I'm Back.

Hey y'all, I’m back.

You hear from me in your inbox most weeks.

But after building a 100k+ person audience on LinkedIn and X four years ago, I largely stopped posting on social.

The truth is I was busy building an entirely new life.

My a16z-backed startup (and my marriage) had fallen apart back to back.

But today…

I’m back.

I’d love if you took a second to drop a comment on my “re-introduction” video post this morning so my very-cold audience has a chance to see it.

I’m also rebranding this newsletter (hope you like the new design) and will now be sharing an essay I write every Sunday morning (literally, I wake up at 4am these days), starting this weekend.

What Happened

In 2020 I started a company called Launch House.

By every external measure I was killing it. We'd raised $23M, including a Series A led by a16z, and I'd built an audience of over 100K people across platforms.

I was also pretty miserable.

My cofounder and I were butting heads, a false hit piece about the company went viral, I had gotten into the worst shape of my life, and my marriage was falling apart.

When it became clear that neither the company nor marriage were going to make it, I made the hardest decision of my life and left it all behind.

I put $10,000 into a new LLC and told myself if it hit $0, I'd get a job (terrifying).

Thankfully it never did.

But the harder part was that I didn't quite know what my identity was anymore. I'd spent years building one up and then it was just… gone.

Most people expected me to start an AI company since OpenAI was exploding and I’d previously built a data science team at Uber.

But I wasn’t looking to jump back into another venture-backed ride right away.

I had other priorities.

Namely, as much as I love SF, NYC, and LA (aka where I’d spent the last decade) I didn’t see them as where I wanted to raise a family.

So I bet on the idea I’d be able to bootstrap a company from elsewhere while starting a family too.

I spent 2025 & 2026 doing a few ambitious things at once:

My plan now is to grow the business and buy some land to build our dream home, get married at, and start a family.

And life’s direction is set enough where it’s time to start putting my voice out there more again.

So I’ll be posting daily on most platforms about how I’m building Rye Valley.

Shameless plug:

• LinkedIn

• TikTok

• Instagram

• YouTube

• Threads

• Substack

Wait… What’s Rye Valley?

Rye Valley is my company.

It’s named after the street I grew up on in Pennsylvania.

We partner with expert-level operators to build verticalized AI-native services that help founders gain leverage for their life and work.

I guess you could call it a holding company, but it’s not big enough yet to really own that label IMO.

Right now there are the 4 you’ve already heard me talk about:

• Hockey Stick → We give your company an agentic brain and automate your workflows with AI.

• JOLT! → We build founder personal brands with shortform video. 5.3B+ views.

• Megaphone → We create a founder-led content engine for your startup on LinkedIn and X. 157M+ impressions.

• Lore → We make you the brand AI recommends to your buyers.

Together they work with 29 clients and are on track to bring in $1.7M this year, even though three were launched in just the last few months.

The crazy part is that I’m still the only full-time employee.

To be clear our client work is done by humans almost exclusively in the US, but our back office and internal ops run largely automatically thanks to over 180 workflows I set up inside our company brain.

I had this structure in mind from the start, even if it took a while to build out.

Media is our top of funnel: my newsletter and creator brand, plus a newsletter for each business (like Viral Examples for Megaphone).

And while each vertical operates independently, they share back office functions.

I can uniquely build this business given my audience, which seems like a pretty decent moat to me.

Services, Not SaaS

Also most founders I know are still building software (even if AI is making that harder and harder). I'm building services.

Services used to mean worse margins and more people to manage. AI has closed a lot of that gap.

@shrutimerch

Sequoia and YC both spent the last year saying AI-native services are the next big thing. Sequoia's Julien Bek put it as "the next $1T company will be a software company masquerading as a services firm."

It’s a long path to $1 trillion, but $10 million in revenue is a good next goal for us.

Overall there are a couple trends converging around services right now that I’m excited about. I’ll go deeper in a future issue.

Why Start Posting Now?

I guess this is a comeback, sort of. I never really left though. I just stopped posting.

The funny part is that life isn't really any calmer.

My fiancée and I are picking where to put down roots for good (Charleston's a contender, and we're visiting others every few weeks).

And with a wedding to plan and more, it's as busy as it's ever been.

But the direction is settled now, which it hadn't been for a while.

So if you're an expert thinking about starting your own AI-native service, hit reply. At worst we can jam, at best we can partner.

See you on Sunday.

A few free resources to help you build leverage