Job search update, summer edition: rejections & gratitude
So, what happened is that by being consistent about building and job-searching in public, a few people I met on LinkedIn started rooting for me. And 2 of them believed in me enough to spend their social capital to help (unprompted).
That's how I found myself meeting 2 high-profile people. This interaction summarizes how I felt:
Me: "from my point of view he's a superstar, so I'm not sure why he'd want to chat with me"
LinkedIn mutual: "Because I explained why you're also a superstar. Which I believe is true"
I had to remind myself that it's not on me to reject myself. Instead, I worked hard to prep; it's my way of expressing gratitude.
One was an ML researcher with >100k citations. To prep for his company, I made a Karpathy-style Wiki tracing each founder's research lineage and how those lines converged. Then, I internalized it by writing a blog post in my own words. I came in prepared - when he mentioned that they're struggling with reward hacking, I brought up a case study from one of his cofounders' papers.
The other was a VC partner who had been in the inner circle of one of the biggest names in tech for decades. To prep, I faced my weakness head-on: behavioral interviews. I hired the best coach I could find (as I said I would in my last job search update) and worked on the squishy stuff: "tell me about yourself", etc. Then, I gave the coach's notes to Claude, turned voice mode on, and drilled the questions over and over again for hours. And it worked! I could tell I sounded more confident.
Either of these two companies would have been a Cinderella ending to my job search... but that's not the timeline we live in 😝
Still, meeting these people has been a highlight of my career. These rejections motivated me to keep building, and directly influenced what I built next:
- The ML researcher inspired me to swap the ResNet in my wall game AI for a transformer, and it's been stomping wallgame.io visitors for a while now lol.
- The VC partner inspired me to think more deeply about how we interact with agents (which I captured in nilmamano.com/blog/agent-ui), including the personal-software suite idea (nilmamano.com/posts/funemployment-has-allowed-me-to-catch-up-9349748).
- And finally, I felt inspired to start my first business, Hosted Isomux (isomux.app).
Anyway. While I'd rather find a team, as long as I'm growing, I'm sure it'll work out.
Thx for tagging along!
If you are hiring in the agentic tooling space, consider taking a stroll through nilmamano.com/blog. It paints a picture of what I'm passionate about.
