How would you define ‘good business’? As an 8-year-old, while playing a trading card game (mostly for the trading) I found a deceptively simple answer: a transaction both parties can smile about. I became obsessed with doing as much of that as possible, and commerce itself became a game I couldn’t get enough of.

Until I did. Being a middleman, you don’t truly get to create value. At 18, I took a hard look at my resale operations. I’d use software all the time in my business and realized those developers were creating a lot of value. I asked an age-old, iceberg-natured question: how hard could it be to do that myself?

I spent 3 years making bad software, through companies like Web3Renaissance and Agora. We tried hard to see the future and innovate, without thinking too much about the Customer. Occam’s razor struck again; Why not make sure people want it before I build it?

Thanks to r/politicalcompass, a 2-week prototype proved Votely’s demand, and my political quiz got the continuous feedback it needed to garner 40K users so far. Similarly, Scoutify sold its first subscription on the 6th day, and now ~1K people use it every week.

As Biggie Smalls says, the sky’s the limit. Now at Cloudflare, I’m leveraging its scale to maximize those smiles. At 22, I’m just starting my career, unaware of what the future holds. I just know I’ll be relentlessly building products people want.