ByTheWay

ByTheWay was a carpooling startup I co-founded and where I served as co-CTO. It was my first experience of building a company rather than a project: deciding what to build, who it was for, and (the part nobody warns you about) what to stop doing.

I co-led the technical side: product architecture, the implementation roadmap, and the ordering of what got built when. That last one turned out to be the real job. Carpooling is a two-sided marketplace, so nothing works until both sides show up, and almost every engineering decision is really a decision about which side you are betting on first.

Beyond the platform itself, I drove priorities across growth experiments and the internal tooling we needed to run operations. Splitting attention between shipping features, testing whether anyone wanted them, and keeping the team unblocked is a genuinely different skill from writing good code, and I was not especially good at it at first.

It ran from 2024 to 2025 and is no longer active. The lasting lesson was about sequencing (the constraint is almost never the code), and it is why I now start projects by asking what would have to be true for this to matter, before writing anything.