The last 12 months have been the strangest year of my life, and I have had some epic years over the last half century. The year has been so strange that I struggle to find language for it. For those near my age, the closest thing I can point at is the 1989 sci-fi drama Quantum Leap, with Scott Bakula as Dr. Sam Beckett. Each episode, Sam wakes up in the body of a stranger at some unknown point in the past, in some unknown place, and sets about correcting a wrong. When he succeeds he leaps out of whoever he has just helped and starts again, always hoping that someday he will leap back into his own life.
Leaping into New Zealand
New Zealand has been a beautiful place to leap into. The stress of the move, the myriad small adjustments, the new skills (I still cannot measure temperature in Celsius, a subject I have written about at some length) all added up to a very concrete environment to adjust to. A wonderful one, but disorienting.
The Second Environment Change
The second major change to my environment was artificial intelligence, specifically in how I carry out my work at WitFoo. I have written plainly about much of that journey on this blog. What gets lost in my well-structured after-action reports is how complicated and exhausting it was to get the tooling and the frameworks reliable enough to be useful. It was several months of 16-hour days: try something, watch it fail, start over. Dozens and dozens of failed cycles across eight months to get AI-in-the-Loop to behave like an actual process rather than a parlour trick. My team did not understand my focus and did not particularly approve of it, and as I wrote at the time, it came close to putting me in the hospital. It was also a way of working that was more novel than the weirdest gripes I worked fixing F/A 18 Hornets.
Ziggy, Sort Of
Getting that process right (I call it WitQ) turned out to be another parallel to Quantum Leap. Ziggy was the artificial intelligence back in Dr. Beckett's own time, the one that told Sam what he should do to "succeed." WitQ, like Ziggy, is helpful at some things and not so great at others (judgment above all), and it still fundamentally changed how I approach every WitFoo problem.
WitQ also created a whole new class of problem. Some of the development team quit rather than "be a manager of robots." Others quietly shrank away, or felt threatened. Most of the non-technical contributors wanted to know why, and how, we could rebuild in one year the entire platform that had taken us 10 years to build the first time, without raising significant capital to do it. I was convinced it could be done, and over the course of the year I did it but I lacked the vocabulary or cycles to adequately relay my convictions. My decision (and my insufficient explanations of it) left me fairly isolated from the rest of my team.
The Offer
Somewhere in that stretch, a potential white-label partner became very interested in how I had built WitQ. Most software development teams then (and now) have not managed to use AI to improve efficiency, stability and quality at the same time. WitFoo was uniquely building on a system that delivered all three. So I was offered $40 million to leave WitFoo and rebuild WitQ for them.
I will not pretend it wasn't tempting. I have made less money at WitFoo in the last 11 years than I made in the year before I started it. That kind of money would be enough to retire comfortably and to set down the relentless stress that greets me every morning before I am fully awake. But my inner Dr. Sam Beckett knew that was not the righteous way to leap out of this episode. So I passed, and got back to pondering, experimenting & building.
What the Machine Is For
WitQ is good at doing coding work I direct, to standards I set. It is also an excellent translator and researcher. What it is not good at is solving complicated problems or exercising quality judgment.
Building this way meant something I had not expected, and it matters more than the speed. Because I was building with WitQ against The WitFoo Way standards, the code I generated could be handed off and maintained by other software engineers. WitQ would take my crazy ideas and implement them in code a reasonable developer could read. Through the 6th generation of WitFoo Precinct, most of my code was undecipherable to my colleagues. That code was our intellectual property, our "secret sauce." It also meant WitFoo had a serious scale problem and a serious risk problem, both of them wired directly to an often unpredictable founder. If I could hand our secrets to WitQ as specifications it understood, it would translate my ideas into code my colleagues could own.
Permission to Be Audacious
I have written before about how rare it is to get to do it all over again. Knowing I had that rare chance at a complete rewrite of the product line, I deliberately slowed the process down and resisted the pull to simply refactor 6th generation code into 7th generation norms. I decided instead to take a quantum leap into a future version of myself, the one where my hopes for WitFoo, for humanity and for the craft of cybersecurity are already realised, and build back from there. I gave myself permission to build the most audacious platform I could imagine.
Thinking at Walking Pace
While WitQ worked its tasking, I walked Hagley Park and the Christchurch Botanic Gardens, over and over, working the ideas. I would lie on the grass at Hagley Oval watching a cricket match as things came into focus. I would sit at The Curator's House, or The Quad in the Arts Centre, chewing on a problem over a flat white. A second Claude-powered assistant I call FiaB (Fish-in-a-Box) would research my ideas and my iPhone would read them back to me while I walked. It was hundreds and hundreds of miles of ponderous steps.
