I no longer believe experience causes you to innovate less. Rather, it lessens willingness to harm because it deepens your understanding of it.

Young founders are usually fueled by either naiveté (being setup to be harmed) or narcissism (becoming a source of harm). Inexperience thereby breeds an extractive cycle of harm that self-perpetuates: The naive become narcissists who prey on the naive.

Deep experience breeds folks who want to take up woodworking & farming to avoid causing more harm. Many experienced peers I respect have expressed this sentiment to me. They dream only of getting out of software entirely.

I was one of those late gen X / elder millennials who were at just the right place to have their imagination captured by the birth of the Web and endless possibilities it offered. That dream is the dimmest it’s been, but I haven’t given it up. I can still see a path leading that direction. I can’t tell you every detail of how we get there, but I already have far more ideas about it than I’ll ever get to share.

Innovation, to me, is not a thing that arrives with a bang announcing itself. It doesn’t disrupt. It comes to you like driftwood — or a smashed block of clay. Real innovation requires seeing the potential inside what the idea could become before everyone else can see its form. And it requires sitting with it patiently, shaping it one pass at a time even when the medium and your environment fights your vision.

I’m as surprised as anyone I haven’t left this industry yet. But every time I search my soul I find more reasons to stay and my heart breaks a little more at the thought of leaving it behind. So, I sign up for another round of abuse, figure out what I can learn and how it will serve me, and protect myself the best I can, lest I join the cycle and perpetuate the harm.

I’m just getting started. Again. It’s spring, after all.