As expected, a weekly cadence has proven to be ambitious. It’s hard to say exactly what I was up to. If you ask me, I’d respond “I was busy”, but if you continued “with what”, I’d have a hard time answering. And whether that be a deficit in my short-term memory or a symptom of the modern workplace, the affliction remains.

There’s a number of thoughts rampaging about. Noisy neighbors, I call them. I’m acquainted. I accept them at times, ignore them on others, and use them on occasion.

I’d like to write them all. But for some, I can’t.
Time is a lens; recent events are inevitably blurred. Those older are not necessarily clear, but do develop the resilience to weather repeated dissection and analysis. At the end of that process, the thought disappears. The neighbor ceases his noise. He settles.

Today is less an effort to expound on my now. It’s to talk about an idea I’ve thought about far too much for far too long. Ownership.

“I’m an obsessive owner.” - so I wrote in my annual review.
Five years ago, I wrote the same words in my review then.

As a word, ownership means the “state of being an owner.” At Amazon, it’s one of our leadership principles:

Leaders are owners. They think long term and don’t sacrifice long-term value for short-term results. They act on behalf of the entire company, beyond just their own team. They never say “that’s not my job.”

It’s not hard to think of why a company would want to promote it. It empowers your employees, indebts loyalty and makes them work harder. At first blush, it seems as if there’s very little downside to having all of your employees be owners (or at least think they are).

But viewed from the lens of management theory, it’s paradoxical. Ownership gives power to the employees. At first, in theory only, as though employees may act like owners, they aren’t truly. But eventually, in practice as well. The strongest owners will realize what they own and what they don’t, seeding discontent as to their scope.

The alternative to ownership is to delineate. Leadership owns the product, the business, and the bottom-line. Workers deliver on the tasks assigned; they’re evaluated based off their performance and expected to do nothing outside of guidelines.

And thought that might seem barbarically industrialist, it’s not a bad system either. Leaders own repercussions; if the performance of your firm goes down and your clients are mad, that is your burden to bear. If your restaurant fails to flip a profit, you still have to pay your employees their wage. If your startup fails, you lose everything, your employees still get their salaries. You own both the upside and the downside.

Employees are given stability in exchange for autonomy. The scope of their work is rigid and less readily influenceable, but their work and their wage is guaranteed. I don’t have to care about my company and its idiot management, all I have to do is some data analysis and be netted my salary. If no customers come during rush hour, that’s a boon not a curse. I don’t have to exceed expectation, all I have to do is meet it.

So in a sense, a top-down environment encourages work-life balance. Work is work, life is life; separate the two and act to minimize the former. That might seem ironic, especially in lieu of draconic workplaces where expectations are high and supervisors are stringent, but it holds some truth. It’s surprisingly nice to be told what to do.

Bottom-up environments are different. It’s tempting to only think about the benefits. Imagine the freedom, imagine the autonomy of only doing what I want to do! And while that is the primary reward reaped, the repercussions are necessarily cruel.

If you let your employees do whatever they want, you pick winners and losers. The former is rewarded, they’re given more scope, more resources, and fast-tracked promotions. The latter is penalized; if you don’t contribute value, you’re cut. It hinges heavily on talent and competition. Weakness in a peer is not to be remedied, it’s an opportunity.

Ironically, these systems are also inherently exclusionary. Although there’s nothing explicit, bottom-up environments tend to self-select the people it prefers by its criterion. There’s a certain breed of individual that tends to succeed. This isn’t to say that top-down environments are inclusionary, they most certainly aren’t as they expect you to conform to the culture they set, but they are more explicit about it.

This essay has taken a surprising analytical bent.

All that said, it doesn’t really matter. Regardless of what’s optimal, I do what suits me. I act on principle over probability. And though you may be able to convince me that a certain strategy is optimal, I will usually ignore it and simply do what I think is right.

That’s ownership. That’s caring about your work: owning it and living by it.

Where that comes from is a good question.

One aspect is personality. I was raised in a family where academic excellence was king. I was told to do a lot: near every waking hour of my youth was micro-managed by my parents. Wake up at 6, leave the house by 6:30, study till 12, eat till 12:30, study till 6, eat dinner till 6:30, study till 10, go to bed and repeat.

That lack of control made me obsess for the opposite. I wanted freedom - and would do anything to achieve it, including a few flawed attempts at running away from home. So bluntly put, I don’t take well to being told what to do. I condone it from those I respect, but even then, I will disagree on directives I think unjust.

The need for independence is what defined my childhood. I craved it - financial independence, emotional independence, professional independence; and worked rabidly to achieve it. Now that I have it, my obsession with it certainly has petered, but it still stands as a hallmark character trait.

There’s other aspects of personality that tie into it. Perfectionism is one, the insistence on doing things well and wanting to do things my way. Empathy and sensitivity is another, the need to feel involved with not just your own work but that of those around you. Sheer egoism is another, the desire to own things out of pride alone.

