Vela: A Retrospective

2025-07-12T00:00:00+00:00

On May 9th of this year, I shut down Vela: my attempt at solving several mental health problems for remote workers.

This is what I learned along the way.

Context</h1>
Vela was designed to be the virtual workplace for humans: one that valued meaningful connection over message throughput.
Intentional omission of direct messaging meant people were forced to finally talk to each other again -- something I've desparately wanted for years since remote work took over after the pandemic. Instead, all text-based communication lived in message board posts akin to traditional online forums.
Open-room voice communication took center stage, encouraging "watercooler" chat throughout the work day and building closer relationships with your teammates.
Throughout it's various iterations, I intended the experience to feel like it shipped with macOS. It's glass-like appearance and windowless design mirrored macOS Spotlight and faded away into the menu bar while you worked.
You can still check out the original launch over at ProductHunt</a>.
I also redesigned the entire experience in an attempt to solve some key problems with the first iteration, but these never made it past internal prototypes.

The Culture Problem</h1>
We've been collectively convinced by Silicon Valley and friends that asynchronous communication is king: no more disruptive phone calls or awkward silence during small talk.
The problem with this is of course is it's all based on text.
Text cannot carry true emotion. Critical meaning (read: the humanity) is often lost in transmission. Message throughput flourishes while misunderstandings skyrocket.
Vela's greatest competition was not other apps like Slack or Teams, but rather our decade-defining decision as a culture to give the boot to social interaction in the physical realm.
Press F to pay respects.
Market Resistance</h1>
Entering a market with abnormally high switching costs is astronomical in difficulty. If you thought building startups was hard, try starting one in an industry hostile to change and plagued by vendor lock-in.
Uprooting one's company to an entirely different approach to collaboration is a tough ask.
Educating my target audience on why workplace communication is broken was a dreadfully-steep hill to climb in the age of TikTok and Instagram.
Take away instant messaging and you're essentially dead in the water.
To add to all of this, teams value highly the ability to search through years, decades even, of message history. This naturally-accumulated knowledge base reduces duplication of effort and repetitive conversation, especially for message threads that often act as a company's internal support forum.
With Slack, Teams and other major players reluctant to implement history export or migration tooling, their customers get stuck in a rock and a hard place when they desire to leave.
And once you stop paying your monthly/yearly ransom (ahem, subscription I mean), your access to said history is locked away from view.
Improve employee mental health, or retain years of critical decisions and documents?
Headphones Requirement</h1>
Somewhere along development, I realized people would need to either be home with their speakers on or have headphones in order to listen and engage with thier teammates.
If people were stuck at home because of Vela, then this went against my core mission of connecting remote workers.
And if people were required to have some sort of heaphones or ear buds in while at their local coffee shop, the liklihood of spontaneous conversation and forming new connections in the real world dramatically decreased.
In retrospect, I naively ignored this and continued on with development in the hopes that I would figure it out later.
Perfect Is The Enemy of Good</h1>
Perfectionism, fueled by OCD, meant every new design or feature incurred far too much time than it should have.
Every moment I spent redesigning or refactoring was another moment lost, time that would have been better spent marketing the MVP to receive early feedback.
Opportunity cost is very real — don't let "perfect" get in the way of "good".
What's Next</h1>
My time since Vela has mostly been spent exploring new domains like blockchain technology, diving deeper into God's Word and apologetics, redesigning this very website, and building a PBR renderer with Odin and Vulkan</a>.
At this very moment, I'm actually wrapping up development on an OCD companion app to help people like me (hello!) who struggle to keep their compulsions in check. I'll be writing more on this in the very near future.
Whatever God has in store for me, I'm more excited than ever to see how I can serve others like never before <3

