In the months after becoming a father, I decided to shut down the company I had been building for five years and watched a heavily over-allocated crypto portfolio fall off a cliff. There was a lot to unpack there, but the useful question was not just how I got here. It was what to do next.

The first question is only valuable in service of the second. Time is moving whether I do anything with it or not. Better to acknowledge what was good, notice what is currently in my favor, and get moving again.

What was

I helped build one of the best marketing agencies in crypto without ever talking much about marketing or doing outbound BD. The quality of the work and the trust we built in the community attracted every client we ever had.

The most common feedback I heard was simple: if SHILLR is working with them, I am interested. Doing roughly $5M in firm revenue — and driving $50M+ in client-side revenue — through organic campaigns while strengthening trust instead of burning it is still the accomplishment I am proudest of.

What I loved most was helping people uncover and clarify what they could not yet see: a product, a story, a campaign, a partnership, or just a better path forward. The pursuit was resonance, first with the client and then with the people they served.

Illustration reading Everything I Did Wrong Learned over a book held by Pepe.
Step one of the transition is honest accounting: what worked, what failed, and what it actually taught you.

What fell by the wayside

Health took a back seat. So did a lot of the broader curiosity that brought me into this world in the first place. Before crypto, I spent a lot of time around psychedelic research, emerging-tech communities, cognition, health, and the mechanics of how people think.

I never stopped caring about those things, but they became secondary while SHILLR demanded focus. When the object of your focus disappears, you become extremely aware of the forest that had been surrounding it the whole time.

What is in my favor

I have a strong network across crypto, AI, venture, art, media, consumer tech, and culture. I have a decade-long pattern of studying how people think and why they act. I know how to turn that into campaigns, products, comms, and systems that resonate.

I also still want the arena. I love contributing to teams doing meaningful and ambitious work, and I feel lucky that this transition is happening at a moment when it is easier and cheaper than ever to build, learn, and reach people directly.

Image of a sign reading Just Do It, Nothing Is Impossible.
Step two is movement: once the pattern is clearer, momentum matters more than perfect certainty.

What’s next

The practical answer is to spend time on a few high-leverage things at once: help people for free where I can be genuinely useful, explore the best consumer crypto and AI products being built right now, keep writing, and attend to the parts of life that lost ground during the SHILLR years.

I also began scouting deals for ADIN. If you are raising, the original thread included the scout link below.

ADIN scout link
This on-site version preserves the original argument and key outbound links from the original article while making the essay easier to revisit alongside the rest of the portfolio.