On two things I could not ignore — and what they changed about why I am building.
I am starting an AI startup, carrying the quiet version of an old question — to build, or to build well. Some days I am sure I am on the right path. Other days, I am sure I am wasting my time. Most of the work happens in that gap.
I was expecting the answer to come when I launched my first products, but it arrived from the world instead. Two things, over the last year, I could not ignore — not what I expected to be thinking about while starting an AI company, but part of what the work is for now.
During the recent wars, I noticed a reflex in myself — one I then saw everywhere else.
If I asked you, right now, which of the recent dead kids mattered most — the American kids killed in a school shooting, the Palestinian kid killed in the Gaza strikes, or the Ukrainian kids killed in the Russian invasion — many of us would notice an instant reaction.
That is what I could not ignore — the perception that one human life was more valuable than another.
I have come to believe that the wars are what our ordinary societies already are, at an extreme. They are what our daily indifference looks like — just armed, and not restrained.
It is the same reflex that lets a coworker fail without asking why. That reduces our friends to what they post on social media. That walks past the corner shop because the chain up the street is a dollar cheaper — every week, every year, until the corner shop is gone.
We have stopped valuing good. Good people get tired and stop showing up. The institutions they held together come apart — first quietly, then loudly.
At work we have traded friends for a network.
At home we have traded neighbors for followers.
At rest we have traded communities for feeds.
There are fewer places left for goodness than there used to be.
And into that weakened version of ourselves, the most powerful technology humans have ever made is arriving.
Do we need an AI revolution — or do we need something more?
David Brooks, speaking at Yale earlier this year on how a society finds its way back, reached — almost as an aside — two and a half thousand years back, to Plato's ladder.
A person, in the course of a life, climbs from one kind of beauty to another. From the beauty of a face, to the beauty of a soul. From a soul, to the pursuit of truth. From truth, to justice. And from justice, to something larger than any one life can hold.
That, Brooks said, was how Plato measured a human being. Not by what they owned. By where on the ladder they had arrived.
I started calling it the Ladder of Life, for what it is.
The reason we had stopped valuing good was not politics. It was not even, yet, technology. We had lost the ladder. We replaced it, quietly, with a different measure — how big, how fast, how cheap.
An empty kind of progress that registers on every scoreboard and answers no question worth asking.
A business climbs the same ladder.
A business has craft — the thing made well. The hinge of a MacBook that closes with the right weight, for no reason except that the maker cared.
It has character — a voice you can hear in the work itself. Patagonia putting "we are in business to save our home planet" into its product decisions, not its pitch deck.
It has truth — a clear sight of what the work is for, who it serves, and what it refuses. Signal has never sold a user, and never will.
And if the maker holds on long enough, their business reaches flourishing — a place in a community so deep that its absence would leave a wound. The restaurant that has been on the same corner for forty years. The company that, when it finally closes, the people who worked there mourn for the rest of their lives.
The economy told small businesses to climb a different ladder. Not Plato's. Maslow's — a hierarchy of needs, climbed from the bottom. In the economy's translation of it: survive, stabilize, find customers, build a brand, reach scale. Every rung measured in growth rate and projected earnings.
Is it made well? became will it ship this quarter?
What is the work for? became who will buy it?
Would our absence be mourned? became is our presence inescapable?
Boeing is the warning. For a century it was the company you pointed to when you wanted to explain American engineering. Then, in 1997, the merger with McDonnell Douglas handed it to executives whose instrument was the spreadsheet. R&D fell. Buybacks rose. The 737 MAX was rushed out to compete on cost.
Two planes fell out of the sky. Three hundred and forty-six people died.
Between those two crashes, Boeing's stock hit its all-time high.
You can grow large without becoming good. You can become famous without becoming loved. You can become rich without becoming someone the world would miss. You can, as Boeing did, become so large that no one is left minding the craft.
I want to put the Ladder of Life back.
Together, they did something I was not expecting. They made the AI revolution more urgent to me — not less.
A badly written book reaches a few readers. A badly built factory pollutes a valley. A badly aimed AI company can flatten a generation.
Pointed in the wrong direction, AI will widen every divide the last century opened. It will take the indifference that made one life count more than another, and give it a new, more efficient language.
But pointed at the ladder, AI can do the opposite. It can give the corner shop the reach the chain up the street has always had. It can hand the small, the local, the unseen, the same lever the large have always held alone.
The only AI revolution worth having is the one that aims at the ladder.
That sentence — sitting alone, at two in the morning, on a blank page — is the reason I am starting an AI startup.
Poppify is what I am building from it. It is for the quiet maker — the one whose work has been drowned out by louder, better-funded players. It gives them the reach that, until now, only the loud could afford. And it asks, in return, only that what they make be worth the reach.
A company cannot, from the inside, notice the moment it begins to drift. Revenue appears and protects itself. A team forms and absorbs the culture that was already there. Investors arrive and the goals shift to meet them. The drift is never visible from inside.
There is only one outside available to a founder — a past version of yourself, honest enough, early enough, to have written something down. This letter is that version of me.
AI has collapsed the cost of building a product to almost zero. The question is no longer can we build it — it is what should we build, and who does it help. The market will answer that for you if you do not answer it first: build whatever sells fastest, to whoever has money already. I have felt the pull of that answer.
Poppify is on the side of the maker whose work is better than its reach. The baker doing the books after closing. The craftsperson whose shop is on the quiet street, not the main one. People who have something worth showing the world, and have never had the means to show it.
The AI revolution will either take these people with it, or leave them behind entirely. If the tools go first to the already-loud, the already-funded, the already-large — the next decade will be decided by the same thing the last fifty years were: how big, how fast, how cheap. That is the Ladder of Life, quietly given up on one more time.
I want the opposite. I want the baker to compete on the bread. I want the designer to compete on the line. I want the work to be what decides the reach.
It is built to be missed if it disappears. Not dominant. Missed.
And it is built on its own money, by the smallest hand it can be, for as long as that remains possible — because the only way to keep a company's shape is to keep holding it.
I opened this letter with an old question: to build, or to build well. I think I know the answer now. It is the same answer we owe the corner shop we have stopped walking into. Well is slower. Well is harder. Well is the one I want my name next to.
I will build so that what I make — when I am gone — is still standing, still refusing, still true.
Aimed at the ladder.
Careful with the lever.
That's Poppify — before a product, before a customer, before a dollar.