A.I.'s 6-Year Anniversary and a New Beginning

This week I'm celebrating 6 years at Aggregate Intellect (Friday) and 5 years of working on it full time (Monday).

The big news is that for a combination of personal and business reasons, I have relocated to the US. This has been coming for a while but this past year was the year that everything finally came together. This was partly due to the logistics of the move working out (visa etc) and partly because I finally had clarity about the importance of the move happening right away. The decision was also empowered by the fact that our business started doing much better than before (more than 5x the revenue of the previous year) and partly by my growing emphasis on becoming a lifelong builder.

Last year, I wrote an anniversary blog post reflecting on five years of running Aggregate Intellect. It was a momentous milestone, and I distilled five hard-earned lessons from that journey:

1. Instead of building a startup, build a product.

2. Instead of building a product, build a company.

3. Instead of building a company, build a business.

4. Instead of building any business, build a sustainable business.

5. Instead of building a sustainable business, focus on being a healthy founder.

Each of these lessons represented a turning point in my thinking—a shift from chasing status, to creating value, to surviving, to sustaining, and, finally, to strengthening myself as a founder. Life, as it tends to do, has a way of humbling you with even deeper questions just when you think you’ve figured things out. My good friend, Serena M., commented on that article saying that she was excited to see what the next lesson was going to be! I was excited to figure that out too!

Over the past year, I’ve lived the answer to that question!

Now, looking back, I think I know where I’m headed. You know you learned a good lesson when it changes how you think, live, and work and this time the lesson was yet another pivot in my mindset. In the early years, my goals were mostly external: money raised, revenue targets, product milestones, team growth. But over time, I’ve realized those goals only make sense when anchored to something deeper: Who do I want to become?

This reminds me of the movie “inside out” and how all parts of identity have to work together to help you achieve your goals

This shift—from focusing on outcomes to focusing on identity—has been transformative. Instead of asking, “What do I want to achieve?” I’ve started asking:

• What kind of person do I want to be?

• What kind of impact should my work have on society, especially at this turning point with agentic AI systems becoming the norm? And

• How do I increase my capacity to become what I want to be?

The last question on capacity is an interesting one. Of course, every day I have a limited number of hours and a limited amount of energy to take care of all the things I need. Very quickly it becomes obvious that I can’t do everything that crosses my mind. So, what’s the right strategy here?

Strategy is learning what to say ‘no’ to

It’s easy to think of strategy as a template you filled, a plan, a roadmap, or even a chessboard where you outmaneuver competitors. But I’ve come to realize that strategy is as much about subtraction as it is about addition. It’s not just about deciding what to do; it’s about learning what to say no to. And honestly that part is far more important because there are often many more things I shouldn’t do!

This past year, I’ve had to confront some hard truths:

• Not every dollar is worth earning.

• Not every opportunity is worth pursuing.

• Some "good" things can sabotage the "great" things.

I’ve seen how easy it is to get distracted by short-term gains or shiny opportunities that don’t align with the bigger picture. Or how choosing to work on something out of despair results in spending way more time and money to undo that. Saying no isn’t just about preserving my time and energy; it’s about protecting my focus and being brutally honest about how every action serves my long-term goals.

If you read between the lines of my journey, there’s an increasing pattern of me learning again and again that if I want to sustain my ability to be a founder long term, I need to be the architect of that future. In other words, I have to build that future with my own hands rather than delegating it to others to do it for me. You might think “duh, isn’t that what founders do”; trust me, every year I’m discovering a new layer to that simple statement.

For a long time, I thought the natural evolution of leadership was moving from builder to manager: delegating tasks, overseeing others, and focusing on “higher-level” decisions. “My time is too valuable to spend it on being in the weeds” is a fallacy that I think I picked up in my corporate days and I still carried traces of it. But I’ve realized that being a builder isn’t a phase to grow out of—it’s the core of who I am.

Ironically, the transition from an individual contributor to a manager back in my corporate life was the moment when the AISC community was born. I wanted to stay “technical” outside of my managerial work hours but over the years I had lost my hands on keyboard coding abilities. Now I’m reclaiming that and the empowerment I feel is exactly what AI agents bring to the conversation, and what I’m excited to bring to our customers (primarily workers in more traditional businesses like construction).

This past year, empowered by all the software co-pilots, I found my way back to coding and contributed to our codebase and built several sales demos with Sherpa. We used one of those to close our largest deal ever, and several other ones I’ve been building with help from the team are making major strides towards our next deals.

I feel that with effective use of technology that is available to me, the same kind of technology that we are developing for our customers, and my ability to hire remarkable assistants and collaborators from the AISC community, I can become the builder that I was meant to be. Combine that with ruthless prioritization of what I should spend my time on, and I no longer have to compromise what I want to be for what I need to be as a business owner.

The best leaders don’t order people to build; they inspire others by building with them.

The Road Ahead

If the first five years of Aggregate Intellect were about building a foundation, this next chapter that has begun this year is about refining the essence. It’s about focusing, scaling with intention, and aligning everything I do—both personally and professionally—with the kind of person I want to be and the future I want to build.

So, if you’re reading this and wondering what comes after “being a healthy founder,” here’s my answer: You stop thinking of yourself as a founder altogether. You stop chasing the title, the milestones, and the status. Instead, you start focusing on becoming the kind of person who builds things that matter—without losing yourself in the process.

And that’s the most exciting journey of all.

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