foo for thought

I left Microsoft a few weeks ago. I said goodbye to big tech, goodbye to a cushy salary. I thought I was set for life, but the day-to-day has only shown me how important it is to have agency and how important it is for product design, especially, to be good. The world’s changing fast. We obviously don’t know where it’s going to go quite yet, and anybody is lying if they tell you that they do know. What we have is not a future laid out for us, but rather different people trying their own ways of seizing the future. Microsoft’s way just happened to be critical mass. You get enough smart people and throw them at different things, you’re bound to have one good idea, right? This could be true. This could work out for them, but I can tell you one thing: there are companies of much smaller size out here in the Bay Area. They make genuinely beautiful and delightful products to use.

One of those products that I’ve been paying for personally for the last year is Wispr Flow. I’ve probably talked about it on this blog before. You probably have heard of it. It’s effortless dictation software. You simply hold a button on your computer, and it transcribes you with perfect accuracy. I’ve never once had to think about it misspelling words or doing literally anything else that dictation can do wrong. It was, by all standards, a delightful product, and one of the things that made me look at Microsoft and go, “Huh? What are we doing? A company of under a hundred people can do it. Surely we can, right?”

which led me here in San Francisco, working for Wispr Flow as a member of technical staff. The CEO, Tanay, gave me an offer, a much better deal if the equity becomes realized, but an offer nonetheless. It was a no-brainer for me. I knew it. I’ve been wanting to do this my whole life: making an app that sticks, making an app that’s delightful to use. This is all I care about. When push comes to shove, I’m always going to fight for the product. This has made it quite difficult to be an engineer. This will continue to be a challenge being a member of technical staff, but a challenge I’m willing to pursue. After all, I do like making things, and engineers are the ones who make things. In order to make delightful experiences, you must make them. They don’t come from nowhere. AI may give us the illusion that they take zero effort, but good systems must be engineered. Good applications must be designed. Good engineers must lead the way to production.

I’ve had more agency in the first week at Wispr than I have for the past year at Microsoft. The size alone could account for 90% of it, but it feels good nonetheless. I want to push the world, and I want to push us as people.

I’m starting to think that the reason why most startups fail is that it’s that hard to find something that sticks. It’s that difficult to not only make a delightful experience but to engineer, sell, and market that delightful experience. I know firsthand it’s incredibly difficult to do that as a solopreneur. I couldn’t get anything off the ground myself. I don’t know how these people at Wispr did it, but how they work has been impressing me every day since I joined. I think I’m part of something that has a real good chance of sticking. At least it did with me. Their pitch worked for me. I paid for their product. I’d like to think I’m relatively picky about my software. My girlfriend could probably argue otherwise, but they made an experience that I wanted to buy. They made an experience that I want to help create.

So, not really any model updates for me now, but expect many more for me in the near future. Up until now, this blog has been run by basically my side projects in curiosity alone. We weren’t empowered very much at Microsoft until the tail end to truly embrace agentic workflows, and to be honest, it still wasn’t as close to being there as you’d really expect from Microsoft. I can probably say the same about a lot of other big tech companies too. It’s not just Microsoft. It’s just the fact that it’s hard to change process with that many people. Small companies can just move faster, adapt faster.. I guess what I’m saying is I will be spending 40 hours a week now on this full-time, constantly optimizing my agentic systems and constantly refining our own internal workflows. I could not be more excited to do so.

This is only my second week here, so admittedly, I have a ton of onboarding to get through, a ton of systems I still need to learn, and not that many people I still need to meet. There are not that many of us here. I hope that in the next few months I’ll settle down and I can start focusing on improving the system. Right now, I’m focusing on understanding the system.

Anyways, just a bit of a life update. It was kind of a huge change, and I’m very hopeful for what this leap of faith will lead to for me in the future. I’m also relocating to San Francisco, so that’s fun. I can go to all the nerd conventions now!