Not All of It Was Code
The year was not wholly allocated to writing software and talking to machines. I negotiated several resell, distribution and OEM agreements. We onboarded and enabled new sales and channel staff. We completed a full marketing refresh. We raised the capital to fund the work. We reorganised into two international subsidiaries to meet the demands of the markets we now serve. I sponsored two students at the University of Canterbury, and together we produced and released the largest labelled cybersecurity dataset of its kind built from real adversary traffic. I got a crash course in the New Zealand Parliament, meeting several MPs and their staff. And I worked to attract American investors to Christchurch, and to make it worth their trip. We also launched a Product Advisory Board to see if what I built was worth the effort.
For much of the year I was shifting between all three of my working selves: "The Poet" out meeting people and trying to be of use, "The Wizard" musing on what the product and the business needed next, and "The Warrior" cutting through the actual work. (If that framing is new to you, it is the one I keep coming back to.)
It was an emotionally and physically draining whirlwind that would sit more reasonably inside a decade than a year. The walks through the gardens, the vibe of Christchurch Central and the encouragement of new friends were the salve and the fuel for me. My supporters in the US have been critical, checking in on standing calls. And I had enough sense to find a therapist I see fortnightly.
May 22nd
On May 22nd I broke my leg rather badly falling off an eScooter. I was in hospital more than two weeks for two surgeries. I am now two months into what will be a year of recovery. The injury changed my capacity and my tempo immediately and without negotiation. The following Monday I was supposed to be in Wellington meeting members of Parliament and new strategic partners. That trip, and dozens of other meetings, came off the calendar indefinitely.
Three Blessings
I count the accident as a divine blessing, for three reasons.
First, I cannot adequately express how moved I have been by the kindness shown to me: the neighbours who cared for me until the ambulance arrived, the staff at Christchurch Hospital (including the angels of Ward 20, stuck with me for weeks), and the dozens of well-wishers and helpers who simply showed up.
Second, the WitFoo team stepped up in big ways while I lay in that bed. I said earlier that I believed my affection for AI had driven a wedge between me and my team. While they all thought I was a jackass for hurting myself, they took on bigger responsibilities, learned to manage WitQ and FiaB, and did a number of things considerably better than I had been doing them.
Third, it forced me to stop. It gave my team some time to catch up while I napped. It also gave WitQ the time to finish the backlog I created.
What Got Finished
By the time I graduated from crutches to a cane, I had finished the 1.0 of the product line, which added 11 products and editions to our arsenal. And with the help of FiaB and our patent attorney, I had written and filed seven provisional patent applications with the USPTO covering the innovations my walks through Christchurch turned up (though many secrets like WitQ stay unfiled).
These innovations became products that meet and exceed what I hoped we could build when we founded WitFoo. They are not only a complete rethinking of WitFoo's own innovations, they are a complete redesign of every facet of cybersecurity analytics. I could not be more grateful to have been able to build them. Time will tell how well the market takes to them, but a deep peace has washed over me in getting them out into the world. There were long stretches of this journey where I assumed someone else would have to carry the torch this far.
Where I Am Right Now
I am in a transitional state. My sleep is hindered by an aching leg. I am often frustrated by the limits on my speed and my range. And I have been robbed, for now, of my long ponderous walks through this "Garden of Innovations" city. I was asked "when does the werewolf go away?" recently in regard to my current grumpy disposition. The discomfort is good fuel for my inner poet and has delivered a number of new revelations (this entry among them). So much has been created in the last year that virtually no contributor, investor, analyst or even Board member yet understands the gravity of the change. I am currently too exhausted to be a great Poet and explain it all. I suspect that work is the next quantum leap.
Wrap Up
Much like the entry I wrote last year on moving to New Zealand, I want this one to help me remember the wonder of the year. Even the act of writing it out is remarkable to me. I am filled with gratitude and joy reflecting on what happened over this lap around the Sun. I wish things would slow down. I am also awestruck and thankful that somehow I held on.
I head back to the hospital tomorrow to see the surgeon who put 82 staples and two plates in my leg. I haven't had a chance to properly thank him yet. If this were an episode of Quantum Leap, I suppose it would be about the right moment to leap into a fresh set of problems (like explaining these products). I expect that very soon, I will look around at an impatient crowd, like Dr. Beckett, and chirp out an "Oh boy."
