Beginner's Mind, Again

In 2007, I was a teenager interning at Clearstone Venture Partners. The work was decent: research, diligence, the kind of thing you learn a lot from without realizing it. But the real draw was having a front-row seat to people not much older than me building real things. Software, products, companies. It was hard not to catch the bug.

So I taught myself to code. Stayed up late, built bad versions of ideas I thought were good, debugged things I barely understood. It was slow. But the slowness was part of it. Every small thing I figured out felt like a door opening. The bottleneck was clear: I had more ideas than ability. So I kept learning.

That feeling eventually faded. Not overnight, and not for any particular reason. It’s just what happens when you spend enough years in an industry. The novelty thins out.

Lately, though, something familiar has come back. There’s a new tool or capability worth exploring almost every week. Concepts that didn’t exist six months ago are now things you can build with. The surface area for experimentation is enormous, and it has that same texture: not knowing what’s around the corner, but wanting to find out.

What’s different this time is where the bottleneck sits. It’s not my ability to build anymore. It’s my ideas. The constraint flipped, and I didn’t fully notice until it already had.

That’s a good place to be. This site is where I’ll be thinking out loud about it.