Last year, I traveled with Jenna Winocur to Cape Town for an ECD training program for nannies. The nannies' stories stayed with me — what they carried, what they hoped for the children in their care. Helping us run the training was a friend of ours, a genuine world traveler who had crossed oceans by boat to get where she was in life. Between the two, I came home changed, and I started building Manaboodle: a place to record and share everything I make — projects, half-formed concepts, the occasional random thought.
A Year of Tinkering
Since then I've mostly learned by tinkering. Of everything I've built, I'm proudest of three: Clusters, a pattern-recognition tool built on the Jobs-to-be-Done framework; Atom Speaker, a kind of ChatGPT for people with vision impairment; and Hana & Flower, a synchronicity engine that measures how much two people connect — or drift — over the course of a conversation.
A New Crossing
To kick off the next year, I decided to give myself three weeks to do nothing but tinker. So I moved onto a boat.
I should be honest: my boat sits in New York harbor and has never once left it. No oceans crossed. My world-traveler friend would not be impressed.
But sitting still (or rocking constantly) on the water for three weeks turned out to be its own kind of journey — and a life-changing one at that.
Cannot wait to share what I'm building.