nick

Building where bits and atoms converge. @teachmelessons @goboxtrot

[nick @commute]

This is a chance to get in early on some great content

[Tyler Maloney @MaloneyTyler]

I’ve been building companies for over a decade, and I’ve barely posted anything online. That’s changing in 2026.

Many of you could make the assumption that I got where I am today from some traditional founder bio path I took, but my obsession with building things started before college.

At 8 years old, I lived on a disc golf course in Austin. There used to be this creek that ran through it and athletes would lose their discs in the water. After every big storm, the lost discs would wash up into the shallows and I would go collect them.

I realized these discs had value, so I started taking them to frisbee golf tournaments and selling them to the players.

Because of this “business”, I made my first few thousand dollars before 4th grade.

Then, at 10, my mom (who was a professor) took a sabbatical to write a book, and we moved to Costa Rica for a year.

To share my experiences with friends back home, I coded up a basic website and started a blog. I wrote about my adventures in Costa Rica, most of which involved chasing wildlife with my Dad. This became my first exposure to tech and writing.

That year made me realize that I didn’t want a standard life.

Flash forward a few years, and I was 17 deciding where to go for college. I got into Duke and John Hopkins, but chose NC State on a full ride instead.

Because of that decision, I graduated debt-free, which meant I could take a risk starting a business out of college instead of chasing a paycheck.

My first company failed after 4 years, but we demonstrated enough promise that I landed a spot at Stanford for my MBA. The experience was incredible. It helped me process all the learnings from my first company and gave me the courage to try again.

Now, I'm building TeachMeTo: the opposite of the AI-centric, screen-heavy narrative that everyone's chasing in 2026.

There’s a lot more to each of these chapters, and I’ll be going deeper on all of them. But beyond the personal, here are some other things you can expect from me:

- How I think about building companies

- Why I’m building a real-world, in-person business in a world racing towards screens

- Raising vs. bootstrapping vs. the messy middle ground

- And what it means to raise kids who build their identity on something more durable than a like count

I’ll share what I got right, wrong, and everything in between.

If any of that sounds like your type of conversation, I’d love to have you along for the ride.

[nick @commute]

@danpantelo Huge

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@VanceE @tetranow

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@samuel_spitz Interested

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@alecvxyz 🔥🔥

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@calebulf @goboxtrot

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@scottastevenson Congrats Scott + team! Impressive work.

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@jameygannon @figma Steal

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@mattepstein sauce

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@jameygannon That bookmark ratio

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@bling0 @blingcapital Congrats Ben and team!

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@justinsliao Can I come

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@jameygannon dm'd

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@zachpogrob @trycreate_co You post, I buy

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@Hunter_Weiss Been loving your trend reports

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@zachpogrob love it. applied

[nick @commute]

My prediction for 2024:

The Experience Economy takes off.

As we all use more technology, we're also starting to value real-life activities even more. We do a LOT online — and so we're increasingly looking for ways to have fun and learn things away from screens. Technology, paradoxically, is helping with this.

https://t.co/Zy8sovzPb4

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@justinsliao @rabois Portal is a fantastic sleep multiplier. Easiest way to follow the Huberman protocol

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@allanmaman Congrats. Always harder than it sounds.

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@JaiDolwani Have made 3 killer hires