Clarity, Alignment, & Aliveness

Note: This is a three-part-series composed of three essays. The first two are included here, the third is in the works still.

Clarity: Part I

I quit my job at Google with no plan.

A little reckless?

Maybe.

But not because I lacked clarity.

Clarity is misunderstood. It’s not about having the perfect plan or having it all figured out. It’s not about knowing exactly where you’ll be in five years. Or even two.

It’s about asking the right questions. And paying attention to the answers, even if they’re inconvenient. Especially if they’re inconvenient.

Several years ago, I was working at Google as a software engineer. In many ways, it was the perfect role – good pay, fully remote, few meetings, and – to be honest – I didn’t work a lot. Lots of free time. Which translated to lots of hobbies – from flying drones to martial arts, and freediving/spearfishing. On paper, a great situation.

But the time I did spend working felt increasingly soul-crushing. And when I moved teams to one I was hoping to be more fulfilling, I found it became worse – not only was I bored, but now I was more stressed too.

I scheduled a meeting with my manager to discuss moving teams again. He asked me:

“Are you running away from something, or are you running towards something?”

I didn’t know. Both, I guess?

A week or two later I was in a meeting with the technical lead of our project. I had recently completed the prototype of a new feature we were working on. It was just a proof-of-concept – we would rewrite much of it later.

“Thomas,” he began, “have I ever told you the story of my friend who loves to cook?”

“Uhh… no,” I said, confused about where he was going with this.

He told me about his friend who cooked every meal with extraordinary care. Even when he was eating alone, he’d spend extra time arranging the presentation, placing each garnish just right. Not because anyone would see it, but because he genuinely loved the craft.

I was still confused about where he was going with this.

“Now, in the same way, we – as software engineers – must cultivate a similar passion and love for our craft as my friend does for cooking. Whether or not it’s a prototype or the finished product, it is to our benefit to put the same amount of care and attention to detail into our craft. That is what makes us great engineers.”

Then he looked back at me.

“Your prototype made me feel sad.”

Whoa.

“It works,” he said. “It does everything it’s supposed to do. But remember my friend. Even if what you’re making is temporary—even if no one else will ever see it—it still matters. Make it beautiful because you love the craft.”

Oddly, I didn’t disagree with him.

He loved writing data analytics enterprise software the way his friend loved cooking.

I admired that.

But I also realized that I didn’t.

Admittedly, the prototype I built looked like dogshit. I still don’t know why I chose that awful shade of yellow for the buttons.

But the conversation clarified one thing.

I finally knew.

I was running away.

Now the other thing about clarity that gets misunderstood. You really don’t need a lot of it.

You only need enough to make that next meaningful decision. The one you’ve either been putting off or the one you don’t even know you’ve been making because you didn’t have enough clarity. Until now.

I quit my job at Google soon thereafter. I had no plan.

Just a question.

What did I want to cook?

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Alignment: Part II

I decided to backpack through Europe.

I had one rule: no work allowed.

No new startup ideas, no new businesses.

I needed to reset. Because nothing I was trying was working.

I was experiencing something the philosopher Alan Watts called the “Backwards Law”: the harder we chase something, the more it slips away.

I knew I wanted to work for myself. I wanted freedom, and I wanted more out of life than a nine-to-five I didn’t care about. I’d had enough clarity to leave Google.

But clarity hadn’t made that life real.

I was no longer living the wrong life. I just hadn’t built the right one yet.

And it wasn’t for lack of trying. For nearly a year after quitting my job, I experimented with more businesses than I’d like to admit.

A few of the ventures:

• A website that generates timelines for any historical event, place, or person. The marketing intern we hired made me lose faith in the next generation (faith has been restored since).

• An app that recognizes your exact skin tone and recommends the perfect makeup foundation for you. Turns out computer vision and correcting for unpredictable lighting makes color identification exceedingly difficult, if not impossible.

• An Etsy shop selling digital paper with patterns I generated using AI. This was actually popular with the middle-aged housewife demographic of middle America, but scaling it proved difficult.

But nothing stuck.

I already had a trip planned to Budapest for a friend’s wedding that summer. My Etsy shop, meanwhile, was slowing down. It turns out the population of middle-aged housewives who buy AI-generated digital paper is not limitless. So I decided to take a break.

