A few nights ago, I was sitting at my computer looking at something I had built
And I had this strange thought.
Nobody knows any of this exists.
Not really.
They might know I am a real estate broker.
Some people know I have gotten very deep into AI.
A few people have seen one of the products I have built.
But they do not see what I see when I open my computer every morning.
The company underneath the company.
The systems talking to each other.
The marketing operation running behind the scenes.
The CRM I built because I needed one.
The little education tool that started because I wanted people to have somewhere safe to ask a real estate question.
The consumer app.
The platform I am still building.
And the AI employees that sometimes work beautifully and sometimes make me want to fire every last one of them.
They see pieces.
I see the whole thing.
And I realized something:
I have spent so much time building the work that I forgot I eventually had to show the work.
The work used to be easier to explain
For most of my career, what I did was simple to describe.
I worked in banking.
Then I worked in real estate.
Then I started my own brokerage.
People understand those things.
You say, “I’m a real estate broker,” and nobody needs a diagram.
Then somewhere along the way, my work changed.
Not because I sat down one day and decided I wanted a new identity.
I started building because I needed things my business did not have.
The first time I opened GitHub, I remember thinking:
What the heck am I looking at?
I was not a developer.
I did not have a technical co-founder sitting next to me.
I was a broker trying to solve problems.
That distinction still matters to me.
Because I never woke up thinking, I want to become an AI person.
I kept running into the same situation.
Something important was missing.
Something had become too expensive.
Something I depended on was outside my control.
Or something that was supposed to make my life easier was creating even more work.
And eventually my response became:
Fine. What would I build instead?
That question changed me
MiniMo was the first thing I built.
Then came other systems.
Keeper.
Curb.
Lighthouse.
The work that eventually became Mo.
Some things worked.
Some things absolutely did not.
I have burned money learning lessons I would have preferred to learn for free.
I have built things that looked impressive and were practically useless.
I have had AI employees behave like terrible employees.
I have rebuilt systems because the first version solved the wrong problem.
And there have been plenty of moments when I thought:
Maybe I have completely lost my mind.
Then something works.
A system picks up a job I used to carry
Something I imagined becomes a real screen I can open.
A process that used to live entirely in my head starts running without me holding every piece together.
And I get that feeling again.
I made that.
That feeling still surprises me.
I think I have been telling this story backward
This is what I have been thinking about lately.
A lot of business content starts with the lesson.
Here is what you should do.
Here are the five things I learned.
Here is the framework.
Here is the answer.
But that is not actually how I experience any of this.
Most of the time, I do not know the answer when the story starts.
I am in the middle of the problem.
Trying something.
Changing my mind.
Watching something fail.
Figuring out why.
And sometimes sitting there thinking:
Well, that was a terrible idea.
That is the interesting part.
So I think I am going to start telling you the story from there.
Not after everything has been cleaned up enough to turn into a lesson.
While I am still living it.
This is the business underneath
That is really what this publication was supposed to be about from the beginning.
Not AI news.
Not prompts.
Not pretending I know where all of this technology is going.
There are plenty of people doing that, and many of them are much better qualified to do it than I am.
What I can show you is different.
I can show you what happens when this technology gets dropped into a real business with real constraints.
A brokerage.
A founder without a giant team.
Marketing that still has to happen.
Customers who still need to be served.
Software bills that still have to be paid.
Systems that break.
Ideas that sound brilliant until reality votes.
And an owner trying to figure out how much of the company she should still be carrying herself.
Because that is the question underneath almost everything I have built:
How do you build the company so the owner does not have to hold every piece of it together?
I am still answering it.
So I am going to show you the receipts
Sometimes that might mean showing you a screen.
A system.
A workflow.
Something I built.
Something that broke.
A before and after.
Maybe a conversation with one of my AI employees that went completely sideways.
Sometimes it will be something I learned running Momentus.
Sometimes it will come from almost two decades of sitting across from people making huge real estate decisions.
Sometimes it will have nothing to do with AI at all.
Because I am still all three things.
Founder. Broker. Builder.
I do not want to lose one of those identities just to make the story easier to market.
They are connected.
Real estate taught me how people actually make decisions.
Being a founder taught me what happens when everything eventually finds its way back to the owner.
Building taught me that sometimes the thing you are looking for does not exist yet.
And AI gave me a way to start creating some of it myself.
I don’t know the ending yet
That may be the strangest part.
I know what I am building.
I know what I believe.
And I know I am much farther from the woman who first opened GitHub and wondered what on earth she was looking at.
But I do not have the neat ending yet.
I cannot write the paragraph where I tell you how all of this turned out.
And I am starting to think that is exactly why this is the right time to tell the story.
Because building is much more interesting before hindsight makes everything look inevitable.
Right now, nothing feels inevitable.
I am still testing.
Still changing things.
Still learning.
Still trying to get better at showing the work instead of disappearing into it.
So that is what I am going to do here.
I am going to show you what I am building.
Why I built it.
What worked.
What did not.
What I changed my mind about.
And what I am learning about the business underneath a business while I am still building mine.
No polished ending required.
I don’t know the ending yet.
That’s why I’m telling the story now.
If you want to follow along, subscribe to The Business Underneath. I’ll be here, building it.