The conference that became a city

In February of 2025 I flew from San Francisco to Denver for a conference. Four days, a lanyard, the usual. I did not understand that I was moving.

There's a specific kind of arrogance in thinking you know what a trip is for. I thought I was going to talk about technology. The city had read a different brief, and it spent the next year rearranging me whether I'd signed up for it or not.

San Francisco was a kind of holding pattern

I’d been in SF doing what you do in SF, building, chasing, optimizing, treating my life like a startup that needed better metrics. It worked, in the way those things work: I was productive and I was hollow, and I’d gotten very good at not noticing the second part.

I think a lot of people live in that exact configuration. High output, low contact with their own life. You can run that program for years. I did. The thing about a holding pattern is that it feels like progress because you’re moving fast, and you only realize you’ve been circling the same airport when something finally lets you land.

Denver let me land. I didn’t plan it. I couldn’t have planned it. You can’t schedule the thing that breaks the pattern, almost by definition, because if you could schedule it you’d already be the kind of person who didn’t need it.

What a place does to an open person

I arrived, for reasons I still don’t fully understand, open. Maybe I was tired enough. Maybe the conference was just the excuse and some quieter part of me had already decided. But I came in porous, and the city poured in.

It started with the people, a community that took the interior life as seriously as the work, which I had never seen modeled by anyone successful before. In SF the inner life was a productivity input: meditate so you can ship more. Here it was the point, and the shipping was downstream. That inversion alone took me months to digest.

And then there was the altitude, the mountains, the particular Colorado light, and a set of experiences I’ll write about more carefully elsewhere, experiences that went a great deal further than language and came back with things I’m still unpacking a year later. I’ll just say: when you go far out, carefully and with respect, you get to see the machinery underneath your own defaults. And once you’ve seen the machinery, the holding pattern stops being invisible. You can’t un-see how you’ve been flying.

I came to Denver to network and I got initiated instead. Those are not the same verb, and I’d been doing the wrong one for years.

The disorientation was the gift

I want to be honest that this was not clean or pretty. The year that followed had real wreckage in it, habits that fell apart, money I lost, relationships that strained, a body that kept forcing itself into the story through injuries and surgeries. Getting cracked open is not a glow-up. It’s a crack. Things fall out.

But here’s what I’ve come to believe: the disorientation was the gift. The version of me that flew in from San Francisco had everything figured out and was quietly miserable about it. The version the city made had no idea what was going on and was, for the first time in a long time, actually present for his own life.

I’d take confused-and-here over certain-and-absent every time now. That’s the whole trade. It cost me a year of stability and it gave me back contact with my own existence.

Why I lead with this

Because every other thing on this site, the markets, the agents, the way I build now, the things I believe about systems, grew out of this. People assume the technical work and the inner work are two different lives, a builder with an unusual hobby. They are the same pursuit, and they started in the same place: a conference in February that turned out to be a city, and a city that turned out to be a door.

I walked through it. I’m still walking through it. That’s the only autobiography that matters.