If you’re here, you probably know who I am, and you might be wondering – where’s he been all these years?
I was everywhere in late 2020 and early 2021 – first in good ways, and then in bad. TV, radio, print, online, it never stopped. When you’re up, they love to have your wisdom, and when you’re down, they love to ask you where it all went wrong.
After all that controversy simmered down, the defamation stopped, (fewer) people were calling for my head (literally) and media crews stopped showing up to my house, I had a choice to make:
Lean in to the chaos or step back from it and reboot. I chose the latter, and for the last 2+ years I’ve been working on what’s next.
Our discourse is broken. Our social media is broken. Our culture is breaking at the seams. It’s clear it needs fixing. Who better than someone who saw it break in real time, fell into the chasms, nearly got crushed by them but survived?
So I got some of the old band back together, so to speak, and we started working. Writing code. Making designs. Thinking through what went wrong and how to fix it. We’re not quite ready to tell the world much more, but we definitely have things to say soon.
And not for nothing, I needed a little time for myself too. Try to put yourself in my shoes for a minute – I was in my mid 20’s, built the hottest new platform in the world through tremendous work and years of near 24/7 labor. Tens of millions of people trusted me and my family depended on me. I was worth at least a billion dollars on paper, and then in a matter of days it’s all gone.
How do you recover from that? (Do you recover from that?)
If you’re going to be a founder, a leader, a doer of cool things, you have to have your own house in order before you ask others to step inside. Since mine was a smoldering heap, I very intentionally shunned press and speaking opportunities and other things that would keep me in the conversation, in favor of working on myself and working with my team.
That took time and patience (a quality I’ve more recently learned). But now’s the right moment to step back out, rejoin the discourse, offer some solutions, and try to make a better world for all of us.
Nice to see you all again. Glad to be back.
