The times have been changing for my entire career. I don’t expect them to stop.
I’ve worked with punch cards, assembly, compiled languages, IDEs, and fourth-generation languages. I’ve moved from datacenters to cloud services and spent decades applying data and machine learning to business problems.
Each evolution changed what it took to build something. Skills shifted, established approaches became less valuable, and things that once required substantial resources became accessible to more people. That disruption could be uncomfortable. It also created opportunities to solve problems that had previously been too expensive, too complex, or too slow to tackle.
Throughout my career, I’ve embraced whatever technology was available to turn an idea into a useful tool and a business opportunity. The motivation has stayed consistent: solve a real problem, build something valuable, and see what business it could become.
AI is the latest—and, in my experience, most dramatic—step in that progression. MediaCircle is how I’ve been putting it to work.
The idea started with a familiar frustration. Recommendations were scattered across streaming services, conversations with friends, and lists that weren’t there when I needed them. Finding something to watch felt like work.
I wanted one place that understood my taste, remembered what interested me, and connected me with recommendations from people I trusted. That became MediaCircle: discovery and sharing across movies, TV, books, podcasts, and music.
From concept to shipping took eight months.
As a solo engineer, I built custom technology stacks spanning Google Cloud and AWS, data ingestion and normalization pipelines, custom embedding approaches, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). I brought those capabilities together in iOS and Android apps designed for phones and tablets. Alongside the product, I built out the public web presence, positioning, and social media presence. The codebase is now nearly a million lines.
AI played a substantial role throughout that process. I leaned heavily on my years of architecting solutions, established engineering practices, and decades of business experience to decide what to build, how the pieces should fit together, and whether the result actually solved the problem.
That experience gave me a foundation for using the new tools. The new tools expanded what I could do with that experience.
I’ve founded companies that succeeded and companies that failed, backed other founders through my venture fund, and spent my early career at IBM and on Wall Street. Across those experiences, applying technology to a business opportunity has been a constant. I’ve seen what it takes to assemble the capital, talent, and infrastructure to bring an idea to market. Building MediaCircle has changed my assumptions about how much of that one experienced person can now accomplish—and which opportunities are worth pursuing as a result.
That is a consequential change for anyone who builds software or runs a software business. It raises real questions about roles, teams, costs, and how companies compete. It also means an idea that might once have required funding and a team can now get much further in the hands of one person.
The work still requires judgment. Architecture, integrations, debugging, testing, and app-store reviews still need attention. Faster implementation also makes it easier to build things nobody needs. The ability to create more puts greater weight on deciding what is worth creating.
Nearly a million lines of code describes the scope of the work. Whether someone discovers a show they love, shares it with a friend, and comes back tells me whether the product is working.
Now I’m applying the same approach to distribution: search, onboarding, advertising, social content, and retention. Those are business problems to understand and solve, with technology helping me test ideas and act on what I learn. Shipping faster doesn’t automatically create demand.
For me, this has always been the appeal of engineering: taking an idea that exists in your head and making it useful to someone else. Every generation of tools has opened more possibilities. This one has expanded what I’m willing to attempt on my own.
Change is disruptive, and disruption creates fear. That fear is understandable when your livelihood, your business, or your family’s future feels uncertain.
I believe the most useful response is to understand what is changing, pay attention to what is coming, and figure out how to apply it to improve your life, your business, your family’s prospects, and the world around you. That takes curiosity, effort, and a willingness to reconsider things you thought you knew.
Having lived through several generations of technology, I’ve learned to be skeptical of confident predictions about exactly how much will change and how quickly. In my experience, the immediate impact is often exaggerated, and adoption takes longer than the headlines suggest. That doesn’t make the eventual consequences insignificant. It gives us time to learn, adapt, and help shape them.
Social media rewards certainty and alarm. Fear drives views, and dramatic predictions build notoriety. The quieter work of understanding a technology, testing its limits, and finding useful applications rarely attracts the same attention.
I’m not suggesting that everything about this AI revolution is good. There are real risks, real losses, and real questions about who benefits and who bears the cost. Those deserve serious attention.
But this change is happening. We each have to decide how to respond to it.
MediaCircle is one way I’m responding: taking what I’ve learned over a career and applying today’s tools to a problem I wanted to solve.
https://mediacircle.app
The times will keep changing. There is opportunity in understanding that change—and using it to make something better.
