Founder · Career
Why I Left Engineering to Build My Own Companies
There's a specific moment I remember clearly. I was three years into my career, embedded inside one of the largest engineering organizations in the world, and I was debugging a test suite that had been broken for six days. The fix took me forty minutes. I remember thinking: I just spent six days on forty minutes of work. Not because of incompetence — but because of process, hierarchy, and organizational inertia.
That moment didn't make me quit. But it planted a question I couldn't stop asking: what could I build if the only approval I needed was my own?
The engineering years
I spent the better part of five years working across Google, Boeing, and UBS. These weren't junior roles — I was building and owning automation frameworks, CI/CD pipelines, and infrastructure that handled real scale. I worked on the Chrome Web Store ecosystem. I helped validate the migration of Credit Suisse's core rules engine during the UBS acquisition. I built load-testing infrastructure for Boeing's global services platform on AWS.
I was good at it. But I was always more interested in the why behind what I was testing than the test itself. Why does this system exist? Who uses it? What would make it ten times better?
"Engineering teaches you how things break. Founding teaches you how to build things worth breaking."
The idea that wouldn't go away
Mindset started as a personal problem. I was distracted during work — constantly. Not in a casual way, but in a way that was genuinely costing me output. I tried every productivity app available. None of them had teeth. They all had bypass mechanisms, workarounds, exceptions. They were built to be pleasant, not effective.
So I built something with no loopholes. No bypass. No "just five more minutes." Mindset enforces focus like a contract, not a suggestion. The first version was rough. But it worked. And when I showed it to other engineers, the response was immediate: everyone wanted it.
What founding actually feels like
People romanticize the founder life. The reality is messier and more interesting than the narrative. You're the engineer, the strategist, the salesperson, the customer support, and the janitor — sometimes in the same hour. There's no sprint planning, no ticket queue, no on-call rotation. There's just: does this exist yet, and if not, why haven't you built it?
I run multiple companies now — Mindset, Nanopost, Verideks — each one solving a problem I've either lived personally or seen clearly enough to bet on. None of them are accidents. They're all deliberate bets on where AI and human behavior are headed.
The honest version
I didn't leave engineering. I took everything engineering taught me — systems thinking, failure analysis, the discipline of making things reliable under pressure — and applied it to building companies instead of test suites. The skills transferred completely. The mindset required a complete rebuild.
If you're an engineer thinking about founding something: the technical skills are the easy part. The hard part is learning to operate in permanent uncertainty — no requirements document, no acceptance criteria, no definition of done. Just a problem, a hypothesis, and the discipline to keep shipping until you're right.
That's the job. And it's the only one I want.