I'm a startup guy again

After 4 years, I left Shopify in December of last year to jump back into the startup game, joining Mark OS as a Founding Engineer where we're building an AI-powered content review platform for marketing teams.

Shopify was a great journey for me, and I worked with a lot of great people, doing some of the most challenging and impactful work I've done in my career so far. I spent my first two years in Professional Services working on projects for large merchants or payment partners, with the last two spent in Retail building the software and infrastructure that would power the Point of Sale database synchronization.

I would say that I did achieve many of the goals I had set out to accomplish going to a larger company. I was working on problems at a larger scale than I had ever worked on, and had the opportunity to work with many technologies that I wouldn't have used at a small startup, along with having many opportunities to plan and champion many of the projects I worked on. But I did miss building a product rather than a piece of it. It was something I thought about often throughout those years.

After 8 years of working on commerce, switching it up and going into an AI-native enterprise platform is a big shift. Enterprise sales is an entire thing itself. On top of that, building the software has changed a lot in a short few years. When you're building something new, there is no scale to hold you back from running fast—this has often been true—but now with agents, you can just sprint. The paradigm for building has substantially changed. You often see writing about how it's changing things at big tech, but my current experience shows it's already substantially transforming building a startup.

In just days, I'll have been here for 9 months. We've already shipped so much in such a short amount of time, and with the new paradigm comes new problems to solve about how we build. I'm looking forward to continuing to dive into that.