But ownership can also be taught. If you treat your employees as workers, that’s all they’ll ever be. If you treat them as owners, they’ll grow into leaders.

My principal engineer was the one who taught me that. There’s a phenomenon in the tech industry where companies spend copious amounts of money and time recruiting the smartest college graduates, then proceed to baby them by giving them trivial tasks and treating them as children.

He did the opposite. From the get go, he treated me like he treated himself. He gave me projects that he knew I’d fail on and held me to his bar, not any other. He treated me like an owner - and nothing else made me work harder.

This approach doesn’t work for everyone. There’s downsides to it. For one, you are intentionally encouraging failure. I don’t mean that purely from the perspective of giving engineers projects with big scope that they may or may not deliver on (and then secretly have ways to guarantee success). I really mean it.

Ownership makes people fail. It makes them personally responsible for failure and incents them to grow. And that is a cruel, albeit fair, thing.

To end on, there’s an admitted irony here. Ownership is the “state of being an owner”, it doesn’t mean you are. I act as an owner, but I’m not really. I acknowledge that, yet still choose to bear that farce. The reason why is because I would rather be, or attempt to be, than be complicit to hierarchy.

Freedom isn’t free. You have to fight for it. Be it now or in the future, in petty corporate politics or in matters of consequence, there are times where you have to stand up and fight. It feels pointless at times. More than anyone, I doubt why I do the things I do for a company or a country I disagree with.

But still, I do.
And whether it be naiveté or absurdity, I refuse to change.

My older brother said it to my younger, in lieu of some argument the family was having about the latter’s grades. He wasn’t struggling in school; on the contrary, he had a 4.0, was taking advanced classes two years above his age, and already had a near-perfect SAT and ACT score as a sophomore in high school.

But that wasn’t enough for our family. Getting As at some “public school” was a given. They wanted more. Math camps, AP exams, honors courses, Olympiads. Any thing that you could study for and test for - you did. It wasn’t a matter of learning, it was a matter of status. Success was determined by your scores, and as a child, your self-worth was too.

That crescendo culminates in the final test of youth: college admissions. The only ivies worth their salt are Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. The other good ones are MIT, Carnegie, and Stanford. The rest are fake: no-names that only serve as a reminder of your inadequacy years down the road. And God forbid if you went to a state school.

Well, I failed.

I went to the University of Texas at Austin. I submitted 20 college applications and was only accepted there. I did not get into the honors program. I did not get a scholarship. I did not get a 4.0. I did not get any internships.

I was expelled from Carnegie Mellon for truancy. I was accepted into their Master’s program for Computer Science, chose to study computational complexity out of pride, quickly realized I was out of my depths, and fell into a depressive hole. I lied to my advisor, my professors, my parents and spent my days skating around Pittsburgh smoking cigarettes and making regrettable life decisions.

I was a punk. And still am.

For all my quirks of personality, the one that’s strongest is the need to oppose authority. If I’m told to do something, even if it’s something rationally sound, my first instinct is to disagree. Not because I have any good reason to (though I’d hope I at least have some), but on ethic alone.

So school didn’t suit me. Neither did my parents. They applied the same principles that they had with pedagogy to the practice of. They read “Tiger Mom” and thought to do better. It was barbaric - I won’t lie. Yelling, shouting, even physical abuse was mundane in our household. Perhaps that would’ve all ended sooner if I had simply complied, but all that did was elicit a stronger response in return.

I’m fortunate to have grown and healed in ways I didn’t think possible. My parents and my brothers did too, despite their old habits re-surfacing now. Truly, at times, the normal relationship we have now seems miraculous. Yet, the past still stands and to the extent that I can, I won’t misrepresent it. And in some odd way, I’m grateful for it.

More and more, does writing this blog seem ill-advised for my career. I’ve grown aware of my (very small) readership and imagined a few scenarios in my head. But screw it, I suppose that means I’m writing something worthwhile.

The bar is the topic on my mind.

It’s a very Amazonian concept, one that I haven’t explicitly thought about in a while, but learned to live with. The bar is the standard to which you hold yourself and others. When we hire individuals, we evaluate whether they “raise the bar,” whether they are better than the average individual at that role. The idea being that if you continue to hire individuals that only raise the bar, you’ll continuously shift the average upwards.

I have a high bar. Some of it is individual: I hold myself to high expectations and I expect others to do the same. It’s a natural, if not honest, thing to do. I’ve learned that I’m certainly more popular when I don’t, but there’s an irony in that. Lowering expectations disrespects the other. I can afford people leniences and say “oh that’s good for you,” but how bigoted is that? How vain is it for me to categorize people as to what they can and cannot do, rather than treat them as equals?

So I don’t believe in a selective bar. There’s only one - my own.
And now’s the hard part. Raising the bar is hard. Very hard. You’re breaking the status quo. You’re walking in, saying “this is not the way we should be doing things” and waging war on precedent.

