I had been at Pinata for eight weeks.
During that stretch, the revamped direct-to-consumer product went live. We cleaned up the backlog, started rebuilding the engineering team, and made progress on the partnership side of the business.
It was also long enough to know I had to leave.
I had decided to cofound Loop with Caroline. The chance to build a company from scratch with a good friend was impossible for me to pass up. The ownership structure also gave me something I had struggled to get in previous startup jobs: a clear path to keep the equity I earned.
I did not want to drop Pinata in a hole. I proposed a few exit paths, from finishing immediately to working a normal notice period. My preferred answer was to end the full-time job and stay on as a fractional CPTO for a short stretch. I could help hire the next technical leader, keep the product and engineering work moving, and disappear when the team was in a good place.
Then I started telling people.
“I have some big news,” I wrote to one of the engineering partners I had been working with at Pinata. “I decided to co-found a company and will be transitioning to a fractional CPTO role with Pinata.”
I used the same email to start recruiting for Loop.
We were building a professional-networking product focused on the parts LinkedIn did not handle well: understanding your actual rolodex, finding the right person when you needed help, recruiting, job searches, and maintaining relationships before you needed something.
The likely stack was React Native, React, and TypeScript. We expected to need a strong front-end engineer and a backend engineer for the first beta. I wanted people with a lot of East Coast overlap and excellent communication skills. The company was tiny. A technically good person who could not communicate was not going to work.
The product was moving under our feet.
Our early flow started with a goal. Loop would recommend people who could help, then let the user reach out inside the app. After more customer interviews, that felt too narrow. I wrote the designer that we needed to pivot away from the golden path and return to the soul of the product: organize, maintain, and explore your professional network.
Warm introductions, search, and notes still mattered. They just happened after Loop helped someone import and make sense of the people already in their life.
There was plenty happening outside the new company. I was training for the Wild West Relay while trying to heal a partial calf tear. I sent the team my preferred legs with one request: manage the total climbing if possible, but I would make whatever assignment work.
I was also messing with bike position on a Brooklyn rooftop, using a chair and a second person instead of anything that resembled a proper fitting studio. The Manhattan skyline made the setup look more sophisticated than it was.
By the end of the week, Caroline sent an email with the subject “Loop has a co-founder!” She introduced me as Co-Founder and CPTO and said we were focused on building through the summer.
I copied her new email signature and told her I was now super official.
That part took eight weeks and one signature block.