I started my career as an internet systems engineer. Back when the Internet was being connected at breakneck speed and nobody quite knew what it would become. Perl scripts. DNS configs. Figuring out how to make systems talk to each other at scale.

This moment feels like that. Only faster. Much faster.

ChatGPT launched just over two years ago. It reached 100 million users in two months. For comparison, TikTok took nine months. Instagram took two and a half years. The internet itself took about seven years to reach that milestone after the first web browser made it accessible.

We’re living through the same fervor of explosive growth that I saw back then, only now compressed by an order of magnitude.

I spent decades in that earlier world. Internet services. Content delivery. Data storage. Travel tech. Building infrastructure, solving integration problems, making complex systems work.

Along the way, I realized I loved something else just as much: telling stories.

Stories to customers about what was possible. Stories to the market about why it mattered. Stories to partners about what we could do together. Stories to leadership about where we should go next. Stories to teams about the hard problem we were solving together.

That’s why I became a TPM. Not because I stopped being technical. Because I found a role where both parts mattered.

What I’ve missed most about these past months isn’t the paycheck. It’s working on interesting, complex problems with capable, collaborative teams.

Building RoleFinder has felt a bit like home. Product thinking and engineering craft together. A pain point I could describe in one sentence. A solution that required smart systems integration, not brute force. Something real that actually runs every morning and helps myself, and soon other people.

I’m not a PM who learned to be technical. I’m a builder who learned to tell stories.

That’s the version of product leadership I want to do next.