There’s a few ways people typically go about it. For one, fear. Fear is an incredibly effective way to spur action, as regrettable as it is. Simply being in the presence of a superior will quickly force most to get their act together. Couple that with draconian punishment doled out at any hint of incompetency and you have a recipe for the military. And it does work - just look at how hedge funds and big law firms are run.

That’s all very familiar to me. It’s how I was raised. So when I joined Amazon and encountered more of the same, I wasn’t fazed. The challenges I confronted paled to my past. But despite that, I refuse to do the same.

Fear is effective. And if I were the type of person to optimize on outcome, it’s the logical choice. But I’m not. I’m a punk and my vanity makes me think I can do without.

And now’s where I’m stumped.
I tried a lot of things. I asked questions, I talked about goals, I gave lectures, I wrote letters, I learned that team events are incredibly high return on investment (so are snacks) and tried to get into the mind of my mid 20-somethings (I downloaded TikTok) before realizing that my attempts to do so would only further estrange me.

I’m trying to inspire them. To work, yes, but to also take pride in what they do and find purpose in it.

I’m up against tough competition and I know. There are way too many fun things in life to list out here and it’s a far sell to think that a corporate job at a big tech company could compare. But still, I’ll try.

The only thing to beat fear is hope. Well at least, that’s mine.

I feel the need to write. No idea to convey or point to persuade, simply a drooling of pen on paper. An untitled unmastered mess.

Writing is strange. Given a context, it’s a rather mundane thing. If the aim is clear, the words write themselves. If I know what to write, writing is a matter of the means. Find the diction, find the tone to paint the picture as I perceive it.

Other times, as now, it’s a strange thing. It’s an act of effort. One that requires me to wake, don the garb of courage (or something like it), and stare vapidly at a blank page while I ruminate what it is I want to write - what I need to write.

It demands honesty. It’s easy to escape from anxious thought to another in the recesses of one’s mind. It’s harder to do so on paper. The pen doesn’t lie. If you write something untrue, it stares blankly back. Each word a stake in your conscience, a reminder of guilt.

I haven’t written like this in quite some time and it shows.
I used to write for self more frequently. Day by day, or week by week, whenever the need strikes, just writing to write.

It’s not so enjoyable really. The term journaling has come into vogue, and though that seems to share similarities with what this is, I’m skeptical that it is. Perhaps it’s just the way that its marketed as part of “wellness weeks” and “self-care routines.” Or perhaps it’s just my personality to eschew anything popular.

But its effects are clear. For one, I seem to adopt the language used in speech. Often, I regurgitate written answers to common questions asked, as if I had crammed for a pop quiz on my personality. The same goes for what I read. What leaves my mouth is a mix of the prose I consume and the words I write. If I happen to be on a particular esoteric binge, I’ll gladly give voice to anachronistic words like “antediluvian” and “multilateral.” Pretentious, I know.

And for two, there’s a certain assuredness I gain after writing. As if I’ve made that amorphous thing known as identity concrete by giving it form. I feel better, in self. Resolute in who I am and who I strive to be. That armor doesn’t last long; its chipped at and taken away by the deluge of the day-to-day. Hence, I write. To find self and define what it be.

Why I publish what I write is a better question. I remember being reticent to share what I wrote prior, and it took quite a while to be comfortable in doing so. My answer now is I simply don’t care. I am who I am - and unapologetic in that.

That isn’t to say I don’t think about how I’m perceived. I do, and often to my own detriment. Even now, the faces and reactions of the few readers who might read this flash by. But they’re secondary. What matters most is what I think of myself. And if I’ve chosen to share, chosen to be vulnerable and let others in, might as well show them everything.

In lieu of that, there’s been a few thoughts on my mind.

I’m getting older. I tweaked my neck again and it serves as a sobering reality that I’m not as young as I used to be. Pain makes the present palpable. You become distinctly aware of your own finitude. The limit on what you can achieve and the time you have to do it.

I can’t do what I used to do. Perhaps a tad exaggerated as I’m still young yet, but less and less will doing the same things that led me to success prior, continue to work for me now.

It’s a tough habit to break. I walked the path of an individualist for a long time. As a child, be it for one reason or another, I read Emerson’s essay on Self-Reliance. That work shaped me. It incepted the idea of self-sufficiency, that if you want something done right, to do it yourself. And I lived by that philosophy. I avoided relying on others and always did things myself even if it was work I was ill disposed to.

Things are different now. I’ve grown to trust others, both out of inclination and necessity. There’s a limit on what I can achieve as an individual. And though vain of me to say, I think I’ve gotten pretty close to it already. That is, I don’t think I could’ve worked much harder in times past.

But it remains to be seen what I can achieve with the help of others.

Mikkel, my cofounder, cemented that point. I view myself as capable of doing most things relatively well, whether that’s engineering, sales, marketing or what be it. Yet, I’m not someone capable of solving fundamentally hard problems. Mikkel is. And by putting my trust in him, in his ability to do things that I can’t, we can achieve what I cannot alone.

