Today is scary. For the first time since the age of fifteen, when I close my laptop, I will officially be jobless. Unemployed. Without income. Racking up student loan interest quickly enough to keep even Max Verstappen in my rear-view mirror.
But it’s not bad news! From the 30th September I will join Entrepreneur First as a Founder in Residence. It’s a risk. It’s different. But I can’t wait.
Rewind.
I don’t know exactly when it started, but I remember it happening. I had come into a rather large collection of K’nex. I’d loved Lego and Bionicles for quite some time, but k’nex is what hooked me. I’d spend hours building the kits, making mechanical objects that could do all sorts of things according to the instructions: but that wasn’t what interested me. I’d spend hours upon hours making, of all things…k’nex chairlifts. No instruction booklets, no point to any of it, just k’nex chairlifts in all shapes and sizes. What was the smallest lift I could build? What was the biggest one? Could I build a chain out of all the pieces or did I need to use string to connect them all? I distinctly recall spending one Friday evening turning the family entire kitchen into a huge snaking network of different lift systems, all powered by various (manual) gear systems that I’d fashioned out of the cogs. All I wanted to know was how many more could I add? How could I get them to work in unison without crashing or colliding? It was the first time I’d just been able to let loose on something that I (and almost certainly nobody else) enjoyed building out of nothing but curiosity and enjoyment.
Over time, this mild curiosity evolved: bookended by amateurish tinkering with electronics at school and, most significantly, as university approached a keen interest in learning to cook “properly”. The starting point of which was to perfect the baking of Chocolate Fondants over the course of a summer. About one hundred fondants later, each batch better than the last, I was confident that I had conquered the humble dessert. Another Friday evening was spent determinedly making puff pastry from scratch: roll, fold, in the fridge, twenty minutes, out of the fridge, roll,…for about three hours. Needless to say my Mom did not leave a courteous gratuity for the timely dinner service that night.
What I have learnt over all this time, is that the kitchen is where my curiosity awakes. Annoyingly, on Friday nights.
But why is this relevant to my resignation?
It is early summer 2021. I’ve recently received a LinkedIn message from someone at a company called Entrepreneur First. He explains that they want the best people to come in with big ideas and build the companies of tomorrow. This sounds exciting but, frankly, the timing couldn’t be worse. My PhD viva is imminent and then I plan to take my returning offer working with the team I interned with at Yahoo. The truth is that I am mentally spent. I’ve been playing a decade long game on a never-ending conveyor belt. A levels, degree, PhD. I need rest. And structure.
Looking back, I can tell somewhat perversely (for reasons much clearer now than at the time) that this conveyor belt suppressed the boy who built k’nex in his kitchen because this person was always looking for the next rung of the ladder up the mountain; never taking the time to survey the route taken and learn what could be improved like with each freshly baked batch of fondants. It felt like winning at a game I wasn’t entirely and resolutely certain I wanted to compete in. The k’nex kid would’ve taken the taken the phone call from EF, been interested beyond articulation in the chance to build the next big thing and applied on the spot. But my confidence was in such a weird place at that point that I couldn’t bring myself to do it. It was there. But it was…fragile. Brittle. Hurt.
It’s summer 2024. Three years after joining Yahoo I have seen another advert for EF. Rather than ignoring it this time, I decided to submit an application. In previous communications I seem to recall that acceptance rates of about three percent were mentioned (I’ve no idea how accurate that was or is): nonetheless, I wasn’t particularly hopeful as I knew competition would be fierce. But over these past three years something has changed that has put me back closer to that youthful and playful curiosity of just wanting to try something for the fun of it and for the process of learning from it. Part of this I attribute to my fantastic colleagues, Alex Saydakov, Jon Malkin, and Lee Rhodes — possibly the three best engineers I will ever encounter — whose influence on me has been immeasurable. They have given me the confidence to just try something new, learn as I go, document and test (…and version control) everything I do. In drilling down on particular performance features of different algorithms’ implementations, it has helped me find again that yearning curiosity I had when I was much younger. However, in doing so, that has given me the motivation to go and try something totally new.
Of course, I hope that I am successful in this endeavour but there is no way of knowing without going all in. That’s the primary reason for the resignation — that to do this properly I need to be one hundred percent committed knowing that for now this is all I am focused on. In some sense this is always what I’ve wanted to do: growing up, my best friend and I would mock up different businesses that we’d like to run in future. I suppose that both of us being the children of parents running their own companies made it seem normal that one day you just would start up by yourself. Seeing him and another close school friend each start their own businesses reignited that flame from when I was younger but I needed to wait until k’nex kid’s curiosity caught up.
I did other things between those two time points that gave me vital experience like refereeing semi-professional football. This role gave me a level of autonomy no other work experience could and is to-date the best “people learning” experience I’ve had. I’m not sure there are many roles fundamentally requiring independence, leadership, and teamwork so crucially from day one. But working in corporate technology has, at times, felt glacial compared to the dynamism of the football field — an environment that I loved. That isn’t a criticism and I understand why it’s the case. Those charged with reinvigorating a pioneering internet company have much more important concerns than my desire to move a little faster. I wish them all the best in doing so as Yahoo has been a fantastic place to learn and grow alongside amazing colleagues.
However, with my curiosity back and a hunger for change, it was exciting when, during the application process, Entrepreneur First shared a “Who we invest in” doc. For the first time since getting on the academic conveyor belt at fifteen I felt that I’d found a description of something entirely me. Curiosity. Speed. Autonomy.
So for now my laptop is closed. Tomorrow the kick off weekend starts and with it a risky but exciting path ahead. The New Curiosity Shop is open 😉 And it’s time for me to work.