Start With WHY

TLDR: Hello World!

I created* this website because I wanted to test the backend I’m developing with and upload my CV to. Plus funding anti-aging research requires a sustainable business, which we attempt to create by failing forward iteratively.

*Technically I just filled the site with content; Jimmy designed this beautiful Hugo theme

Start with WHY

Let me introduce you to my existential crisis, it goes like this: Time is passing by, life is short and the technological innovations are fast. Will aging ever be signifcantly slowed down or stopped, is it even possible? If it’s possible, can it happen in your lifetime? If there’s a chance it can, then shouldn’t you be working towards making it happen as soon as possible? What are you waiting for?

Nick Bostrom explained it much better in his story, The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant. In case you’d like to understand my WHY check out the this animated version of the fable.

Since I’m not a king and can’t sell my summer castle, my second best bet is to create a sustainable business that attracts talented collegaues to (1) build products and services that both consumers and providers admire and (2) use the profit to fund fight fight againts the Dragon Tyrant. Down with the why, let’s get to the what.

Unsustainable = Enshittification

Most platforms that we grew up with failed us at multiple levels: on social media platforms creators have to pay to deliver their content to their subscribers, search engines show you what earns them money instead of what you’re searching for and well, privacy focused open-source browsers (prepare to) sell your data. The playbook is the following:

First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
― Cory Doctorow, The ‘Enshittification’ of TikTok

Okay got it, but why does this happen?

According to my theory these enshittified platforms and services usually have one thing in common, they utilize shady practices to create a monopoly. This comes in different forms*:

some lure in high value clients into the platform
some products at a price that they can’t sustain to more acquire users
some buy out competition (all of them)

These actions are not sustainable on the long run and solidifies the path to enshittification, even though on the short run they drive traffic/growth.

*I’m not saying TikTok is hand-picking the profiles to make viral or that Google Search is a monopoly, or that Amazon operated this way

Is there an alternative way?

You just have to create a great product or service properly price it from day 1 and always plan for the long term. Also don’t do any shady practices, Don’t be evil is not enough.

So the way I would like to compete with existing platforms is the following mentaliy: Build things that your family, your customers and you admire. To specificly answer the what: I’d like to start with a sustainable, privacy respecting, superapp that respects users and their content. (it won’t be free, sorry)

Failing Forward Iteratively

In 1986 Ericsson created a programming language called Erlang, which supposedly acchieved 99.999999% availability (meaning it’s offline for less than 0.05 second per year). This is the same language that follows the “let it crash” coding style.

The beauty of this that a programming language (or system) that knows that failures will happen and helps the developer handle it achieves one of the highest availabilty ever achieved. Why can’t we plan startups the same way?

Therefore, I have created a stable, highly available cross-region Kubernetes cluster mesh. This will be responsible for running products (startup ideas), all of which are being built on the same basic services (such as authentication, logging, database, WAF, etc.). This will allow each product to fail independently of other products, learn from mistakes, and improve with careful course correction at every iteration. That’s the starting point; I’ll share more on this once the products reach your device. 🤠