My Triumphant Return to Blogging

It’s been more than three years since I last wrote anything here. No, I’m not dead, I’ve just been busy. I spent two-and-a-half years as an engineer at Twilio (a telecom startup), traveled to London, Cape Town, Berlin, Freiburg, the Bolivian Amazon and the Argentine wine-country, and I just recently got engaged.

I also started a company called Bolt. We’re building a replacement for the default phone app on Android that happens to be a replacement for your mobile voice service too. Think of it like Skype, but without usernames. Or like FaceTime Audio for Android. We’ll eventually build a messaging app to replace carrier SMS as well.

You can read more about Bolt’s mission on the Bolt Blog in a post titled Cutting the Telecom Cord.

Looking back at the last thing I wrote, Going Down Fighting, I’m not surprised that I’m building a product to replace carrier voice and messaging service. I am surprised that not much has changed since I wrote it.

Mobile carriers have done a much better job of delaying the inevitable future than I anticipated. Perhaps I was a bit naiive. I thought we’d be a lot closer today to thinking of mobile carriers primarily as mobile internet service providers who happen to also give you a phone number and voice service.

Replacement services have been slow to catch up, clunky to use and often platform-constrained, which is why we’re building Bolt. We’re starting on Android, but our product roadmap calls for iOS and desktop web clients as well. Given enough time we’ll build clients on all platforms with a significant number of users.

I’m excited to be building a product that will accelerate the rate at which my previous predictions come true. In fact that’s the best way to predict the future: predict that something will happen, and then work as hard as you can to make it happen.

I’m also excited to be writing again. Hopefully I can keep it up this time.