My relationship with my directs is different. Many of them are young, and yes, I can do more than they can. Much of management is ensuring the minimum. For this person, at this role, what is the expectation and how do you ensure they meet it. It’s unglamorous, boring work, largely consisting of asking questions and reminding people of their deliverables.

That alone is a self-fulfilling prophecy. If the goal is to meet expectation, you will never exceed it. It doesn’t interest me. It doesn’t expand possibility, it only systemizes it.

The bet I took is that I can achieve more together than I can alone. That only works if I can raise the upper bound. It’s the belief that my directs can and will supercede me. That they will obviate me and achieve what I cannot.

Indignance is the word to start and end on.

The higher you get up in a company, the more nebulous progression appears to be. Early in your career, promotions are well-defined. There’s many people to compare yourself to and there’s much to learn and do. Doing what’s in front of you is often all it takes to move forward.

Higher up, it’s less clear. Tenure plays a part, as does delivery. But what distinguishes a good director from another and how does one go about pushing for a promotion at that level? Many seem to answer with politics. They chase the coattails of their superiors, seeking to appease and get on the good-side of whoever is most influential at the time. They cascade fear, lashing out at their directs in response to their bosses doing the same to them. They wage wars to gain scope and increase their number of reports to embed themselves more firmly as people of undeniable import.

It’s the pursuit of power.
And I won’t claim to be above the rest.

Frustration was the feeling that filled me after abandoning my startup. A feeling of lack. I tried my best to solve a problem that was personal to me - and failed because I was insufficient. I was unable to build the future I envisioned. I lacked power.

Power is the ability to do what you want to do. At a small scale, it’s the ability to work on whatever you want to work on and make a living from it. That’s hard enough. At a larger scale, it’s the ability to create real change and build assets to do so.

It’s tempting to chase scale. To chase capital, to chase influence, to chase promotions and conflate that with ability. But call it indignance or immaturity, I disagree.

I’m going to do what I want to do.
I’m going to do what I think is right, be that as indignant as I may.

I was an intern at the time. The team I was on owned an internal logging tool for retail systems (i.e., RTLA), but we were soon to be defunct: mandate had came that we be merged into AWS Cloudwatch. I was given two options. I could either accept the return offer, contingent that I emigrate to Dublin, or find another team to return to. I chose the latter.

I spent the remainder of my internship interviewing. I cold-called managers in Alexa, SageMaker, Last Mile, and a few dozen more. I didn’t quite know what I was looking for, but I knew what not to look for. Many teams sounded the same. They were all working on something “business critical” and I’d be given opportunities to “grow my career” and “own scope.” I was being sold - and I disliked it. I distrusted them.

My first call with JJ started off similar. I explained who I was, the position I was in, and then asked for an overview of his team and the work I’d be doing. He stared at me for a few seconds in silence, ignored me, and then asked me what I wanted to do with my life.

I don’t quite know what I replied with. Probably some incoherent anxious mess, something along the lines of “I want to learn and build something great.” His response was as honest as his character. “Great" and hung up. A few days later, Jim reached out to me to give an overview of Percolate, and a few months later, I was on the team.

JJ was our team’s Principal Engineer. He built Percolate, Amazon’s content optimization system. He created that vision and made it a reality. He wrote every doc, was in every meeting (and was always right), still found time to push code daily, and tore through any and all blockers (be that people or systems).

He was my mentor. And though my ego wouldn’t let me admit it at the time, he and I were quite similar. He worked hard and I did too. He loved work and taught me how. He held a ruthlessly high bar and I did the same. He was blunt (at times, overly so) and whether you loved or hated him, everyone in our org knew him. He was incredibly hard to work with, and I loved working with him.

There’s a lot I learned from JJ. Some of it was new, ideas that challenged me and made me grow in ways I didn’t envision before. But most of it was pushing me to be a better version of who I already was. This doc sheds light on a few — the principles I’ve learned to work by.

Aim for great

When I first joined Percolate, work was not my motive. I had just dropped out of graduate school at Carnegie Mellon and moved to Seattle. There was much to distract me and fascinate me outside of work. I was addicted to Overwatch at the time. I tend to get quite competitive when playing video games, with the mindset of either I’ll be the best in the world or quit it entirely.

I did that initially with League of Legends, where I no-lifed it for a season and got up to Diamond, but then quit when I plateaued shortly afterwards. Overwatch was dangerous because I didn’t. I kept climbing until I was ranked in the top 100 and was even courted by a few pro teams to come do tryouts. That’s all to say, my day-to-day initially consisted of coding in the office from 10AM to 5PM, going home, and then playing Overwatch from 6PM to 2AM.

