"You eat what you kill"

Attending college in the Bay Area for Computer Science was meant to launch me into a FAANG career at one of the companies everyone knows about with the stacked snack drawers and ID badges. That was the norm and traditionally marked success after graduation. I worked at a large consulting company for a year and while I learned a lot, I wanted to have more impact with my work since it'd take up so much of my life. I've always know I wanted to take the higher-risk path of startup land, even knowing nine out of ten fail.

I was really close to giving up on doing my own thing and taking a cushy job at a large company with clear expectations and comfortable "rest and vest" equity and 401k packages. After each startup I worked at failed by running out of money or pivoting to whatever's hyped in the market, it sounded even more appealing. But I knew deep down that it wasn't the type of career I wanted. It runs in the family; my dad’s mantra has always been “you eat what you kill” as he runs his own practice and built up what he has today, similarly to my grandfather who was a residential home builder. It makes the stakes more real to me, knowing the ceiling isn't capped by a manager's yearly review. A stable salary with linear promotions might work for some, but I craved the risk of doing things my own way.

In a startup, you pour long hours, late nights, weekends, and 80-hour work weeks into an idea you believe in, only to realize it might not be the one. The key is maintaining your work ethic and staying adaptable. Looking back, I probably overworked myself and lost touch with the world around me.

Read this for more insights into where I was at right before clanker:

Reflection of My First Five Years in Startup Land

I'm writing this article as an extension of my reflections for recalibrating my five-year plan now that time has expired for my previous ...

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Clanker

This ties into Clanker. Alex and I were local, in the right place at the right time. Luck and the post-election buzz played their part. In a bear market, we focused on learning skills and building networks. We click because our shared values and ethics make it easy to align, challenge, pivot, and gain perspective. I’m the techie, Alex is the relationship guy who understands what people want.

Before Clanker, we built “pump.linkedin” for about a month. The idea was simple: map endorsements for a coin, and once it hit a threshold of around three advocates (FIDs), the coin would launch. Some of that logic still lives in the Clanker codebase. Caught up in the hype around Aethernet and Askgina, Alex proposed a rogue bot that would launch random coins. I built the core functionality, taking a name, symbol, and image from a cast to create a coin, and soon we realized we’d created a half-decent token launcher with an in-feed UI.

Growth was insane. I remember rushing to add pagination as tokens deployed rapidly, then tackling the challenge of directing LP fees to the requestor’s address tied to their FID. We were building the ladder as we climbed it.

We knew immediately after launch that we were onto something. I was interviewing at Base, my dream job at the time, and Alex had referred me. As tempting as a stable, prestigious role was, I realized that fully committing to this partnership and project was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

Big things happen when you least expect them. When you take the pressure off reaching a goal, everything falls into place over time with consistency.

I forget who casted this but someone said there's now two eras: Before Clanker (BC) and After Deployment (AD) which I have a feeling will define milestones in my career

Thanks for reading, more to come, just wanted to get these thoughts down!

-jd