New here? Hi, I’m Michael. I’m a software developer and the founder of TinyPilot, an independent computer hardware company. I started the company in 2020, and it now earns $80-100k/month in revenue and employs six other people. Every month, I publish a retrospective like this one to share how things are going with my business and my professional life overall. Highlights We completed the first-ever TinyPilot release where I didn’t perform any release task directly.

New here? Hi, I’m Michael. I’m a software developer and the founder of TinyPilot, an independent computer hardware company. I started the company in 2020, and it now earns $80-100k/month in revenue and employs six other people. Every month, I publish a retrospective like this one to share how things are going with my business and my professional life overall. Goal Grades At the start of each month, I declare what I’d like to accomplish.

Six years ago, I quit my job as a developer at Google to create my own bootstrapped software company. For the first few years, all of my businesses flopped. The best of them earned a few hundred dollars per month in revenue, but none were profitable. Halfway through my third year, I created a device called TinyPilot. It allows users to control their computers remotely. The product quickly caught on, and it’s been my main focus ever since.

I found it eye-opening in terms of understanding how municipal governments work in practice and how perverse incentives lead to poor community outcomes. It had a huge impact on the way that I think about where to live and what policies I support in local government.

This book complements Happy City in that both books explore what characteristics of a city make it attractive for residents to live there but also how legislation often yields the opposite results.

Have you ever used archive.org’s Internet Wayback Machine? It’s a free tool that’s been archiving the web since 1996. So, if you want to see what Google looked like in 1999, they’ve got it. Internet Archive capture of Google from April 22, 1999 ArchiveBox is like your own, personal Internet Wayback Machine. It’s free and open-source, and you can use it to archive most websites. ArchiveBox is a free, open-source tool that lets you archive websites locally.