The first project I was given exacerbated that fact. Jim gave me the Percolate Management Tool. The goal of the tool was to provide a single consolidated view of all the different content strategies scheduled in Percolate. It was an odd project as it was isolated from the rest of the team. And it was an easy project, as it was just spinning up a web server to call an API and render some JSON data in a Gantt chart view. So I just did it. I hacked it up, showed Jim what I built, made him happy enough, and went along thinking “Is this all work really is?”

JJ broke that. About three months in, I received an email for a “Search-Percolate kick-off meeting.” I showed up and JJ was in the room, along with a Sr. Manager and two Sr. SDEs from Search. He began commandeering the meeting, throwing a deluge of terms I didn’t understand: link parameters, eventual cache consistency, customer targeting criteria. The meeting escalated as JJ and the SDEs began arguing over both technical and business details. “What’s the expiry time on the cache, should it be configurable per provider?” “How do we ensure data isolation between different providers?” “Is the end customer experience we’re enabling here sufficiently large to justify the investment?”

Then JJ turned around, quit talking, stared at me and asked “What do you think Paul?” I felt a rush of red course through my head and stammered out “I don’t know.” After the meeting ended, JJ grabbed me and said “You’ll be owning this, write a design doc.” and walked briskly away to another meeting.

I felt a mix of feelings. Yes, I felt embarrassed, I felt unprepared, I felt I was in a position I was unready for. But at the same time, I was excited. I was shown how much I didn’t know, how much I lacked, and how much I could learn.

I wrote my first design doc the next day of and sent it to JJ by email at 5PM. An hour later, he replied with 60 comments in red. State all requirements as P0 or P1. Propose a singular solution. Use the word shall not will. Does this meet the latency requirement, have you tested? This schema isn’t flexible enough, fix it.

I was in shock. For one, I didn’t expect he’d reply so quickly. And for two, I never received feedback like that before. It was direct, it was detailed, and it was stated as fact. As much as I tried to dispute his comments, they were right. I revised the design doc the night of, sent it to JJ, and he replied a few minutes later with “Great, thanks, go build it.”

A lot happened after that. I started working hard because I found a reason to care. I was given projects that were beyond me, things that I couldn’t handle and was expected to fail. And I did fail. I failed a lot. Those failures made it clear how I lacked and motivated me to become more than who I was before.

I’ll caveat that this rather draconian way of mentorship isn’t one I think works for all people. People are different, and there’s some inherent parts of my personality that suit the JJ school of thought well. Yet, I’ll be transparent and honest in who I am. This is the way I’ve learned to work and this is the way I love to work.

Aim to be great. Don’t settle for good. Don’t compare yourself to the other SDE Is, or the other SDE IIs, or even the other SDE IIIs. Find the single smartest person in your org, the guy who’s doing 10 times the work others are, the guy who’s always right about everything, the guy who comes up with new ideas every week and aim to be him. If you can’t find him, then define him. Redefine expectations and push the bar of what’s possible. That’s your comparison.

JJ was my bar. Not anyone else. My goal was to exceed him: to do something he couldn’t and to make him proud.

Work hard

I’ve never thought of myself as a dumb person. And though I wouldn’t say I was particularly precocious, I did pretty well in school while trying relatively little. I made games of skipping university classes, minimizing the number of in-person attendances required to get an A contingent I’d ace all my exams. My linear algebra professor caught notice of it and used to announce my arrivals with especial emphasis, “Paul, how nice of you to join us today!”

But I’ve never thought of myself as a smart person either. That was painted in clear reality when I met my cofounder, Mikkel, freshman year of college. I was taking discrete math at the time and catching up on overdue homework as usual. There was a particular proof I struggled with, and though I solved it, I presented the answer with some uncertainty. Mikkel took one look and said “Wrong.” I asked “Why?” His reply, “It’s obvious.” I spent the next three hours furiously trying to disprove him, but then realizing he was (as he always tends to be) right.

I felt the same in Percolate. I keenly understood that I was the dumbest person in the room. And not just JJ and Jim, it was everyone in our team. Our team leaned very senior, we had one Principal Engineer, three Sr. SDEs, two SDE IIs, and then me. These people weren’t only strong because of their tenure, they exceeded it. They were smarter than me, more talented than me, and had more experience than me. How was I to catch up? My answer was to work.

There’s times in life where failings can feel crippling. Where I feel frustrated at my own weaknesses, my own lacking, and lament myself for it. I wish I was smarter, I wish I was older, I wish I walked a different path than I had thus far. It’s painful because it’s true - there are certain walls you can never overcome despite how much you might try.

But still, I choose to work. Hard work is my solace. And if I’m about what I say I’m about, if I really want to build something great, that’s my only option. I can’t change who I am. I won’t ever be smarter than Mikkel. I won’t ever be older than I am.

The only thing I can do is work - so I will.

