The first time I quit my second startup

🔥 How To Quit

Quitting a startup is an incredibly exhausting journey in and of itself, and it is a process most would typically consider me too young to have experienced. But I am not; I am reaching the concluding end of a 5-year journey across two companies, transcending beyond the community college barriers that only those of us with no elite network of students or friends could understand. In a coding interview, my friend once stated that a celebrity is someone who everybody knows but that does not know anyone else. I wonder who the rest of us are.

As I said, this is my second startup. Of course, it depends on what you qualify as being a startup, but I’ll go into a bit more detail on my past organizations later. For now, I’ll just share that I’ve been a solo founder. Everyone said that was a horrible idea; you need teammates. Looking back, that sounds reasonable. I just never found any. Let slide the fact that covid-19 was just starting to unleash its tyranny on the world. But I am glad that even as a solo founder, I did not quit because I could not find a partner. I left because I was not ready.

Not ready for what? Well, I am in the business of internet identity. To most, that either sounds cool, dull, or downright evil. And it is all of those things… or at least could be. But it is also so much more. As I refer to it, online identity is the future of accessing websites, managing internet accounts, and compliance with legality on the internet. It is the experience that wraps these functionalities into something that we as a consumer can then utilize.

And to be fair, I’m not sure it exists yet. Not in America at least, and frankly, I don’t find the government-facing global competitors in this market very appealing. But I also don’t trust myself to be the one who builds it, and even if I did, I’m not entirely sure how. So, I quit. Stripped of my masculinity in the most primitive and unhealthy ways, I now walk the valley of the shadow of death, seeking opportunities as a lowly junior software engineer.

⛰️ Who Succeeds?

It is a strange thing to feel success in an early-stage startup founding experience. Though I suppose I wouldn’t know, following some preconceived notions, I hold toward success. My second company, Swish, had no users, no funding, honestly no actual product offering at all. But to me, it was one of the most epic of successes. Why? It was a learning opportunity. Imagine the perspective shift from knowing I had a great idea and seeking the wealth attributed with that idea… towards understanding I had a great idea and seeing an entirely new world of opportunity like a painted landscape of the future.

In founding my own company, the first problem I realized was that my deadlines and expectations were too hungry for the lonely mind. I found myself constantly falling short of my expectations. Looking back now, I think this is a necessary step, and I continue to improve on estimating my project deadlines. Initially, I would say my estimations were wrong because I was basing them on how long it would take to learn and implement a specific skill. But skills tend to work together, so I continuously fell down a rabbit hole of needing to learn more and expanding to complete the task at hand. My friend calls the learning and retention of these skills “Hardware Acceleration,” meaning once you understand them and they’re ingrained into your hardware (brain), they will be easily accessible at a moment’s notice in the future. Deadlines get shorter-- and god d*mn would a team have helped.

My following notion of success is related to the celebrity reference previously—the seeking of networks, fame, attention, money, power, and all of the above. Let me just say. It is a very lonely experience to be a founder, and I am lucky to have a life partner & spouse who makes even the worst of times a bit brighter. Being a founder during a time of isolation, migration, and desolation such that covid left us is a period of life I will not be able to wipe from my memory. But back to becoming famous, it’s hard to meet people in general, and it’s way harder to meet people and crack deals when your best weapon is messaging them on Linkedin. And consider me saying that after my first company raised half a million in college because a billionaire founder messaged us on Twitter and thought we were “cool.”

In closing, for success and what it means to succeed, I think I have concluded. It simply depends on what step in the journey you started at and where you ended up. Often, we see only what we wish to, and when I see what I wish for, I have not succeeded. But when I step back into reality and look where I started and where I ended up-- well, let’s just say I’m smiling as I write this.

What is your goal?

🌊 How To Start

Starting a company is a ridiculous f*cking process. When the doors of potential begin swinging open, you are faced with the horrifying reality of fantastical prospects of possibility and overwhelming magnitude at the size & scope of the market. In other words, I thought as a 25-year-old ex-hacking, ex-racing, ex-farmer, ex-childhood-bitcoiner, and multi-founder that I would be unique. Nah, that’s not even a unique lineup when you start looking at a worldwide scale of founders. But it’s not impossible. And the benefit of so much knowledge is that we can choose to take unique paths on how we utilize our knowledge.

My life starts in the internet age—a child of the late 90s, at the cusp of millennials and zoomers (genZ). I was raised in a farm town, the kind with Amish kids who quit school at 13 or so. My neighboring city was Pittsburgh, at the west end of Pennsylvania, an hour away. As you can imagine, tech culture was not a highly relevant subject of discussion to the people around me, and I guess that’s why I found the internet.

But the internet also found me. No longer was I limited to discussion of lawnmowers and farm equipment. Suddenly, my friend Micah told me about his day in Trinidad, while another told me about growing up in the Bronx. It wasn’t long before my best friends became faceless names on the internet. Like my boy Donat, who has been a loyal Croatian companion since I was 14. My friends and I mostly convened on games or forums. We also bounced between the internet’s white, grey, and black zones at that age, primarily noobish hacking culture, game economies, and other generally disruptive web sections. Maybe we all had something to prove, or perhaps it was merely teenage idleness.

