If you've come to burn an effigy...

Last Friday was my last day at High Dimensional Research, the startup I cofounded with two friends. It was the longest I’ve ever worked anywhere in my career – about two years. Most of my jumps are around that length, which feels odd to me, but I’ve always either joined startups or founded companies myself, so it’s been fast moving. I imagine at corporate it’s easier to rack up time.

In that time we ran the whole gamut of what founding your first startup means: constantly doing MVPs, testing to see what people want; making a plan for what you want to do with funding, then pitching; reconfiguring the product and the pitch over and over, moving industries, from vertical to horizonal to vertical again. Bootstrapping, then getting pre-seed funding, and testing our hypothesis. At the time of my departure I felt that we both had

It felt both prudent and due to transition out for the sake of my career. After all, over the past year I’ve found my friends entering career resets, asking personal questions, making sense of what their purpose is in the new era. I haven’t felt immune to this sense of questioning. I’d just been outsourcing it, half-acknowledging it, first questioning my need for distraction, trying new life patterns to focus directly on others, and finally questioning why I was so addicted to novelty.

In the back half of the year I felt more like I was coming to the point where I had to make a life decision in some direction, that the final boss was integration, through giving myself to something in order to understand it, believing in order to understand. Or, I guess rephrased, “I feel a bit impoverished but afraid of commitment; the only actual solution is to commit in some direction”.

Around the start of the year it felt more apparent what was next.



A Sabbath without sleep

It’s hard to call the next period a sabbatical: I am, after all, still pretty busy. The first order of business is that I set up a new corporation for creative software, Effigy Softworks. While it’s still being finalised, the main purpose is to create an entity to wrap up a game I’ve been working on with some collaborators for the past few years.

While I’ve been working on it in my spare time, it’s rare that I would get the time to sit down and really write entire swaths, the way it currently needs. So I’d like to give it some allocated time to finish it and put it out.

If you’re interested in that, there’s a signup for a mailing list on the website itself.

The second emphasis for the company is to … of course, bootstrap additional work. I’d like to spend at least some time each week or so to work at developing smaller revenue streams with partners. I gestured at this in my ideation on values earlier this year, and I’d like especially to pick at projects in that vein. If you have suggestions and want to work together on something, let me know.

Otherwise, I have a whole syllabus of stuff to get to. 2024 was practically a missing year for my intellectual development and media consumption (excepting music, which has had a renaissance), and I would like to get a bit hermetic. After all, it was so good for me last year! I still run a forum for artsy selfsames where I charted a Japan travelogue last year, and I found writing long-form has been really fun.

I haven’t leapt like this in about half a decade, so it’s obvious I feel a little anxious, but I think developing a reasonable comfort with uncertainty is necessary. I’ll be in travel for a brief period, but afterward, between focus on my loved ones, my local community and through continuing professional connections in these various projects, I feel confident it’ll shake out.

Until then…

If you've come to burn an effigy... - February 12, 2025 -