It has been a year and a half since I quit my job to start a consultancy. It took me years to build up to quitting, and I had not only a chip on my shoulder, but to quote Seth Sentry, “the guac and the dip and the salsa.” The people that read this blog probably understand what I’m talking about. I looked around at how organizations are run, at the people that told me what to do, and thought “Surely I could do a better job than this.”
This feels like a dangerous train of thought.
On one hand, that arrogance is precisely one of the mechanisms that makes someone incompetent. If you’ve learned everything, there’s no real reason to open up another book, and even that is rather generously assuming that the person providing a service to you has bothered to crack the spine on even one.
On the other hand, how else are we to make sense of the world? If you walk out the door, you will be immediately clotheslined by institutions failing to achieve the most basic of tasks with any reliability. Almost every office I’ve walked into as an employee has been a decrepit nest populated by the beaten-down working class, a sickly ooze of self-important managers amongst whom a Gladwell reader ranks as a towering intellect, and executives that are feverishly muttering the word “AI” to credulous journalists as they blindly cut headcount. So many of these institutions seem to be held together by either regulatory capture or writhing clients bound by enterprise contracts like so much barbed wire. I’ve lost track of the number of times that someone has looked at work from a company like KPMG and gone “Ha ha ha, maybe we should all be consulting – then we can do terrible work and bill at two thousand dollars a day.” This joke is so overused that you can see the person saying it is reluctantly dispensing the cliché.
So when I kicked off the company, some traitorous part of me was hoping that it would be difficult, as horrible as that would be for me personally. If it was hard, yes, perhaps I’d have to go back to some miserable office and be beset on all sides by smiling imbeciles talking about innovation, but it would make sense. It simply can’t be that easy to be free of those structures. Surely there’s a reason for it that isn’t simply “Wow, we’re systematically producing people that are terrible at their jobs and they can’t even see it.”
Unfortunately, that really is most of the explanation.
In late 2025, I said I’d write more after admitting how awkward it is to say the business is going well. I haven’t written anything for five months, and there’s no delicate way to put this, I drastically understated how well we’re doing. I'm ripping off the bandaid: in February 2026, I realised that we had already generated enough revenue to last us until 2027. On some engagements, I split my income several ways with teammates that weren’t on the job and still exceeded my corporate salary. For forty hours in 2025, I broke a thousand dollars an hour on tasks with measurable success metrics, an amount of money that would have seemed like some sort of sick joke two years ago, and both customers asked for a repeat engagement because the service quality was higher than what specialised firms were doing – I had spent about ten hours thinking about the engagement model. And we still have seven months left in the year.
All of this is to say two things. The first, I’m not going to pretend that everyone would find it as easy as I do, but it’s easy enough that basically anyone that can read both a book in software and the humanities will be fine.
The other is that this was all so easy that I’m going mad with boredom.
I.
Crept to their door, opened it slowly and tip-toed but, shit
Somebody set the bar too low and I tripped over it
Whoops, jumped up, tried to throw in a quick ultimate
Just hopin' to scare 'em but, oh, it just killed both of 'em
Bodies with slit throats on the linoleum
I just throw 'em in dumpsters, the shit's appropriate
Blue Shell, Seth Sentry
I wish that I could say it was difficult to make things work. It would make sense of the world. I could have fun talking about going extremely overboard with machinations. The reality is that all of it, from service delivery to sales, has been more-or-less trivial. Closing and delivering a deal for twenty thousand dollars takes less time and energy than one sprint in a regular office. Nothing even feels high stakes – the global economy is so large that, for an efficient team, you can roll the sales conversation dice over and over until it turns up a 20. I personally blundered hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales over our first six months, and we’re fine.
As a company, there are many things that I'd like to improve – it might sound silly given that we’re doing well and all our customers are happy (or lying to me), but the places where we're falling short of my expectations are extremely visible to me. By virtue of having a sizable following on this blog, I have extensive exposure to programmers that are better than me and people that are smarter than me. Every Thursday, I have a call with Efron Licht, and frankly I can scarcely grasp why someone that competent spends time talking to me.
The problem is that I’m not competing with Efron. If I was, I'd either have to study for five hours every day for the rest of my life, or shut the company down tomorrow. I’m competing with people that don’t have functional literacy. And it’s not just incompetence at programming, it’s everything. The world has phoned it in, leaving us with no pressure to push for excellence. Last year, I was unable to put clients on both Evidence and Prefect because the former failed to attend a sales meeting booked through their website and the latter failed to book a meeting after the ex-real estate agent they hired failed to actually schedule a meeting following outreach also through their website. Our (excellent) accounting team is Hales Redden, who managed my co-founder Jordan Andersen’s old physiotherapy business… because the people I tried in Melbourne don’t check their sales inbox. Our lawyer is reader Iain McLaren because the firms I initially tried also don’t respond to their sales inbox. I cannot state this clearly enough – the bar is so low that it is hard to give people money. There are competent actors on the market, but at least in software, there are simply so few of them that you’re more likely to be allies than enemies.