Redefining MVP

2024-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Common wisdom from YCombinator and friends is to build a Minimum Valuable Product, or MVP, with the goal of getting to market as fast as possible. This often means cutting corners and shipping a subpar product so you can begin a cycle of iteration after testing the waters. While this is definitely effective for determining what you should actually be building, many products from my experience remain in this pseudo-minimum state and are simply built upon for years. This can result in a forever-subpar product that would likely require a colossal effort to achieve true excellence, paradoxically going against another piece of common startup community advice.
My proposal, as difficult as it may sound, is to build for excellence from the start rather than the minimum.
An ever-present example of this problem is an Electron</a> application, where the full stack JavaScript architecture enables founders and their team to deliver and iterate super fast with minimal context switching between frontend and backend. In the end, though, these apps are prone to very noticeable performance issues and clunky behavior, resulting in a lackluster experience for everyone. The intention by the founders is pure, but that doesn’t take away from the resulting reality.
This issue extends to the design of the product as well, which is sometimes determined on-the-fly by engineers. Taking more time to research the UX of similar products and designing hi-fi mockups before even starting development can to help achieve a more refined product rather than one that simply meets the minimum requirements.
Many technical founders and team leads overlook the potentially substantial long-term costs of early, crucial decisions. I've repeatedly witnessed startups I've worked for prioritize speed-to-market, only to grapple with significant consequences for years afterward. The hidden expenses of extensive workarounds and, occasionally, complete rewrites become increasingly evident over time. You can find yourself struggling for every minor product improvement because the codebase is chaotic and the user experience is abysmal. But hey, at least you beat everyone to market, am I right?
Ironically, I actually love what Weebly founder David Rusenko had to say about this topic during an old YC talk</a>, stating how founders should aim for building a Minimum Remarkable Product rather than the traditional notion of an MVP (Minimum Viable Product). Although it may just sound like semantics, this change in thought can result in a far better product that truly is better than any other solution on the market.
I implore engineers specifically to consider redefining their approach to building end-user software using this new definition. This could mean using a more error-resilient and high-performance tech stack, such as one written in Go or Rust. Or if you don’t have the bandwidth to learn a new technology, you could simply take more time to architect your solution before diving in to the code.
For design-savvy founders, I heavily recommend spending a good deal of time exploring different ideas on how to solve the problem at hand rather than going the ad-hoc route and hoping it’s good enough. Create collections of inspiring designs from existing products, even those outside of your industry, and build functional design prototypes, such as those in Figma or Sketch, where you can rapidly iterate on user experience before starting development.
This is absolutely a two-faced problem. Intentionally putting more effort into the product before initial launch will obviously increase time-to-market and result in potentially higher development costs. You run the risk of building something incredibly refined but that nobody actually wants or needs. To prevent this, it’s still vital to identify your target audience, conducting customer interviews and sharing prototypes with others to obtain early feedback.
I probably recall this photography quote I heard somewhere at least once a week, and one I believe is just as relevant to engineers as it is to creatives:

“To create something of beauty is reason enough.” </blockquote>
The context being, of course, that no matter who sees, likes or comments on your work of art, creating the art itself is enough to warrant it’s existence.
This sentiment resonates deeply with the philosophy of building for excellence. When we approach our work with the mindset of creating something truly remarkable, regardless of immediate recognition or success, we inherently push ourselves to higher standards. This pursuit of excellence not only satisfies our creative drive but can also lead to products that stand out in the market. By focusing on crafting something beautiful and refined from the start, we set ourselves up for long-term success and satisfaction.
Now go build something beautiful.

Productive Inefficiency

2024-08-31T00:00:00+00:00

The standard for team communication in the remote workplace has morphed into something far from natural, something efficient. In the pursuit of increased “productivity”, most companies rely on asynchronous chat apps like Slack and Microsoft Teams for the majority of their team communication through channel, group, and direct messaging. As a result, remote workers (hello 👋) experience a social disconnect from their coworkers, which can lead to devastating mental health problems such as anxiety, depression, and loneliness. Lesser known, these negative mental health effects also effect organizations at a massive scale: according to the HHS</a>, loneliness is costing companies around $154,000,000,000 every year.
Yet, human communication is inherently inefficient. Our speech is filled with ums and uhs, emotionally-charged and synchronous by nature. And that’s a great thing. It’s what a Slack message can never be: emotional, lively. Human. The inefficiencies in natural conversation - the pauses, the tangents, the shared laughter - are precisely what make it so valuable!
Moving workplace comms out of the physical office has removed this spontaneity from our day-to-day. Impromptu cubical visits from a teammate about something so unnecessary can now feel so strangely necessary. These seemingly inefficient moments can lead to creative breakthroughs, stronger team bonds, and a more vibrant company culture.
It is absolutely critical to the health of the general public that we don't lose sight of the importance of face-to-face interactions in fostering innovation and camaraderie within teams. The spontaneous nature of these exchanges allows for the free flow of ideas and the development of personal connections that are difficult, if not impossible, to replicate one-to-one in a purely digital environment.