You really gotta like what you're building.
Open Public was a cool idea. A commons where people can donate agentic compute to their favorite open source projects. But you know what? I really didn’t like building it.
An essential ingredient in any upstart is for you to really like what you’re doing. There was an initial set of technical challenges which were very interesting to me. I learned a ton about how to securely serve models at a very low level.
There’s also the joy of building an interface from scratch, which is very fun, especially when using something as fast as Elixir and Phoenix served through fly.io.
But after building it all, writing some content, talking to some people, getting some users, and going through the whole growth motion, my interest cratered. At this stage in my life, I don’t want to build a product, I want to build things that are inherently and obviously useful. Or tell stories that touch the heart rather than the mind.
Either way, you gotta enjoy the journey.
If I’m looking for a business, there’s better businesses to start.
If I’m looking for a creative outlet, there’s many more ways to play. I love writing. Check out his blog, for instance. I write about all kinds of weird stuff! Even if no one reads it, I enjoy the journey.
But that’s it. That project shut down. Everyone has been made whole. So if you wound up at this blog while looking for some compute or some project somewhere, you won’t find it.
Thanks for giving me a chance and checking it out, anyways.