Thinking About Lockdown
I’ve been inside, locked down for… eight months at this point.
And, while I’m naturally an indoor sort of person, you can get too much of a good thing. In the early mornings, with the emptiest of streets, exploration had never been this easy. I don’t even know if “easy” is the right word, but walking in the middle of the freeway during curfew — that feeling… The roads had never felt more expansive.
Amidst a global catastrophe, being told to stay indoors was the toughest of realities. I’d had enough of not exercising, and that itch needed to be scratched. The feeling of being in an empty city, for the right kind of person, is unbeatable. I don’t think I’d ever explored as much as I did during 2020, 2021 & 2022. I guess I explored as much as possible because I knew I’d probably never get to see the city like that again, so I kept pushing through new paths & novelty, anyway… let’s get into the real story.
Business and Start-ups #
2020 was a pivotal year that began with uncertainty but also revealed hidden opportunities. My journey into start-ups is a story about “hidden gems of experience you pick up along an uncertain path.” My past had put me on the path of trying to understand the subtle mechanics of building and investing in early-stage businesses. I completed an accelerator programme in 2020. This laid a strong foundation of business acumen in my mind, going through the program and delving into Y Combinator resources. Thus, we segue into one of the blog’s core talking points: “Mastery, Competency, and the Search for Knowledge.”
During the pandemic, the risks to nightlife and entertainment businesses became clear, at least to me. As a non-technical founder, at the time, I found myself “throwing my shoe in the ring” by attempting to code on woefully underpowered PCs that could barely handle the task. Shoutout to Nvidia & AMD, whose work has pushed the boundaries on computing power! That year, I had set the table for my transition into a deeper dive into tech.
A Builder’s Beginnings #
Having completed the accelerator program, I didn’t know it, but I was starting my journey in systems design. Aiming to build a distributed system that allowed users to gain nearly real-time awareness of neighbourhood or city happenings. It was a bold attempt to impact an industry often dominated by “beach bar economies” that thrive on “location, location, location.” This was the start of my transformation to being a person who wants to learn the deeper workings of computers, servers, and how software teams collaborate and support each other in the development lifecycle.
Finding (and Losing) My Tribe #
The accelerator programme, for me, was a revelation. It wasn’t just the access to AWS credits or the technical mentors, workshops on IP, marketing, UX/UI etc.—it was the people. After years of feeling like the only one in the room chasing these big, unwieldy ideas, I’d finally found a community. A tribe. And yet, as with all great tribes, the time came to let them go.
“Teams can never last forever, the band will always break up, the dynasty will always end.” It’s one of those painful truths of collaboration. But even when it’s not the right fit, every team leaves its mark on you—both the good and the bad. Those early days, spent hacking away with my co-founder, taught me lessons I still carry.
Lessons from Expensive Experience #
“Experience: you cannot buy it, borrow it, or pretend to have it.” Those words hit harder after my 2023 experience. The opportunity cost of not leveraging the AWS credits due to not shipping code taught me more about product development than any success ever could. For a two-person team trying to do it all, the lesson was clear: focus on what matters.
Fast forward to today, and the game has completely changed. Dev tools have exploded in accessibility, enabling small teams to do what once required armies of engineers. AI agents are reimagining the way we build, test, and iterate. The notion of struggling to build an MVP and then getting it into users’ hands (from the developer’s perspective) now feels outdated—AI is poised to multiply our capabilities exponentially.
Imagine this: AI-driven platforms now allow entire marketing, UX, and sales teams to collaborate in isolated containers, running A/B tests on the fly without touching production code (Builder.io: Visual Development Platform). Tools like Claude’s computer use will probably even handle UX research by observing how users interact with a product, gathering insights in ways we couldn’t dream of in 2020. Sure, it’s a bit unorthodox, but who cares about breaking the rules when the results are this transformative?
Final Reflections: The Beauty of Competency #
2020 - 2023 weren’t just the years of uncertainty and global shift—they were the years I shifted, too. From a non-technical co-founder fumbling with npm scripts to someone driven by a hunger to understand—how computers work, how systems scale, and how teams collaborate. My time in the accelerator programme wasn’t just about building a product; it was about building myself.
The world today is a playground for anyone willing to learn. Dev tooling has never been more accessible, AI-enhanced capabilities are levelling the playing field, and the only limit is your curiosity. So, if there’s one takeaway from this journey, it’s this: “Being competent is always more fun.”
And I’m just getting started.