tldr; Want to skip straight to the news and find out about my new job?
\nOn December 15, 2014 I went to dinner with Jukay Hsu. I was 25 years old and not too proud to say yes to a free meal, and my friend Josh said I really should meet him. I was none the wiser, so I agreed, not realizing that dinner would become one of the more consequential nights of my life.
\nOur dinner turned out to be a job interview of sorts. Jukay asked if I'd like to be a teacher at the non-profit he was founding. I wasn't just skeptical, I was a software developer. Teaching and mentorship would come to be a big part of who I am, but at the time I wasn't interested in doing it full time.
\nI politely rejected the offer and said \"but this all sounds great, please do keep me in the loop with whatever you're doing.\" I didn't realize how seriously Jukay would take that, but I was thrilled that he was doggedly persistent as he built Coalition 4 Queens. Today C4Q is known as Pursuit.
\n\nPursuit at its core is a job readiness program, one that operates rather uniquely. You can read more about it on their website, but the gist is that for over a decade they've taken cohorts of people who make an average of $18,000 a year and given them a free 9-12 month training program. 1 Pursuit helps students (now known as builders) develop in-demand skills and pairs them with a job placement team. Over the years they've had an 85% success rate finding good jobs that pay an average of $94,000 a year. The numbers fluctuate per cohort and the curriculum always changes, but as you can imagine, these results are truly life-changing.
\nThe people who run Pursuit are dedicated, but it's the builders that make Pursuit what it is. Many work eight-hour shifts as bartenders, teachers, or Uber drivers, and still come to class five days a week for 4-8 hours a day. When they're done they go home, continue working on their assignments, get as much sleep as they can, and do it all over again the next day.
\nFor their first decade Pursuit achieved this transformation one person at a time by training people to become software developers. But as the market for entry level software developers plummeted, Pursuit threw caution to the wind and undid years of work. They rebuilt the curriculum in realtime, sometimes on the same day they were teaching a subject because of how fast AI moves. Now they teach AI-native skills and use AI to help students push themselves further than they ever have before. And the results are there. The first AI-native cohort finished a few months ago, and people are landing jobs. Despite all the chaos AI brings, Pursuit continues to change lives.
\nI've always been struck by how committed the builders are to reshaping their lives. It's no surprise that magic happens when you pair people working this hard with an organization that cares so deeply about making a dent in the world.
\nPursuit reminds me a lot of my own upbringing. I was born in New York, I was raised in New York, and while it's not completely in my hands, I have no plans on dying anywhere else. When I look at Pursuit I see New York City at its finest. Every cohort is diverse, full of immigrants, with people taking on the challenge of trying to change their lives, and the lives of those who depend on them. This is my community.
\nEconomic mobility isn't just important to me in the abstract, it's a matter of personal import. When my parents fled the Soviet Union they were allowed to take nothing more than $60 and their belongings. I've seen firsthand how difficult, rewarding, and prosperous the journey to economic stability can be. It wasn't always easy, but today, thanks to their hard work, I'm lucky enough to live in that stability. And I want nothing more than for others to have the same.
\nIt's been over 11 years since I started volunteering at Pursuit. I helped interview and select people for their very first cohort. I've mentored individuals and became close friends with some. I've attended Demo Days, given talks, and when I worked at Twitter I would bring engineers by so students could benefit from my industry access. Pursuit has always shown that it doesn't matter how much you have, but what you have to give.
\nI've spent countless hours at Pursuit, but last year I was there every week volunteering with their inaugural AI-native pilot. I grew incredibly close to the people taking on this challenge. With the tech industry in such upheaval, the promise of employment on the other side was more uncertain. And yet people believed that if they bet on themselves it would all work out, so I was happy to do what I could to improve the odds. I loved every minute of it.
\nWhen I was done volunteering I'd come home to my wife Colleen and share every little detail from class. In her words, I was always beaming, with the biggest smile on my face. One night I took her to Demo Day, where the builders were presenting the projects they'd been working on for two months.
