Why Airspace
I met Nick in 2015. I had just woken up to the idea that spending my time on this planet writing software for the government was a terrible idea. It was just so disorganized that almost nothing moved forward in a meaningful way. I thought I was pretty damn good at making things and I wanted to know that I wasn’t wasting time doing it. So I started looking for two things:
- Something meaningful.
- Something super hard.
I wanted to go to bed every night knowing that I made the world a better place. That ruled out pretty much every company most people were vying to work at at the time like Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, etc. Nothing against those companies, but they do not check point number one.
I also wanted something that would be the best measure of my skills. I wanted to know that I was good. I needed to prove it to myself for some reason. Who knows why.
Then, I meet Nick Bulcao. He explained to me that time critical shipping was broken and that people were suffering because of it. Doctors, for instance, try to minimize the time an organ for transplant is outside of the body so they will coordinate the surgery around the time that the forwarder gives them. Then something as simple as traffic happens and the patient might wake up finding out that their organ, that was a one in a million match, expired. Now it is going for research and they are back on the transplant list.
In that moment, I knew how I wanted to spend my time. That was almost 11 years ago, almost 20 patents ago, millions of lines of code ago, and to this day I still feel lucky to go to bed knowing that what I did that day mattered to someone.