It’s easy to romanticize the life of a startup founder, thinking that your passion will be so fulfilling that it’ll obviate all the effort required. That once you’re doing what you want to do, work will be effortless. It won’t. You’ll be working 80 hour weeks and if you can’t deal with that, if you can’t do that, you shouldn’t start. It’s the same for many other pursuits. It’s fun to talk about starting a restaurant, it’s not fun to actually do it. I can talk about wanting to be a journalist, but the reality will always betray the thought.

If you want to do what you want to do, if you want to do something real and meaningful to you, then work.

Work hard. Try the hardest you’ve ever tried. Give it your all and do everything you can. Do that every single day. Don’t just read this and be motivated for a few days. Each and every day, wake up, remind yourself of the person you want to be, and work hard.

Love what you do

There’ll be times in life where the only thing you want to do is work.

JJ said that to me on a Friday night in the office. I don’t recall why he said it, but the phrase strikes in my memory since.

Work gives me purpose. I like what I do, I like building products for people, I like mentoring and developing others, I like writing, I like inspiring, at times I even like the politics and the absurdity of it all.

When I was on Percolate, work gave me an incredible amount of purpose. I believed in our vision, I truly wanted to make Percolate succeed and thought that what we were doing was the right thing to do for the customer. We were buccaneers making the site for better. We went from page to page, found crappy content systems, and replaced them with dynamic personalized recommendations. I loved the people I worked with. I learned from them, became close to them, and eventually felt responsible for them. They relied on me and I was intent on never betraying that trust.

After I quit Percolate, there was a certain void that occurred. Work had been the primary thing in my life that fulfilled me, to perhaps an abnormal degree. Some part of me attempted to rectify that by doing more of the same. I found stuff to work on, kept myself busy by taking lectures and reading papers, and continued to build side-projects. That didn’t quite work: I still felt empty and unfulfilled.

So I started something new. I got into a lot of hobbies, met a lot of people, and did things I’d probably never do again. I learned how fulfilling life can be outside of work, how purposeful relationships can be, and how meaningful life in itself really is. I'm grateful for that and cherish what I’ve found.

But I still love work. I love what I do.
At the end of the day, few things are cooler than building products that solve problems for people.

So learn to love work. Give it a shot. Rather than think about how to minimize effort, give a shit. Actually try. Be an owner and think about what would you do if you were in charge. What would you do instead?

And even after that, if you find that what you’re doing is not what you’re supposed to be doing, then quit. Figure out what you want to do: be that art, literature, activism, or whatnot. Quit and go do that. Be proud of what you do. You choose what to work on. Not your manager, not your director, not anyone else. Don’t forget that.

In that time, I did a lot. Wrote a lot of code, wrote many more docs, pitched a lot of ideas, and was fortunate enough to have one go through. I was busy, and the languid state of my body corroborates that fact. Yet, it feels as I’ve achieved very little. Perhaps more telling of my own personality than anything, but it stands as my own truth I can’t deny.

The intent of this doc, this series of weekly notes, is a few-fold. For one, it’s to write. I like writing, and while Amazon lends itself well to that, there’s aspects of its written culture I disagree with. Too often do we seem to focus on the audience, harping on particular words and dictions to appease. We rewrite docs to be more “scientific“ if that’s in leadership vogue and avoid particular words like the plague (the word graph, I‘ve learned, is perhaps more taboo than common expletive). That irks me. And while I recognize the practicality of it and am no longer as indignant as I used to be, it still leaves me wanting an outlet for self.

There’s a particular way I write. I like short sentences, I like esoteric words, I like flirting with the grammatically incorrect. I like statements with a bit of bombast, the unsubstantiated to inspire. I write for myself - and I take pride in what I write. And in some sense, the way I write is very Amazonian. I remember religiously reading “The Elements of Style” by William Strunk after having my first doc be ravaged by a slew of comments. Remove what doesn’t add. Revise obsessively. Active voice over passive. I’d repeat those rules to myself chronically as I wrote and re-wrote. And then to others as I began to review their writing.

The second purpose is to be read. Although many writers will often say that the act of writing itself is satisfaction enough, I disagree. There is a lucidity that writing can bring about and its something I rely upon heavily, both personally and professionally. But writers are quite the egotistical bunch. What writer doesn’t want their work to be read? And I aspire to write well. To write something real that stands on its own.

The third, and the most vain of all, is to sell. There’s a vision I have of Amazon. I was lucky enough to be exposed to it 8 years ago. The people around me embodied it: they were incredibly smart, worked hard, and made amazing things happen for our customers. I followed suit. I was inspired to work and I fell in love with my job. Work, in no small part, gave me purpose. At the time, I knew the team I was in was special, but I didn’t realize how special it was until I left.

Things are different now. The company’s changed and I’ve changed. No longer am I an over-confident SDE I, my role’s different now. Some of it, yes, is to “manage risk” and be the cog that keeps the company churning. But the other part of it is to be a mentor and a friend. To pass the torch on and do what was done for me. Show people how fun work can be, how exciting it can be to build products for people and relish that joy together.