\nOne builder told her that I'm the only volunteer they know who would bring their family to Pursuit. To me it was obvious, I wanted the person I love most to meet the amazing people I'd grown to care deeply about. She wasn't just wowed by the warmth in the room, she was impressed by what people with no technical background had built in eight weeks with AI.
\nThese were apps and tools that really mattered, ideas that could change the communities the builders came from. But Pursuit doesn't only teach you how to build. Colleen was struck by how good they'd become at the other work involved: product, design, market research, public speaking, presenting. (And that's from someone whose job involves giving a lot of presentations.) The lessons Pursuit teaches go beyond AI. They focus on critical thinking, communication, creativity, and the adaptability you need in a fast-moving world with ever-changing economic conditions.
\nAs I wrote in Open To Work, I've been looking to start a new chapter of my career. I've loved my last four years as an indie developer building Plinky and teaching AI workshops. I have thousands of happy customers, I've learned and used every skill you need to run your own business, and I've had unlimited freedom to do what I feel is right. But I dearly missed working with caring people on a shared mission, the way I felt every time I was at Pursuit.
\nThat's why I was over the moon when Pursuit's co-founder David Yang reached out on LinkedIn after seeing my post. Jukay had recently stepped down as CEO, but Dave is still there running product. He asked if I wanted to talk about joining Pursuit as an employee and I said sure, but joked that I was woefully under-qualified for the only open role I saw on their jobs page — Fractional CFO. When we got on the phone it was immediately obvious that we both want the same thing, to help people build better lives for themselves. And when you have that in common, few things seem impossible.
\nI spoke to a bunch of companies during my search, and while I was nervous about my first interviews in nine years, they mostly went well. But almost every company I spoke to left me unmoved. It's not that I don't want to work in tech anymore, but signing up to spend the next few years of my life building a slightly better AI tool, or a chatbot that's a small improvement on a feature ChatGPT will surely implement if it succeeds, isn't particularly compelling.
\nPursuit though felt right from the first conversation I had with Dave. The feeling only grew as I spoke with more of the team and saw how deeply people cared about more than technology. They bring humility and thought to everything they do. At a time when we're integrating more AI into our lives, they've only doubled down on bringing their humanity to the field. It was obvious that these were people I wanted to spend my time with.
\nToday I'm joining Pursuit as their Director of AI Product Engineering. It's an interesting fit because to date Pursuit hasn't been a traditional engineering organization, and yet they've managed to do so much engineering in the last year.
\nWhen it comes to AI they fully practice what they preach. Their educational platform was built by a single engineer. They have an internal version of JIRA maintained by people from across the organization. And last month one product person took it upon themselves to build a better interface to Salesforce to speed up Pursuit's fundraising pipeline. This is exactly the change I wrote about in AI Agents Are Starting To Eat SaaS (Really).
\nAt the same time, I'm a software developer by trade, and my domain expertise is software engineering. I've always done a little bit of everything, because at the end of the day we're here to solve problems, but I have a strong conviction that good code accelerates our ability to solve hard problems. AI has clearly raised the floor of what's possible at Pursuit, and my goal is to bring my craft so we can raise the ceiling too. I want to do even more to accelerate the mission: helping good people get great jobs by teaching them essential skills, so they can better their lives and their communities.
\nMy role will be roughly 80% engineering, helping build their internal educational platform that will reach all New Yorkers. I was sad to leave my AI workshops, but I won't have to stop educating entirely since 10% of my time will go to helping with Pursuit's curriculum. The rest of my time will be focused on empowering everyone in every role at Pursuit to contribute to building the platform, in ways that scale without losing that all-important engineering excellence.
\nThis all feels like a pretty good way to put my skills to use. The essence of Pursuit has always been helping others so they can help others, and I'm excited to be around that spirit every day. There are dozens of reasons to join, and dozens more I'll surely discover along the way.
\nEleven years ago I went to dinner to have a nice conversation over a free meal, without knowing how meaningful that night would be. Today, I feel blessed that my job will be to do great work in service of others. We should all be so lucky in life.
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