Moving on from Topology

I have moved on from Topology. My personal path has taken me in a different direction.

A personal retrospect

I have made many mistakes. It was only with the serenity gained from stepping away from the project that I could make out their shapes.

Self-worth. I tied my self-worth closely to various external measures of progress. Consequently, I let personal, irrational factors color my own decision-making. Deep down, I equated the success of the project to personal survival, failure to extinction. The right thing to do would have been to do the private work of incubating and maintaining a robust self-worth, and to bring the fortitude it lends to the job.

Planning. I was too inclined to jumping into action before the goals, constraints, sub-goals and their dependencies, risks and their mitigation were studied sufficiently from a leadership standpoint. Given the ambition of the project, good plans were crucial but I undervalued them. Moreover, planning skill is a muscle. It atrophies under disuse. As the journey progressed and the stakes went up, my planning skill was under-practiced and incommensurate with what was required of me.

Reinventing the wheel. I read too little. There is great wisdom in good books, academic papers, blogs, memos and all sorts of artifacts generated by companies and founders in the past. I underweighted research and over-relied on building things from scratch. I arrived at conclusions published by others years before, discoveries that were not new. The right thing to do would have been doing more research upfront with an open mind and concentrating the firepower of first-principle thinking to the real limiting factors and critical paths.

Losing my identity. I held onto the silhouettes of a small collection of idiosyncratic founders and elected their attributes as my ideal. I never sought to understand what kind of founder I was meant to be.

Looking ahead

What am I doing next? When GPT came out, I concluded that scientific progress might finally accelerate. There is no other pursuit that would be more rewarding than contributing at the frontier. I am actively exploring topics in the applied sciences.

Will I create a new startup? I believe startup is a means to an end. I appreciate how a startup can be unparalleled in coordinating talents and resources, and a forcing function for bold results. Having learned so many lessons from my time at Topology, I look forward to putting them to use.