Thinking Out Loud: Notes From a Moving Target

Reclaiming depth in a year obsessed with speed

This is part of a series of reflections written while building RightMatch in a volatile market.

I’ve been overdue for a check-in here. Life has been moving fast, and when things move fast the instinct is to optimize, to compress the world into tasks and deadlines. But speed has a way of flattening meaning. I wanted to pause for a moment, recalibrate, and share a few things I’ve been thinking about while building RightMatch and trying to stay awake to the world outside my laptop.

The past few months have been a loud reminder that we’re all living in overlapping realities. On one hand, AI continues its relentless sprint, with new models landing so quickly that “state of the art” barely lasts a quarter. Productivity curves bend upward, barriers fall, teams get leaner, and the world suddenly expects every founder to operate like they have a neural network in their bloodstream.

On the other hand, the world of work feels more fragile than the headlines suggest. Layoffs have crossed the million mark this year in the US alone, the highest level since the pandemic. Entry-level hiring is at its weakest point in more than a decade. New graduates are struggling to find their footing, often taking longer to secure jobs than high school-educated workers. A degree no longer guarantees an edge. The job market is reshuffling itself in real time, and it’s creating a strange tension: economic acceleration paired with personal uncertainty. As someone building hiring technology, it’s impossible not to feel the weight of that, knowing the tools we create touch real people navigating moments they didn’t choose.

Running a company in this environment feels a bit like shooting analog film in the age of 8K smartphones. You can capture every pixel with perfect clarity and still miss the story entirely.

Photography has been its own form of calibration for me. Film forces patience. It forces trust. There’s no preview screen offering reassurance. You click the shutter and for a while you live inside uncertainty. Later, the negatives return with their tiny imperfections and uneven textures, somehow more honest than anything a sensor would have produced. The world feels slower on film, less manic, more interpretable. That slowness has been reminding me to protect the parts of building that don’t happen at high speed.

Even inside a company centered on automation and intelligence, the work remains deeply human. Every dataset has an origin. Every hiring funnel we optimize maps back to someone trying to move their life in a better direction. Every interview we automate is still a person’s inflection point. And in a year when millions are job searching longer, questioning their place in the market, and navigating uncertainty they didn’t choose, that human layer matters more than it did when the job market felt predictable. It shapes how I build, what I prioritize, and how I think about responsibility at scale.

I’ve also been noticing a quiet shift across the tech world. Conversations with founders and investors feel different than they did even six months ago. People are questioning efficiency for efficiency’s sake. Now that automation is nearly baseline, the differentiator is depth. Knowing which problems are worth solving. Understanding when to rely on models and when to lean on judgment. Choosing clarity over noise. Depth is becoming the new speed.

That shift isn’t just technical. It’s personal. We’re surrounded by more tools, more streams, more acceleration than any generation before us. Yet the scarcest resource is undivided attention. I’m trying to protect mine. Trying to see what’s actually happening, not just what’s urgent. Trying to widen the bandwidth for curiosity.

So this is me trying to pay attention. To the craft of building. To the people trusting us with their hiring pipelines. To the workers navigating a volatile market. To the strange, turbulent macro environment. To the quiet in between the decisions. To the way morning light hits a half used roll of Portra sitting on my desk.

The next few months will surprise us, as they always do. Markets will swing. Models will evolve. Teams will adapt. But I’m holding onto one principle, a simple mantra that keeps me oriented when things move too fast: stay honest, stay curious, protect the texture.

More soon, likely once the next roll comes back from the lab.