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It ran from 2024 to 2025 and is no longer active.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 — that 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.