Sixteen

Back in March of 2010, if you had asked me how long Karbon would be around, I would have told you, “I have budget for a year.” In fact, when I hired Shawn on day one, I told him, “I can pay you for at least one year, after that who knows.” In mid-2011, when I signed what would end up being the biggest contract of our lives, I told Shawn and Bill—whom we had just hired, and to whom I’d also given the same one-year speech—that we’d be able to go “another year.”

You might be sensing a pattern here.

I never thought Karbon would be the defining work of my career. I wanted to design and build iPhone apps and to get paid to do it. In early 2010, the best way to accomplish that, insofar as I could see, was to start my own company and get to work. I always figured it would peter out eventually and we’d all have to find other jobs. This seemed acceptable to me so long as I was able, for some period of time—nearly always “one more year”—to do it my way with the people I enjoyed working alongside.

And so in 2012 I told Shawn and Bill we had enough budget to go “one more year, I think.” In 2013 I probably said the same thing.

In 2014, our biggest client shifted major processes and priorities, and suddenly we found ourselves in a perilous situation with one large contract closing and no new large contract on the horizon. I vividly remember saying to my wife (something I’ve now said hundreds of times), “well, it was a good run, but it’s over this time.” But, toward the end of the year, I managed to negotiate a new contract and suddenly we were back from the brink. Another year. My family packed up our things in Los Angeles and moved up to our first house in Portland—a house I had purchased directly from the success of Karbon.

2015 through early 2018 were a blur. We worked tirelessly, Shawn, Bill and I. We built countless products, shipped hundreds of binaries. At some point we crossed thresholds like “one million lines of code reviewed” and “one billion users” and other staggering numbers¹ . Opportunities arose and we took them. We got lucky more than once. We learned, adapted, improved, and more than anything, we did good work every day. I became better and better at running the business itself, landing contracts and managing client relationships.

In early 2019 it became clear we needed to grow Karbon, and so in May of that year we hired for the first time in years. We went from three to six, then nine. By the end of 2019, Karbon was so much bigger and we had so much more work to do. There were growing pains, certainly, but it ended up working out. With the larger company we took on more, larger projects. We split up into smaller teams, formalized more management structure, started focusing on how Karbon should build things in the long-term, regardless of which client we were serving.

When I celebrated our 10-year anniversary in March 2020, I told my family I was going to get a tattoo of the Karbon logo to mark the occasion² . Ten years is remarkable for a small business, and I was so proud of us and what we had accomplished. For the first time in the history of the company, I genuinely felt like if we only had one more year it would have been enough.

Yesterday, March 1, 2026, was Karbon’s 16-year anniversary.

My children were born in 2012 and 2014. For their entire lives, their father has run a small business called Karbon. They sometimes ask me what I will do one day if and when Karbon closes. I genuinely don’t know. There were times when I thought I did—at least, certainly, I would take a vacation—but these days I cannot fathom not doing this job every day. For better and for worse, this is my life’s work. It is what I do. It is who I am.

I would not be who I am without this wonderful little business and everyone who has been a part of it for the past 16 years. I am endlessly, eternally proud and grateful.

See you in a year.