Fifteen

I sold Ideaware in April.

Fifteen years of one company. I started it with a stubborn idea about how good products should feel. By the end, I’d worked with hundreds of teams, hired hundreds of people, placed hundreds more, and built something I’m still proud of every time I look back. The sale closed in April, and I haven’t stopped thinking about that fact since.

This piece is the long-overdue thank you, the short version of what those fifteen years taught me, and a quiet nod at what’s next.

The thank you

To every client who trusted me with the thing you couldn’t afford to get wrong, thank you. Some of you are still close friends. A few of you bet on me when I had nothing to show but conviction, and those bets shaped the company forever.

To everyone who built Ideaware with me, you are the company. Designers, engineers, project managers, ops, the people who kept the lights on and the people who shipped the work. You know who you are. I learned more from you than from any book or conference.

To the partners and advisors who showed up at the right moments, the ones who took my calls when I had no idea what I was doing, thank you. The 11pm calls when I had nothing left to give. You know who you are. You probably saved the company more than once.

To Claudia and the boys, none of this happens without you. Fifteen years of weekends, late nights, and a husband and dad who was sometimes physically there and sometimes very much not. You held the line. You always have.

Fifteen lessons

I’m not going to pretend I have neat theories about all of this. These are just the things that kept showing up, year after year, until I couldn’t unsee them.

1. Pick clients you’d work with for free. The work is hard enough on its own. The wrong client makes hard work miserable and the right client makes hard work fun. Energy is your scarcest resource, not time.

2. The boring stuff kills more agencies than bad work. Contracts, invoicing, taxes, ops, payroll, legal. The interesting work is the front of the house, but the back of the house is where companies actually live or die. I learned this slowly and expensively.

3. Your network at year fifteen is the actual asset. Not the website. Not the deck. Not the case studies. The people who pick up the phone are the entire moat, and you build that moat one honest conversation at a time over a decade.

4. Cashflow beats revenue. Always. I’ve seen profitable-on-paper companies miss payroll. I’ve seen unprofitable companies survive because they collected on time. The number that matters is the one in the bank on the first of the month.

5. Saying no is a strategy. Most of the growth I regret came from saying yes too fast. The clients I declined and the projects I walked away from shaped the company more than the ones I took.

6. Hire for ownership, not skill. Skill is teachable. The instinct to treat the work like it’s yours is not. The best people I worked with weren’t always the most technically polished, but they cared about the outcome like the company was theirs.

7. Distribution compounds quietly. A Reddit comment I left in 2024 turned into a client two years later. A throwaway tweet from 2023 just turned into a real conversation last month. Between them, $400k+ in deals from two posts I’d forgotten I’d written. You don’t see compounding while it’s happening, but it is happening. (More on this in time to access.)

8. Taste is the moat. Anyone can build anything now. Tools collapsed. Knowledge is free. What’s left is judgment, and judgment is the rare thing. Build taste, defend it, hire for it.

9. The crunch has to have an end date. If it doesn’t, that’s not a season, that’s the job. I normalized crunch for too long and paid for it. The work expands to fill the time you give it, so guard your time like the asset it is.

10. You can’t outsource the thing your name is on. You can outsource almost everything else, and you probably should. But the calls that define the company have to be yours, and the relationships that matter most can’t be delegated.

11. Build in public. The smartest people I know found me through a tweet or a blog post, not a pitch. Writing is the cheapest, longest-lasting form of distribution and it doubles as a thinking tool.

12. Don’t normalize a thing that’s killing you. This applies to clients, contracts, hires, habits. Whatever you tolerate becomes the standard. The hardest decisions in fifteen years were almost always the ones I knew the answer to six months earlier.

13. AI changed the unit economics of everything. What used to take a team now takes one person with the right stack. I’m not speculating, I’m watching it happen. The companies I see leaning into this already look different from the ones that aren’t. (I wrote about the ladder underneath this shift in levels of agentic engineering.)

14. Most “growth” is just complexity. Adding headcount, adding services, adding offices, adding processes. Each one was supposed to make the company bigger and most of them just made it slower. The leanest seasons were also the best ones.

15. Help people you love. This is the one I’d lead with if I could only say one. The business gets easier when the people in it are people you’d want in your life regardless of the work. Everything else is downstream of that.

What’s next

I’m not done. If anything, the next chapter is the one I’ve been waiting on for years.

I’m still working with founders, still shipping products, still doing the parts of the job I love most. The difference is the shape of it. Smaller surface area, sharper focus, more time with the work and with my family. Same hands, different operating system.

More on what’s next soon.

To the fifteen years, thank you. To what’s next, let’s go.

This is the way.