An essay on
High Agency Burned Me Out
I built a company by adapting to every problem. That same instinct kept me in a CEO role I no longer wanted.
How I got here
I grew up in Myanmar and learned to code at twelve, mostly from books. The internet was unreliable, Stack Overflow did not exist, and the compiler was not interested in explaining itself. I learned early that waiting for ideal conditions was not a strategy.
While I was at university, I started Nexlabs. I eventually left to build it full-time. The company grew, and so did my job. I moved from code to sales, payroll, hiring, fundraising, and whatever else was on fire. We built Better HR inside that company, spun it out, and eventually sold the engineering unit to a public company.
That success came with a cost I did not notice until later: I had built organisations that no longer needed me to build. I had more authority and less of the work that made the authority meaningful.
So I returned to engineering. Today I’m building at Chalkie AI and writing about software, leadership, agency, ambition, and the tension between scaling the work and staying close to it.