Vision
What this
could become.
None of it is decided. That is exactly why it is written down.
If you came here to find out what we have settled on, we haven't. This is the current state of my thinking, and some of it will turn out to be wrong.
I am publishing it anyway, because I would rather you argue with it before you join than discover it three weeks after. If you read this and disagree, that is not a problem. That is the job.
The shape
One roof. Several attempts.
The idea I keep coming back to is ZERO as one roof with several things being attempted underneath it, rather than one product we bet everything on.
Some of those would be software. Some would not. A product, a service, something in media, something you can actually hold. The thread is not the technology. It is whether the problem is worth solving and whether we are the right people to try.
Why that shape? Because I do not think I can pick the right first idea on my own, and honestly neither can you. What we can do is build something that survives being wrong two or three times.
That is a direction, not a decision. It is entirely possible the first thing works and the umbrella turns out to be unnecessary, which would be a good outcome too. I am telling you where my head is, not what I have promised.
The bar
What counts as a problem worth solving
This is the question I get asked most, and the one that decides everything else. Here is the bar, so you can hold me to it as well as the other way round.
Someone is already paying to avoid it
In money, in time, or in some stupid workaround they built themselves. If nobody has bothered to work around it, it does not hurt enough to matter.
You can name the person
Not the segment. "Gen Z" is a demographic bracket, not a target audience. Tell me about one person you actually know.
It happens often
Something that annoys people once a year is a bad business, however annoying it is when it happens.
It survives being said out loud
Say it to the person who has the problem. If you find yourself explaining why they should care, you have found something that interests you rather than something that hurts them.
Someone disagrees with you
And you can hold the argument. A problem nobody pushes back on is usually one nobody has thought about properly, including you.
Most ideas die on the first two, which is fine, and cheap. Dying on the fifth after four months of building is the expensive version. That is the whole reason we argue first.
Who this suits
“Jack of all trades”
was a compliment for about a hundred years. It meant someone good at many things, and it was meant kindly.
Then someone added
“master of none”
to turn it into a put-down. The insult was the edit.
We are hiring the compliment.
People who can hold three things at once. Who will design the thing, argue about what it should cost, then write the post that sells it. Who are tired of being told to pick a lane before they have seen the road.
That does not mean shallow. It means curious in more than one direction, and willing to be a beginner in public.
And it does not mean unserious. If you are comfortable and want to stay comfortable, this is genuinely not it. If a nine to five feels like wearing somebody else's clothes, you are the person I am looking for.
Still here?
Then you are probably the sort of person who should be in the room when we pick the first one.