So, some part of this will be stories about work. From Percolate, from Stripe, from my startups (DeepDive & Rehabbit), and the random things in between. The other parts (unsurprisingly) will also be about work: lessons I’ve taken to heart, principles to operate by, and ideas to share. And on occasion, a soapbox on whatever happens to be gnawing at me at the time.

It is my hope that in some small way, these writings will be of use to you.
—baepaul

I started climbing at the end of COVID-19.

Lockdown restrictions were loosening and I, just like many others, was anxious almost rabid to get out and about. Climbing hadn’t appealed much to me before - I’d been taken a few times in Seattle by tech yuppies, a predominant faction of gyms’ clientele, and found it boring. A modern-day social sport, the equivalent of bowling alleys in the 90s. But be it for one reason or another (likely some pent-up ennui), this time I was hooked.

I’m quite obsessive. I’m the sort of person to look for purpose in pursuit and commit myself wholly to it, often times to my own detriment. I was addicted to work, I was addicted to video games, and this time, I got addicted to climbing.

There’s a certain combination of traits I look for in a discipline. Climbing had them all: it was individualist (you don’t need a team to climb), it was a skill sport (that lent itself well to progression), and it suited me well (one of the few sports a skinny 5”7 guy could excel at). So I did as I always have, I obsessed over it: climbing as much as my body would allow me, tossing myself relentlessly at the wall, and spending copious amounts of time analyzing my own climbing and that of others.

That led to two outcomes: I got a lot stronger and I got a lot of injuries.

Not a particular surprise, when you consider moments like these:

And that started my history with pain.

The first injury I ever got was a lumbrical injury, a minor muscle in the palm of the hand. I sprained mine while matching the finish hold on my first V8. I felt something funny immediately which cascaded into a sharp pain radiating through my palm. The morning after, I was unable to open or close my hand without intense pain shooting through my arm.

That terrified me. To have something you’ve taken for granted, something you’ve done millions of times before, be rendered decrepit in a day. It was traumatic. 

In hindsight, after receiving and rehabilitating a long list of injuries, this episode seems almost minor. I’ve had TFCC tears, MCL sprains, pulley injuries, joint synovitis, shoulder impingement, and even a cervical herniated disc. Many of those hurt far worse and disabled me for far longer. Yet the first is still hard to forget.

Now again, I’m obsessive.

So when I, a try-hard who would literally do anything to climb harder, was set back by injury; what did I do? I contacted sports doctors, physical therapists, certified hand therapists and spent copious amounts of time and money to fix my body. I learned a lot about injury.

Take shoulder impingement for example. Patients typically present pain in the shoulder, limited range of motion, and weakness. The underlying pathophysiology is vague. The hypothesis is that something in your shoulder’s subacromial space is impinging against each other: tendon rubbing across bone or inflamed bursas. But we don’t know what. In other words, something in your shoulder is inflamed and it’s causing you pain.

When I went to my sports doctor for a diagnosis, he didn’t administer any scans or MRIs, he simply moved my shoulder around a few times and gave me a referral to physical therapy. The physical therapist did the same. He moved my shoulder around a few times and told me to do a bunch of shoulder exercises.

That bewildered me. I advocated for myself and pushed for scans, but they were deemed medically unnecessary. How was it that my doctor could accurately diagnose me based off nothing but a few questions and physical tests? How was it that the only treatment I was prescribed were a bunch of exercises with rubber bands?

I was skeptical.

I began to research the literature myself: buying orthopedic textbooks, reading dozens of papers on treatment efficacy, and experimenting with myself (running A/B tests on different treatments and recording progress/pain over time).

And the evidence was clear: physical therapy does work. It’s a proven scientifically backed treatment to many forms of physical pain. It’s a long-term fix that addresses fundamental root causes. It was the only thing that truly helped me.

But while physical therapy as a treatment was effective, the industry wasn’t.

It’s expensive. It costs a minimum of $125 per session in New York, running up to $250 for boutique clinics. That’s a recurring cost - one session of PT isn’t enough, you need 2-3 visits a week for months.

The quality of care is going down. As margins grow thinner for clinics, “mills” are becoming the prevalent model of care. Clinics where the primary form of treatment is group sessions, where a single physical therapist aide runs around supervising groups of 8-12 patients doing exercises.

The real value of physical therapy is information. The diagnosis and the exercise plan. Once I know what to do, it’s a matter of doing my exercises regularly. I don’t need to go into a clinic to do that; I can do that on my own time in my own home.

And that’s the PT idea. We founded Rehabbit on three beliefs.

1. Physical therapy is effective

2. Physical therapy is just exercise

3. Anyone can exercise

Our MVP.
A medical chatbot. 
A historically bad startup idea.

But we believed our approach to be different for two reasons:

1. We mitigate risk

   1. Diagnosing physical injuries is easier than medical conditions.

   2. A sore throat can indicate a large range of diseases, ranging from minor colds to serious conditions. Muscular pain is a lot easier and a lot less risky.

