinds of the project’s success, I’m starting a new engineering team focused on our AI Platform. In time, we’ll be responsible for the core of all of our AI products, but for now we’re kickstarting something new that is very hard and will battle test our new infrastructure.
I’m basically where I wanted to be in January when I incorporated Tetra and started my journey at Canary. I’m still adjusting to that fact.
I incorporated Tetra to keep me honest to my long-term career intentions: I want to spend my career pushing the boundaries of intelligent machines and I want to do that in KC.
In the shorter term, I joined Canary to hone my skills on the frontier of LLMs. The role would also allow me to build up my cash reserves, invest into my new relationship, and build a good foundation for my 30s.
Now, the disconnect between those ambitions has been resolved and they are fully realigned.
My focus for this blog is going to shift towards what I’m learning along the way and any interesting side quests I go on in the meantime. I have plenty of smaller bets to place that’ll keep me sharp as an entrepreneur. As I find balance in my new role I’ll start carving out time for those adventures.
Thanks for reading and continuing to push me. I appreciate your time and friendship.
Talk soon. I’ve got a lot of nerdy ideas I’ve been brewing on.