Winding Down Fimio
After 4 years of building, I've made the decision to wind down Fimio, Inc., the AI infrastructure company I founded in 2022.
First, I want to thank my investors for believing in me and backing this journey. I'm grateful for your trust, and I'm proud that we were able to return remaining capital rather than burn through it.
When I left GitHub, I wasn't sure what was next. In the language of Jim Collins in What to Make of a Life, I was facing a cliff. I had been pushing hard for 16 years straight, driven by an inner fire to survive and build something of myself. Instead of sitting in the fog, I plowed headlong into what I thought was next: founding a venture-backed startup.
I love building. And through building Fimio, I learned a few things about myself that I hadn't fully recognized before:
- I really REALLY believe in permissionless systems.
- I believe die-hard in open source.
- I love builders.
I started Fimio to focus on web3 security, then took my infrastructure learnings and pivoted post-SBF into AI infrastructure (sandboxed inference deployments). What I was building turned out to be exactly what the world needs now.
So I should have been thrilled. But I wasn't.
The building and shipping part lit me up. The selling did not. I had designed something beautifully suited for enterprises, which meant founder-led enterprise sales. And that work (spending most of my time with the buyer not the user, the long cycles, the focus on closing a deal instead of shipping a product) ran against everything that energizes me. I fell into the classic trap of the highly technical founder: build something great, then discover the go-to-market motion requires becoming someone you're not.
Instead of forcing it, I chose to be honest with myself. I shut it down, returned cash to my investors, and stepped back to learn more about who I am and how I'm wired; so that next time, I can build something where the entire journey, not just the product, aligns with my strengths.
To every founder wrestling with a similar tension: it's not failure to recognize misalignment. It's clarity. And clarity is the most valuable thing you can carry into whatever comes next.
Onward.