05/07/2025 - It's Been Almost a Year Since I Left my Company! What the Heck Have I Been Doing?

During my last couple of years at Tall Poppy I finally got to the point where I felt like I was pretty good at tech leadership and figuring out how to run a start up. I could coherently talk about my company with other industry people, investors, and fellow start up founders and I was starting to feel like "hey, maybe I can be a CTO". Tall Poppy was accepted into the Morgan Stanley Inclusive Ventures program in 2023, which was a really great experience that involved a lot of SF to NYC flights, spending time with some really awesome start up founders, and being able to learn from some amazing mentors. Everything was going pretty well! Except near the end, it wasn't. Me and my cofounder were struggling, we were both really burnt out and the economy was and still is making it really challenging to keep a business running. Last summer I realized I needed a change, so I stepped down from Tall Poppy.

I've had this idea kicking around in my head for years, I've called it my "bad start up idea", but I realized it's not actually bad, it's just not well defined, so I decided to go back to school to see if I can refine it and eventually give it a go. This semester I'm taking prerequisites for the funeral service program at a community college in Sacramento and I'm going to apply to the program in the fall. I'm not sure where this is going to go, maybe I'll end up with an associate's degree and learn how to embalm people, or maybe I'll take a couple of classes, then figure out a start up idea that makes sense. Either way, I think it's important to learn how the industry works and why things are they way that they are before I decide to start a company that attempts to do things differently.

It's a little weird not having a tech job and going back to school. I've never attended school in the U.S. or done online classes, so it's been a new experience for me. Things feel more uncertain than they have in a while, but I'm glad that I'm able to do new things and try to do things in a different industry.