This was infuriating at first, comical later, and has now lapsed into depressing. As an employee, these people were an unending source of frustration, the same six-figure delinquents that would forget to renew my contracts when I was on a temporary visa. As an independent operator, they’re babies that have yet to develop executive function and I’m taking their candy. I’ll do it – candy is delicious and babies are weak – but it's hard to feel good about it after the thrill of being right wore off. Some days, I get to 5PM after pitching to fix a competitor's work, put my head in my hands, and go “There is no way you dumb motherfuckers can’t stand up a database. We’ve been on the moon. We’ve been on the fucking moon. There’s no way you dipshits cannot operate Google.” Nonetheless, there is money in my bank account and I’m in a house with three bedrooms, and we must all reckon with this dreadful portent.
Is this it? I’m just going to stand up data platforms for the next forty years, a task so easy for us that we could do it drunk out of our minds, then die?
As much as I enjoy having free time, the whole affair has been oddly unsatisfying. Every day, I wake up and feel like I’ve opted out of society. I don’t have the same problems as my peers anymore. Daily stand-up is a hazy memory that I remember with faint queasiness. And the very nature of consulting, even though we make the majority of our money on technical delivery rather than pure advice, is that we’re simply adding efficiency to clients. We’ve had the luxury of firing a few for bad vibes, leaving us only with clients that we’re very happy to work with – but at the end of the day, they‘re doing the thing worth being proud of, and we’re simply an instrument. They do the admirable thing, and we make them better at it. It’s better than continuing to be an ultra-coward and getting paid to let people Do Scrum at me, but I dunno.
Part of the reason that we’ve done so well to begin with is that we haven’t worried about scaling at all. I still think that is the obviously correct decision when you’re starting off and don’t want to take on debt. But at the same time, when a reader asks me if I’m hiring, my answer is essentially, “The whole business is designed for the team to be comfortable, and we didn’t build in the leeway to take care of other people.” My largest expenses outside of housing over the past year have been donations to a local writer’s group, Meridian Australis, and various bits to other causes, but this amounts to a few thousand dollars per year.
I’m probably supposed to be content with that, but I’ve already quit my job, so what’s a bit more risk? Why am I always reading about unreflective narcissists and tedious bootlickers funding things? Why can’t the causes I care about have resources thrown at them without them having to contort their value systems for the money?
II.
At any rate, the passage is crystal clear in both cases: Alexander is not weeping in sorrow that there are no more throats to cut. This is not a picture of a man at the end of a career of world conquest; he’s at the beginning. “Look at all these throats—and I haven’t even cut one!”
And Alexander Wept, Anthony Madrid
We still run into problems all the time that aren’t solvable by simple efficiency – perverse incentives from sloppy legislation, places where buyers can’t understand enough to avoid exploitation, gambling companies run by vile degenerates, things that make me want to throw up. I am fully engaged with capitalism every day, and despite the fact that I’m winning for some definition of winning, much of it is grotesque. Sometimes I wonder whether I should have gone into medicine, like most of my family, but at the same time someone has to keep the databases running. So here’s what’s going to happen for now.
We have seven months left in the year. Around the start of June, we’ll be done with our most complex work, and ready to try something new, where by “something new” I mean we’re going to pick some nerds (pejorative) and cut their throats. The area that we’ve picked out specifically is technical recruiting, if only because it is the most accessible area that is most densely populated with easy prey. It should take us a little bit to knock out a small platform, then I’ll broadcast that here for readers to sign up. We’ve done some work in the space, and all I can say is that software recruiters are defenseless money piñatas incapable of serving the competent sectors of the market, and I am going to beat them with a large stick and then loot the wallets from their corpses.
Is this it? I’m just going to stand up data platforms for the next forty years, a task so easy for us that we could do it smashed out of our fucking minds, then die?
At a rough estimate, every time we place someone that would otherwise have had to go through the hellish experience of conventional recruiting, we could plausibly knock one individual recruiter out of the market because of their slim margins (due to all the incompetence), which will temporarily satisfy my never-ending lust for blood. Then we’re going to take that money and use it to knife someone else that's causing negligent misery, and funnel some of the excess into things we care about. If we do a really good job, I really believe we can meaningfully distort some section of the market, even if that’s just “Ugh, everyone knows you can't recruit software engineers in the A$180K band in Melbourne. Those Hermit Tech folks have destroyed all the margin and established themselves as supreme dictators, and also their CEO will bully you online if you do a bad job.” I’m going to commit economic violence for the next forty years, and get so good at it that we can do that smashed out of our minds, teach other people how to do it, then die, and some of you will pick up the work where we left off.
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