2. We treat directly

   1. A chatbot might be right in diagnosing you with the flu. But what’s the next step? It can’t prescribe treatment.

   2. But we can. If we diagnose a patient with shoulder impingement, we can recommend a personalized rehab plan immediately.

We showed it to climbers.

The response was largely positive. People liked the immediacy, the diagnosis, and the simplicity. But we had to take that with a grain of salt: they were churning. They would use it initially, do some exercises for a few days, and then quit subsequently after. We had an adherence problem. Our app could diagnose injuries and tell people what exercises to do. But how do we ensure patients adhere?

We decided to onboard physical therapists.

Our pitch to providers was simple: $30 for a 30 minute call. After the call, patients would be able to text their providers and vice-versa. What we wanted was accountability. We believed that patients would be more likely to adhere if they were told to do so by a real person, not an app. Someone they could call, someone they could text, someone they would see - whenever they opened the app.

The pitch worked. We cold-called therapists and were able to onboard a dozen or so with nearly all calls converting.

We launched a few weeks later. Our go-to-market targeted climbers: a chronically injured and obsessive customer base. We launched on Reddit, first on a smaller niche /r/climbharder subreddit and again on the larger /r/climbing subreddit.

The response was overwhelming. 150K impressions, 1K upvotes, 100 comments, 500 shares, and 500 installs within a few days. But it felt odd.

Mikkel and I would often talk about firsts. Our first customer, our first dollar, our first employee. How good it would feel, how motivated we’d be, to know that what we’re working on is no longer just an idea, but a business. A small business no doubt, but a business nonetheless. Something real.

It didn’t feel that good.

I was at the climbing gym when Mikkel texted me the numbers. For a few minutes, I was euphoric bouncing around the walls grinning like an idiot. But then I started thinking what next. Now that we have customers, how do we scale, how do we grow, how do we raise?

The ending of this story is as abrupt as reality. I quit working on Rehabbit a few days after we launched.

Life happened. I won’t explain the details, but my time was cut short. If I wanted to keep working on Rehabbit, I needed it to succeed and do so in a short time-frame.

So I quit.

Fear was a factor. If I had full confidence, the conviction that our idea would succeed no matter what, I would’ve stuck with it. I would’ve made things work. I didn’t - I’ll admit it.

We were struggling to raise capital to scale. We didn’t have a concrete plan on how we’d support insurance. We didn’t have a why now. Why our idea wasn’t done already given the underlying technology was all present years prior.

If I had the pluck I typically carry myself with, I probably would’ve kept trying. Kept bullishly pursuing my beliefs, regardless the obstacle. I didn’t.

Startups are hard. Really hard.

There will always be questions unanswered and challenges to confront. There will never be a point with certainty where we can say we’ve succeeded. It is, and always will be, an uphill battle.

I didn’t know what it means to start a business a year ago. I won’t claim that I do now.

But what is clear is that your business is your life. And nothing else in your life, takes precedent. To succeed, you need to commit - for as long as it takes.

To end, here are some thoughts.

Physical therapy is broken.

It’s growing rapidly as a whole, projected market cap from $60B to 2024 to $128B in 2032. But margins are thin. Net profits are single digit percentages. There’s a huge discrepancy between what’s billed for a session and what the therapist takes home. Reimbursements for a session can total over $200. A therapist takes home $50.

The existing business model isn’t scaling.

Clinics can’t set their own prices. They’re subject to billing the CPT codes mandated, which means their only means of leverage over revenue is optimizing costs. That leads to acquisition and conglomerations: larger groups buying up individual clinics and standardizing operations. More “mills”, more group sessions, all of which directly reduce the quality of care.

The model needs to change. And it has already.

What we’ve built is Hinge Health for the public. Hinge Health is a MSK startup valued at $6.2B. It has the same model of care we do. Patients get assigned physical therapists who provide initial 15 minute consultations and support through text messages. Patients then do their exercises without in-person supervision.

This model has been proven to work.

It’s cheaper and more effective than traditional models of care. But, it’s hard to take it and deploy it en masse. Insurance is the blocker. Telehealth consultations with physical therapists aren’t supported. You can’t bill for text message support and monitoring. So what MSK startups, such as Hinge Health, have done is sell their product directly as a cost savings to employers, given that insurers don’t support their model as-is.

However - things are changing. 
This model can be supported by insurers now.

Telehealth consultations can be billed for under COVID provisions. RTM devices are a new class of billables that let providers charge for remote patient monitoring and text support. Admittedly, these codes are on shaky ground. Some of the bills are temporary and it’s unclear whether they’ll be permanent. Others are nascent and their reimbursement rates remain to be negotiated. But it is possible.

And if it were, we could take a proven superior model of care and directly replace traditional clinics. 

That’s the vision for Rehabbit: to redefine physical therapy.

1. Personalize physical therapy for the patient

2. Build a sustainable model for the provider