Thank you for replying. Totally makes sense that it helps people do a lot without having to spend a lot of time learning to code. Similar to Wix allowing you to have a cool website without years of learning web languages. I guess I enjoy coding at least partly to solve problems but I’m not sure what the next type of problem is for me. I don’t necessarily like juggling 20 things at once which is one new problem allowed by it being much easier to do things with code.

Thanks for replying. Yeah, right, technology is learning to do things that were previously done by humans, which devalues them and the labor that goes into them. A lot of techs did this but recent technologie are much more versatile.

I agree. I am at mid-career. I know many people who dedicated years of their lives learning a craft and building a dignified, somewhat-creative career. I admire these people greatly. The rewards from putting in this effort have disappeared.

For example, I have no knowledge of film editing or what “works” in a sequence, but if I wanted to I could create something more than passable with AI.

Hey there, loved the post. What do you think is next for you? Would you do it all over?

Thanks for all of the content!

Thanks for reading!

>What do you think is next for you?

Next is either an educational product or a SaaS business I can build either fully solo or with 1-2 teammates in customer support roles.

>Would you do it all over?

No, not knowing what I know now about how difficult it is to succeed in hardware.

I'm grateful that TinyPilot worked, but there's definitely a reason why there are so few bootstrapped hardware companies.

In the first few years, there were so many things that could have clobbered the business, like supply shortages, manufacturing errors, lost shipments, design mistakes. I did a lot of things to mitigate these risks, but a lot of it just came down to being lucky enough to avoid random disasters.

For example, there were definitely times in the business where a critical part could have been lost in shipping, and we would have been dead in the water for months if it went missing or got delayed.

As the business matured, we were able to mitigate those risks better, but I wouldn't want to go through those first two years again unless I had a huge amount of investment or co-founders with more specialized hardware/manufacturing expertise.

Great to know, thanks so much for the info!

Thanks. I just wonder what the answer is, security-wise. I guess if you can find something self-sustaining where there isn’t a huge need to grow. That was behind my original question, a feeling that a need for profit growth drives these decisions for larger (public, or on their way there) companies. But I guess if a smaller company is not yet profitable, it’s also bearing some risk to get somewhere that it might not.

Were the engineering cuts were due to pullback in the primary business?

The established part of the business had an appalling half year and couldn’t continue to fund the not-yet-profitable digital part of the business.

If you work for a startup you know there’s always a possibility that the money will run out, but at least you know your runway.

What does “pullback” mean?

Thanks. I meant “a pullback,” as in a euphemism for underperformance. The question was whether the engineers were incidental casualties.

Personally I find that if I read something that I enjoy, I’ll usually find a way to incorporate it into my life somehow. For Stratechery and information economics in particular, it’s been finding ways to leverage my skills to make myself indispensable professionally.

Set an alarm for 30 or 60 minutes. Don’t allow yourself to look at your phone or do anything else during this time. Make this time special.