Just for one month, I’d stop trying.

I decided to spend that month backpacking solo through Europe by train after my friend’s wedding. The one rule: I wasn’t allowed to work on anything. No new startup ideas, no new businesses. I needed to try something radically different.

The trip was incredible. I wasn’t thinking about businesses or ways to make money – I was simply living. Having adventures.

I went paragliding in Switzerland. I was part of a human tower in a Catalan sport called Castells. I met a British lady who was saving up money to quit her job and start a new life training kung fu in the Shaolin temple.

And whenever the urge to “figure things out” entered my mind, I would remind myself of my one rule. Besides, it could wait for when I got back. And so the adventure would continue.

My final destination was Paris. I had only one weekend there, and – in my usual style – had nothing planned.

Unexpectedly, I learned from my mom who texted me that one of the biggest tech conferences in the world, VivaTech 2023, was happening that weekend I was in Paris.

Pretending to be a student to dodge the $1000 entrance fee, I went.

It was inspiring, to say the least. All sorts of cool tech and companies.

I met a small family business from the Italian countryside that was showcasing their accounting software. Not the most exciting piece of software, but they described to me how they made more than enough to sustain their family, and – in typical European style – could still afford to take months off for holiday every year. Very different from the typical Silicon Valley startup.

Another company that caught my attention was one that built helper robots for hospitals to transport supplies such as cleaning equipment and medicine to hospital staff. Their robots had LCD screens as faces showing friendly cartoon creatures to make them more approachable.

But they didn’t stop there.

Behind these strange cartoon-faced hospital robots was an entire treasure trove of lore. They had written a whole series of graphic novels detailing how these creatures mysteriously crash landed on Earth years ago, and have been searching for meaning on this strange new planet. Additionally, they had a TV cartoon series in the works.

Whether spending a seemingly significant portion of their budget on graphic novels and a TV show was the wisest move, I don’t know. But it was fun. And I loved it.

Whether it means having the freedom to take months off in the Italian countryside, or getting creative in the most fun ways with your company, one thing was clear – it was possible. The type of work I was looking for but hadn’t succeeded yet in creating for myself was possible.

And beyond that, the sheer amount of cool tech in the conference inspired me. It reminded me that I loved building things.

In perfect timing, I flew home a couple of days later with a renewed vigor to create something. AI was something I’d been fascinated by since before it was cool, and some of the AI breakthroughs I saw at the conference had me thinking about it again.

I decided I would start an AI company.

I had no idea yet what it would do.

So I just started building things. With my background as a software engineer, the world was my oyster. I also started pulling on my network, reaching out to people to see if there was anyone I could join or if anyone wanted to join me.

A few weeks later, I had plans to go spearfishing (with the same friend whose wedding I had attended in Budapest actually). As I was looking out at the ocean, I received a call from my friend – he was stuck in traffic and wouldn’t be able to make it.

You generally want to always spearfish or freedive with a buddy for safety reasons, so I decided to pivot my plans. I headed to my gym’s sauna instead to unwind.

In the sauna, I overheard a couple guys talking about their attempted e-commerce stores. I told them about my Etsy shop and the interestingly high demand for digital paper from the middle-aged housewives of middle America.

When I mentioned my pursuit to start an AI company, one of the guys mentioned that an old co-worker had reached out to him just days earlier – he was looking for a technical co-founder for an AI company in the renewable energy industry that he was looking to start.

Interesting.

He offered to introduce us. Three days later, I was having lunch with his former co-worker talking about AI and the freedom we both hoped to find by building our own company, working for ourselves. We both expressed our skepticism around raising VC money and how we were aligned in our desire to retain ownership to maximize our own freedom.

It was a perfect skills match too – Bryan had spent a decade in the renewable energy sector on the business side as an asset manager. He knew the industry inside and out, and was extremely well connected. He needed help on the tech side to design and build the AI platform he was envisioning. And I was a former Google engineer who was looking to build AI software – a side of tech I was passionate about – but didn’t have a clear problem to solve with the tech yet. Now I did.

Talk about alignment.

After we finished lunch, we shook hands. ContractPower – our startup – was born.

For the first time in a while, I felt like I was moving toward something rather than merely away.

It felt aligned.

And for a time, it was.