Rhode Island & Early Pangea

Staying in Providence wasn't some grand strategic decision — it happened because that's where our users were. Rhode Island has an absurd concentration of college students: Brown, RISD, Johnson & Wales, and about twelve other universities packed into a small state. If you're building for the college market, there's no better place to just walk onto a campus and talk to people. Beyond that, I genuinely loved Providence. It was affordable, it was focused, and it let my co-founder John and me put all our energy into building without the distractions and burn rate of New York or San Francisco.

Pangea started as a side project John and I were tinkering with, and I honestly didn't think of it as a company. The turning point came in the most unlikely place — a job interview. I was interviewing at Harry's, the DTC razor company, talking to their COO. I was young and didn't really know what I was doing, and I spent most of the interview talking about this concept we were building instead of, you know, answering his questions. He interrupted me and said, "You seem very excited about this idea. Have you considered working on it after you graduate?" I remember thinking — is that even possible? Launching a company straight out of college wasn't something people around me were doing. It wasn't a path I'd ever seen modeled.

We ended up applying to Brown's summer venture accelerator. It was designed for students going into their junior or senior year, but we applied as graduating seniors and got in. They gave each of us a small stipend to work on Pangea for eight weeks. We figured — what's the worst that happens? We'll learn a lot doing something we want to do. So we did it.

We signed up our first thousand users by hand. Literally walking onto campuses, handing out rubber ducks and two-dollar bills to get people to download the app. It was scrappy and it worked — at least for getting people in the door. But we made a lot of mistakes in those early years. We tried to be product-first, building custom software when we probably could have shipped something faster with low-code tools — though in fairness, Airtable and Bubble weren't what they are today. We were very opinionated about what we thought the world wanted, and we kept trying to sell instead of listen. Two ears and one mouth, as the saying goes.

The bigger issue was how anchored we got on our initial assumptions. We were locked into it being a mobile app, locked into the college student market, locked into a model where both buyers and sellers were students. That gave us a very limited view of the problems people were actually willing to pay to solve. It took us longer than it should have to realize we needed to shift toward higher-quality talent and a more professional freelance and fractional marketplace.

There wasn't one dramatic "burn the boats" moment — it was more of a gradual compounding of commitment. The accelerator kept us in Providence for the summer, and then we just... kept going. Every small win made it harder to walk away, and every mistake taught us something we couldn't have learned any other way. We took it a lot further than we ever thought we would. The conviction came not from certainty that it would work, but from the fact that we genuinely wanted to do it. And once you know what you want, what you need to do reveals itself.