Why I joined Scribenote

I spent about five and a half years at Tradable Bits. It’s where I learned to walk as a professional engineer, going from writing features to shaping architecture to, eventually, leading the team. A lot of who I am as an engineer was formed there, and I’m grateful for it.

The biggest reason I stepped away had nothing to do with work at all: my daughter was about to be born. I wanted to be as present for that as I possibly could, not squeezing her first months in around the edges of a job that was asking a lot of me. Some of that stretch had left me tired in ways I won’t belabor here. Mostly, though, I just knew what I wanted more of, and it was her.

So I made room — almost a full year of it. In that time I built an incredible bond with my daughter, the kind you only get from being there for the ordinary days and not just the milestones. I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

Toward, not just away

When I started thinking about work again, I didn’t want to take the first exit back to a paycheck. I wanted something worth the time it would take from home, something I’d genuinely run toward. Two things had to be true. I had to feel real passion for the technology. And I had to be able to say, honestly, that the work was making the world a little better — not just building another tool to help big companies make more money. Scribenote is both.

If Tradable Bits was learning to walk, this feels like running. Toward something good.

What pulled me

A small team, moving genuinely fast, building AI-centered software with the ambition to shake up its industry. Small enough that what I build matters the next morning. Ambitious enough that the ceiling is nowhere in sight.

How fast? I can’t share details publicly yet, but in about a month our small team took a genuinely powerful new tool from zero to real. I’m proud of it in a way I haven’t been about my work in a while, and it’s a taste of what this pace makes possible.

It also scratches the oldest itch I have. I’ve spent my whole life taking things apart to see how they work and putting them back together. AI is the most interesting thing there is to take apart right now, and Scribenote is a place where doing that is the job.

And the team is new to me, though it hasn’t felt that way for long. They’re sharp, generous, and genuinely fun to build with. What’s struck me most is how welcome my ideas have been from day one: no waiting to earn the right to speak up, no watching good suggestions disappear into a process. You raise something worth doing and it actually gets picked up. That kind of trust is rare, and I don’t take it for granted.