When I moved to NorCal almost nine years ago it was explicitly to get closer to the startup culture of the Bay Area. I was close enough for occasional trips, but I was really constrained by the amount of time I could spend in the city. I arrived just weeks before Trumpās first inauguration and there were plentiful distractions in the years that followed.
California continues to work its magic - sixty days ago My Long Nightmare Is Ending revealed what I had hoped for when I first arrived in California in 2015 finally happened. There is a name for my condition and a simple treatment that eliminated most of what had been holding me down since 2007.
Once I was sure the changes were real, I hit the door running, and something good happened immediately. Let me tell you a bit about it ā¦
Starting:
So I network in a variety of ways, hardly at all on social media any more, itās infested with a pack of ankle biters who make preposterous pretext approaches. People I already know on LinkedIn have been helpful, but thereās that other network, the IRL one I seldom mention, and never in detail. Someone in that space heard I was well, and on the hunt, which lead to an introduction.
And after some initial conversations, a lot of āWait, you can do WHAT?!?!?!ā, and a couple brief false starts, now there IS a startup. The team has an experienced organizer, a CFO /w CPA, thereās a problem domain specialist who will also be CEO, and Iām responsible for translating the theories into scalable practice. Itās AI focused and I canāt say more than that.
Funding:
So we meet daily via a Signal video call, and we each report our progress. Itās a little weird for me, because people run 8:00 - 20:00 five days a week. They sleep like normal adults and theyāre very defensive of their weekends. Thereās a bunch of paperwork and due diligence stuff that must be done to get any serious amount of money, and thatās some of what weāre doing for the rest of fourth quarter.
But there are āangel investorsā, people who wonāt care so much about reading the detailed plan, they make relatively small amounts of money available to people they already know, to people with history of success, or with compelling founder stories.
And we had all three bases covered, so a five digit deposit was made on our behalf. My rent is paid through the end of the year AND I got a fancy gadget to use in my R&D.
Conclusion:
This is what I started to do in 2001, a process which was badly damaged by my ex-wifeās health downfall the next year, and utterly destroyed by my own five years later.
Tonight I was at the grocery store, celebrating with egg bites and this vegan protein drink I really like. The clerks in the checkout were talking about the fact that the already bad theft problem was going to go completely berserk in November. Apparently the government shutdown has taken out Californiaās SNAP funding. Itās a strange thing to be personally rising, while everything else is coming apart around me.
This event is the saving throw I needed in response to last weekās Complete Commercial Collapse, but itās just enough for me to slide through into 2026. Those of you who are subscribing are covering my subscriptions for various services, the little things I periodically need in the way of supplements, and you keep my BART card ready in case I need to head into the city. So thank you, and NEVER imagine those $5/month subscriptions donāt matter, there are days where thatās the glue that holds everything else together.
Second chances in life are the rarest of commodities. And this is my third. I promise I will not waste it.
