Over the last 24 months or so I’ve been doing a job I love, but in an industry that bores me.

I stayed because I was scared.

God’s will or come what fortune gives, is this truly how you choose to live?

Today that changes.

In April, I got word of some heavy family medical issues. I mulled over how to handle that and what I wanted to do with the news. I kept coming back to something a mentor of mine (and former boss) Jay Moon said to me:

Time is the only valuable thing you have. Don't waste it.

When he told me that I didn’t really understand what he meant. I thought I did, but I didn’t. And, as if to slap me in the face, shortly after we got the news in April, we saw Avengers: Endgame. In it, Tony says something similar (ironically enough to his father in the past):

No amount of money ever bought a second of time.

In combination with wanting to be there for my family, I have had a dream of doing my own thing for years which I have been putting off—again, because I was scared.

I’ve got ideas for a bunch of different things:

1. A live event guessing game. You can [play that here]. We hit over 500 users last week.
2. A mobile payment solution for bars and restaurants that allows patrons to open and close tabs from their phone. Coming soon to Hopewell—sign up for the [beta here].
3. A non profit to help college graduates with substantial student debt.

With the copious amounts of free time I’ll have trying to stand those up, I’ll be doing some freelance product and optimization consulting.

I don’t know which—if any—of these ideas are going to pan out for me. Maybe I’ll learn something from one of them that leads me in a totally different direction.

What I do know is that I have to try doing something like this on my own and be there for people that are important to me. I’ve wanted to break out and try to do something like this for years and I think now is finally the time for me to take a crack at it because the only truly valuable thing we have as humans is our time—and I’m tired of spending that limited resource on other peoples’ dreams.

I’ll be sure to use this space as a way to communicate progress on all of these ideas—and whatever other ones I get along the way.