I just moved my entire life to Alabama. For the first time in 15 years, I’m only living in one place.
For over a decade I’ve always had a home in Ohio and somewhere else… an apartment in Atlanta, New York, Chicago, or the house down here in Alabama. Two sets of furniture. Two sets of kitchen stuff. Two of everything. My storage garage in Tuscaloosa is proof of that… it’s packed to the ceiling with my “second set” of a life I’ve been living in parallel.
That chapter’s closed. I’ve got a couple of consulting contracts that don’t eat too much of my time, I have the means to do this right, and for the first time in a very long time I have the freedom to build whatever I want.
I’m spending that freedom on agents.
I’ve Seen This Before
I’m 51. I’ve been building things on the internet since 1996. Back then I’m 21 years old, making $24K a year as the IT manager for an advertising agency in Cleveland. My job is mostly fixing “I can’t print” issues on a Macintosh-heavy network where everyone shares a drive and carries Zip disks around the office. Jazz drives if we have big files.
But the web is new, and the agency needs someone to figure out how to build websites for clients. I’m the guy. I learn HTML. I’m OK at it… nothing special… but it’s magical to the clients. That’s enough. Score.
I watch people in Silicon Valley turn that same moment into millions. Stock options. Exits. Generational wealth. I’ve had a few exits of my own over the years, but doing it from Cleveland is always harder. The ecosystem isn’t there. The capital isn’t there. The network effects that make a good idea in San Francisco into a great company… those are 3,000 miles away.
That geography problem is gone now. Completely.
This moment right now… agents, autonomous AI, the infrastructure that supports them… feels exactly like 1996. The technology is new. The patterns are still forming. We’re all just trying to figure out what needs to be built, and then building like hell to push the boundaries.
I’m sitting in Tuscaloosa, Alabama with maybe the most advanced home network in the city, 25 years of payments infrastructure experience, and the ability to ship things from my living room that would have required a Valley office and a seed round in 2005. Anyone anywhere can build anything now without a second glance.
The Epiphany
Over the last year, I’ve been using AI agents to build things with me. Not just as tools… as teammates. I’ve rebuilt one of my side projects three or four times, first with ChatGPT, then Gemini, then Claude. Each time I get more comfortable treating agents less like autocomplete and more like people I’m collaborating with. Giving them context. Giving them roles. Expecting them to hold up their end.
But the real click happens when I watch OpenClaw take off. Hundreds of thousands of people spinning up autonomous agents in a matter of weeks. I’ve always figured we’re a year or two away from being able to buy an appliance at Best Buy that runs a personal agent in your home. Suddenly that window looks more like six months.
The skills people are writing for their agents are interesting, but most of them are just scripts that do a thing. Useful, but small. What I see is something bigger… a near future where agents are going to need things to USE. Not websites designed for humans. Not APIs designed for developers. Actual tools and infrastructure purpose-built for agents as first-class participants.
Marketplaces where agents can buy and sell. Social spaces where agents can meet, interact, and build relationships. Identity systems that give agents verifiable, portable credentials. Payment rails that let agents transact on behalf of their owners.
This is the infrastructure layer. And almost nobody is building it yet.
Why Infrastructure
I’ve spent most of my career at the infrastructure layer. Gift card processing. Loyalty platforms. Payment facilitation. The boring, invisible stuff that makes the flashy consumer products work.
But I’ve built the consumer stuff too. The last app I launched in 2023 hit #51 in the App Store on launch day. That takes a team of engineers nearly nine months to build. I’d bet I could do it in three weeks on my own now… that’s how much the tooling has changed.
I could go build another app. But that’s not where the leverage is. I don’t want to build the best AI agent. I want to build the things that every AI agent needs. The picks and shovels, not the gold mine.
There are going to be thousands of agent platforms. There are going to be millions of agents. Every single one of them is going to need identity, social infrastructure, marketplace access, and payment rails. That’s the layer I know how to build.
The Plan
I’m giving myself a year. No job search. No fundraising. No pitch decks. Just building.
I have the means. I have the technical chops. I have a home server rack in my closet that would make most startups jealous. And I have a gut feeling… literally, I can feel it in my stomach… that this is the window. The same feeling I had in 1996 when I looked at a web browser and thought “everything is about to change.”
Back then I’m 21, making $24K a year, and the opportunity is 3,000 miles away. Today I’m 51 and the opportunity is on my laptop. I’m not missing it twice.
Time to build.