How I operate
Principles
Why I build, how I work, and what I believe.
Why I build
I want to make people's lives better, around the world and for the generations after us. Technology is the best tool I know for that. I also want to help build a future that gives people something to be excited about when they wake up in the morning, something to create, solve, make or finish. That's what moves humanity forward.
These are the rules I try to work by. Most of them I learned from the founders I study. A few I learned the hard way.
Customers and their problems come first.
People matter more than anything else in a company. Understand their problem, build for it, and keep improving it until their life is actually better. Profit follows from that. It's the fuel that keeps us serving people, not the reason we exist.
Lived by Jeff Bezos, who built Amazon around the customer, and Paul Graham, whose advice fits in four words, make something people want.
Get things done.
Ideas are cheap, and plans are cheaper. What counts is shipping things people actually use, then shipping the next version faster.
Lived by Michael Dell, who started by selling computers out of his college dorm room.
Code is cheap. Understanding is not.
Coding agents can write code now, so anyone can build. The hard part is knowing what to build, and for whom. As CTO, I spent as much time talking to customers as writing code. They used the product in ways I never expected, and every conversation changed what we built next. The architecture and the understanding are the real job. The code is the easy part.
Lived by The Collisons, who would install Stripe on a new user's laptop right there in the meeting. Paul Graham called it the "Collison installation."
Understand the whole business, starting now.
Engineering is one part of a company. Sales, marketing, finance, investors and operations decide whether it survives. I'm learning all of it now, not after I start my next company.
Lived by Every founder I study. Each one ended up owning the whole business, not just the product.
Build big, and build it your own way.
The people I admire didn't follow a template. They picked something big, did it on their own terms, and earned respect by building it.
Lived by Elon Musk, who started a rocket company when almost everyone said it couldn't be done, and JRD Tata, who founded the airline that became Air India.
Choose the problem, then commit for years.
I don't need to stay in software. The right problem decides whether the answer is code, hardware, robots or a restaurant. But once I've chosen it, I stay. Great companies take a decade, not a season.
Lived by Jensen Huang, who has bet on accelerated computing since he founded NVIDIA in 1993.
Go where giants can't follow.
Fighting a giant where it is strongest is a losing game. The opening is where its size, structure or business model stops it from responding, like a market too small for it today, or a customer it doesn't understand.
Lived by The Collisons, who built payments for developers when banks weren't thinking about developers at all.
Kill what isn't real. Push through what's just hard.
Hard is normal, and I stay through it. Not real means customers don't need it badly enough, or the conditions make it impossible to win. Then I end it and say why. Reimburse AI helped employees, but companies were the buyers, and they were already happy with Ramp and corporate cards. SnowMind ran for six months, but retention was weak and a year of big DeFi exploits made people wary of depositing anywhere new. I learned from both, and I keep going.
Lived by SpaceX, whose first three launches failed before the fourth reached orbit, and Airbnb, which stayed alive by selling cereal boxes.
What I believe
Humans shouldn't do work that is dangerous or wasted.
Guarding border posts, cleaning sewers, working in heavily polluted sites, sitting at a counter all day. Machines should do this. Some of these jobs carry human connection worth keeping, and designing around that is part of the problem, not a reason to ignore it.