It wasn’t until later in life, when I realized people perceived my experience as somehow novel. I also didn’t know that I was watching in real-time new technologies dropping on the scene, like the phase change from putty booters, to stress testers, botnets, and eventually IoT’s introduction. Or the growth of Bitcoin for its immutability over predecessors like LR, PM, and so forth. After bitcoin came the introduction of privacy coins and the entirety that is now the blockchain industry. Consider that for a moment. From my perspective, Blockchain has been around essentially for as long as I have been on the web. It’s not weird to me; it came from the necessity of age-limited banking while I was a nascent entrepreneurial spirit. From my experience, a blockchain-based currency seemed inevitable.. And I would rather say I’m from the internet than wherever some do.

It’s this background that has brought me toward creating an experience around online identity and personal security. Like the game, I find the internet is sort of like a second life.

💨 Open-source Blueprints

Because identity on the internet is a few things, we will break it into four main categories.

( #1 ) Legality

Because there are legal requirements in place, industries such as FinTech (Financial Technology) have obligations toward governments such as the United States to collect legally identifying information on individuals and businesses who do business on their platforms. KYC (Know Your Customer) is typically the reason why someone might upload their driver’s license and passport photos to the internet.

( #3 ) Utility

We have identity management at an optimized disadvantage to attracting innovation, like identity access management for the consumer internet. I find this a severely lacking field in terms of product offerings but destined to grow into a beautiful new way of managing yourself across the internet. Consumer utility allows us to stand above imposters on the internet and create pseudo-anonymous accounts on various sites.

( #2 ) Economics

Despite legality, there are also economic reasons for identifying customers on the internet. These are due to the cost savings of fraud as a business expense. When a business funnels users through a verification process, they are less likely to have fraudulent transactions and lost revenue on their platform.

( #4 ) Social

It would be a grievous mistake to underestimate the social impact involved with identity. It is easy to overlook social behaviors in this field and impossible not to recognize that the most adopted identity platforms on the internet today are led by social media organizations. OAuth technology related to the end consumer in “Social Login” is exclusively dominated by big media corporations Google and Facebook. Developers may have a slightly different experience when considering platforms like Github or Digital Ocean for similar SSO options.

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Identity isn’t exactly popular. If you’re in security, you should understand it’s hard to change or convince user behavior to be more “secure.” If you think I’m lying, build a security app, publish it, and tell me about your adoption rates. If they’re good, I’m looking for a job.It’s tough to get consumers to care about this kind of thing but let’s set aside reasoning and logic for a bit and just talk about what could be in an identity experience that I, the author, would like to see.

Internet Accounts

• Password Manager
  • E.g., Login with username & password.
• Social Login
  • E.g., Login with facebook.
• Account Security Management
  • Think security settings by tags like financial, social, or throwaway account.
• Account Notification Management
  • Think of your email & texts that weren’t full of account notifications as spam.
• Web3 Accounts seed phrase storage, digital signatures, and cool blockchain stuff.

Security & Internet Convenience Tools

• VPN Access
  • Better yet, defaulting it.
• Adblock
  • Because-- fight the system.
• 2FA
  • Efficiency is why Twitter has two percent 2fa adoption rates.
• Account sharing
  • Magic Sharing. Passwordless. Cross-device. Friends, family, self, other. Is antivirus still a thing?

Identity Network

• Reusable Identity
  • Identity documents are fungible (non-unique) and uploaded to many sites.
• Connect (Login) With
  • Connect to an already verified identity network account over reuploading docs.
• Request Data Deletion
• Central Account Manager
  • Managing OAuth (SSO/Social Login) & Password Manager accounts in 1.
• Mobile Identity Access
  • Utility for police, banks, bars, and other physical establishments.

It’s hard to think of how all these things could look together, but when I first got started a few years ago, I desired an app that looked something like the image below. In my head, I try to imagine an app that I would feel comfortably secure on but that my parents can also understand how to use. Because I am not the average victim of identity fraud, they are.

That image led me on a long journey from initially learning how to scan the data on a driver’s license and passport, which was my starting product development focus. As far as my business goes, I began work on it about two years ago. I invested roughly $10,000, and I spent most of my time on research and demo development. I never tried to acquire users. To lead this project, I believe it imperative to understand how the features work, how they can interact together, and, most importantly, development and operations on a technical level.

Would you trust me with your identity? If not, consider who you trust now.

I decided when I hit $400 left that it was time to move on. Not because it wasn’t a success in my mind, but because I don’t have all the necessary experience to feel comfortable trusting myself yet. And that’s okay. For fun, I’m still going to build what I consider a killer feature of the internet. Magic Account Sharing. Like snapping your fingers to log in a spouse, friend, coworker, or self into any of your accounts at the click of a button. On any device. No passwords.

I would like to write more someday, so I will leave you with this last piece. There is a tsunami washing across the internet, and eventually, we will feel the water rising at our ankles. The earthquake that set it off is web cookies, and the wave is only getting bigger.

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