Know Your Why

I spent months thinking about what I wanted next after my exit from Linq. But, unlike Steve Jobs, I didn't feel like that meant my next company needed to be literally called Next. Most founders don't spend enough time thinking about what they want to build. They don't think about how this will consume years of their life, or realistically a decade if they happen to be successful. No, they are too desperate to find a problem—any problem—to consider where their own soul naturally gravitates. Instead, they chase what's new and what's hot; it's shiny object syndrome on full display. This approach leads to burnout, indecisiveness, pivot (after pivot) and erosion of morale / questioning of your leadership once your lack of conviction and passion becomes apparent.

In order to know what to build, you need much more than the idea. It's not just the total addressable market and the competitive landscape. You need to know yourself. Yet that is the work, like leg day, that we skip, in search of progress elsewhere. Why is looking inward so uncomfortable? I think it's usually tied to feelings of inadequacy. Fear of being so different or so flawed that your failures aren't just shuttered companies, but actually indictments against who you are as a person. Maybe self-assessment feels elusive. Or maybe we're incredulous that the things we like and appreciate could be so liked by others that they'd actually pay us to enrich them.

The start of the journey has an outsized effect on the end, so whatever the reason, find a way to be confident in yourself, especially if you're going to have countless employees dependent on your leadership as a means for their livelihood. Simply put: If you wouldn't bet on you, why should others?

Ideas are easy, or they should be. There should be a baseline of imagination that is the benchmark of a good founder. Before you dispute me here, not all creativity is drawing and painting. Creativity is the ability to synthesize concepts in a way only you can. It's an output that your unique path and range of skills / experiences has made discoverable. You just have to know how to tap into it.

Your next career move could be a blank canvas. The beauty is you don't have to know exactly what to put on it. An artist starts with the background color, and sees something in it. Then scaffolding and structure start to emerge. And a finished piece finally materializes over time. Maybe your first brushstrokes are, "I want to start my own company!" There's a backdrop for the whole scene. Just be certain you know yourself. Do you really want to start a company? ... be a leader? ...answer to customers? ... investors? ...wear different hats every single day? Once you know the answers to these kinds of questions, make a list. Write it all down. The question of what to build (and what not to build) then becomes much easier.

Why I Started Luau

Well ... I became interested again, as I do every few years, in domain names. Earlier this year people started stirring over a startup who committed most of its funding to buying their domain name ($1.8m on friend.com of its $2.5m raised). This started a fun side quest. I'm already a bit of a domain expert on domain names ... and TLDs and ccTLDS. I often dwell on the obscure manner by which Apple arbitrates that .io and .xyz should auto-format to links in an SMS or QR code, while .ai and .app are lifeless plaintext. My journey started by asking Perplexity AI, "What kind of apis or tools can help me figure out quickly which domain names are available?" It surfaced a github repo I could run at the command line that used a GoDaddy API.

It took some tinkering to get it to work. GoDaddy has limited its api to people who have registered 50 domains with them, and they didn't document this restriction at all 🤬. But to their credit, the sandbox actually worked.

The results were mixed. GoDaddy has an interesting take on what their api considers to be an available domain. I went for really short 3 letter domains on reputable TLDs, testing for aaa.io, aab.io, and so on across .com, .co, etc. This was taking too long, and even respecting rate limits, the script would fizz out after a while.

So then I found a list of all three and four letter words in the English language. I used it instead of checking every permutation of all letters (and numbers) together. This worked much better.

The results were surprising. For one, managing a TLD is lucrative. .xyz created its own page dedicated to auctioning off their scarcer short domains. Secondly, short domains come at a premium ($$$). Just because they are unclaimed doesn't mean they are $15. Three or four characters will cost you, as will broadly searched words like history, apartment, etc.

Note: My goal if I ever become a billionaire is to build my own islands / governments and create country TLDs (ccTLDs) for them. I'll let the registration fees keep the islands running. Maybe .xx and .xy? Sorry, I know that a rabbit hole discussion for another time.

As I searched for short domains, I was shocked by how many 4 letter words were available—emphasis on the word were. I bought a number of them. But my favorite, obviously, was luau.co. In it I saw a brand with a lot of potential and with little to no real competition for its meaning.

It's a weird roundabout way of starting a company to be sure. It comes from tinkering with things that interest me. I like collecting domain names. But finding the domain was only a step in the journey. It sparked the next idea and the idea after that.

You know the saying that to a hammer everything is a nail? Well, it's true. Luau could have been a clothing line, or furniture built from koa wood. It could have been any one of a million things if anyone else had found it. But to me, Luau looked like the ultimate party platform. That's because I host 30-40 parties and get-togethers every year. It's something that is a unique part of who I am. I like hosting and entertaining. I like building community and bringing people together. It's my why, and a part of who I am.

Now I have the opportunity to build something for myself, something I would love to use. That's something a lot of founders never find. Another unique insight I have comes from having spent last year and a half building AI user experiences and product designs for other companies. I'm leveraging the culmination of all these passions and experiences to benefitting Luau's users. It's fun to see the stars align, to find the one diamond in a sea of golden nuggets. Let's face it, it's easy to get excited by an idea, they're all golden and shiny. But you have to love the idea, and the idea of bringing that idea to life. If you can find that spark, then all you need is the vision, trust and conviction to chase it.