Lao Shi

On milestones and learning.

Feelings

An update about the shared feelings of people and companies.

Footprint Product 18 Months In

How our product got to where it is now, and where it will go from here.

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

On playing pinball, Plaid, and a NYT best seller.

Do We Change?

An exploration of if we change as people as we grow older.

Binary Thinking

Navigating life with binary thoughts

Dying on the Wrong Hill

I said I was going to own up to and learn from my mistakes in real-time last month. This month I write about exactly that.

Losing the Super Bowl: Learning from Loss

We need to acknowledge mistakes to appreciate our limits as humans and build armor where it is needed.

Avicii and Iterative Perfection

An update analyzing lessons from my inspiration Avicii's music-making process.

We Have What We Want

The intersection of our self-given narratives to our lives avoiding confrontation with the secret desires of our shadow self finds a strange armistice in our minds. And that is ok.

This Isn't New

Footprint isn’t all that new or innovative. We’re just lucky to be building it at a unique moment in time.

Vicissitudes

If our baseline narrative is 100% successful, one bad moment may seemingly deem the rest of the progress—the integral—irrelevant and worthless. I think this mindset is often a helpful propellant. But I’d like to get past that way of thinking. Life isn’t this binary.

Apple and Identity

Footprint wants to put people in control of their data. Apple, from their own marketing, does not always want to hold it. Footprint is an enterprise security company. Apple is almost everything but that.

The Rehearsal: Empathy in Life

We must never lose sight that this isn’t a rehearsal and the people we touch are not actors: it’s people's lives and their data. They’re not our puzzle pieces to play with or dislodge in pursuit of our dream. I want to build with empathy, so we can help millions.

Out of Stealth: Searching for Dreams vs Risking Reality

Don’t get me wrong—I love dreams—they change the world. But they only have that chance if put into action. Without launching our company, we’ll never know if Footprint is just a neat idea, or a world-changing product. But we must find out either way.

Privacy & Dobbs

We decided that Footprint would give away for free our account creation flow that hides PII like names, email, DOB to period trackers to protect identities of women who sign-up...the result is a growing coalition I'm calling Tech Fights Dobbs (TFD).

Unusual Partnerships

Amidst 200 years of war, Jews, Muslims, and Christians traded together because it was the smart thing to do to grow their own coffers. During a bear market, we will strategically partner with other great companies to bolster our growth and gain market share.

Societal Fear of Technology

People conceptualize a lot of technology innovation today from what they read about in books and watch in TV/Cinema. But I think they only tell a small part of the story of how the inputs we receive influence our thoughts on the future of technology.

Paradoxes in Privacy, War, and Life

At Footprint, we believe that privacy means the freedom to control where your data goes. We think privacy means not needing to share your PII to create accounts, but we think your data should still exist, and its footprint should grow in a trusted account you control.

Trust and Transparency

We want to build a company that resurrects the faith users once had that the internet works for, not against, us. Footprint can change the relationship we currently have with the digital age.