This is a longer story time on how AI changed my life, identity, and sense of self, and why I make this content for you guys about AI. Didn’t expect to go on this journey when I was filming in the car the other day but I hope this message resonates. If it strikes a chord with at least 1 person out there, I’m happy. 🩷

Not to be dramatic, but I think it is potentially true that the greatest crisis of our time is the fact that AI still, for the most part, is being completely gatekept by tech people. I, in the summer of 2022, was unceremoniously laid off by my employer. I was the head of technical operations at a medium-sized startup, I had a team of four people under me, and we all got cut overnight, like literally completely blindsided. After having worked very closely with the C-suite for a year and a half in that position, I remembered thinking, if these clowns can start a company, so can I. And so that's exactly what I did. After I lost my job, I went out and I founded a company. It was called ReturnFairy, and the idea was to be like an Uber for returns. So you buy something on Amazon, it doesn't fit, you want to send it back, but you don't want to go to the store, you call ReturnFairy, someone comes to your house, picks it up, returns it for you. When it came time to go raise money from investors to try to build this idea, they all wanted to know, okay, who's gonna build this app? Now, I took the computer science core at Stanford, I have a pretty good understanding of object-oriented programming, but I couldn't create a full-stack application and put it on the app store out of nowhere, like, I didn't have that skill set. And that's what I would tell investors, like, oh, I'll hire someone to do it, or I'll find someone to do it, and that was not what they wanted to hear. That feeling of feeling like I couldn't even start, I could not even freaking get started until I had somebody next to me who was like, I can code, I can, I'll do it. God, I hate when I have to ask people for permission to succeed, it's like, like, my eye starts twitching. Now, if I could go back in time, and if AI copilot coding apps were around at that time, I probably wouldn't even have needed venture-backed funding or to go raise money from investors, because I could have just had the app and then deployed it. The only reason I needed money was to go hire an engineer, you know, and so I wouldn't have needed them, so then I could have just deployed my app, and then I could have just focused on the thing that I wanted to do anyways, which was to build a company and solve people's problems. That's the job of a founder, it's not to write code. The job of a founder is to get so freaking clear on the problem that you're solving for your customer that you are able to orient the entire boat, whether it's a small raft or a massive ship, in the direction of where the entire company needs to be going. In this metaphor, the boat is the company. So when I say that AI is making it possible for people to live out their dreams, I am talking from firsthand experience. I built a prototype for my app, Popfolio, which is like a LinkedIn for entrepreneurs and freelancers, in one weekend. I didn't need to raise money, I didn't need to find an engineer, I didn't need to hire anybody, I didn't need to get a co-founder, which has left me feeling so beyond empowered to take control of how I make my money and how I spend my time. It's insane. So my mission is about making this crazy, new, weird, insane, bizarre, freakish technology feel a little less weird and bizarre and freakish, because the reality is it does have the potential to completely change the way that all of us live our lives, and the fact that a super small contingent of tech bros within a 20-mile radius of San Francisco actually understand how or why that is, is deeply upsetting to me. How do we get everybody outside of the 20-mile radius from San Francisco in on not only why AI matters in their life, but how to make it work for them? How they can actually reshape, redefine their entire identity by taking all of this into account. If that sounds interesting, give this page a follow because all the next videos that I'm going to be posting are going to be about this exact topic, and I can't wait to see you there. End of yap.