I went to a different chiropractor last week. It was business as usual until I got asked the most American question we have:

For fourteen years, I had the cleanest answer possible: Apple. You could see it immediately: the other person knew Apple. More often than not I’d get hit with a broken iPhone or bad WiFi question within 30 seconds. The conversation wrote itself.

I said "I'm building a startup" and watched the conversation die in real time.

The Trade I Didn’t Expect

Working at a big tech company comes with a lot of unintended consequences. You know the adage “your reputation precedes you”? The ultimate version is being labeled the Apple guy by friends and family.. People I have yet to meet know me as the person who works at a world renowned company.

That means people would return my email. They’d quickly answer my questions. It had nothing to do with me. And it came for free.

The moment you turn in your badge, that all ends.

I left, founded Attrove, and started to reach out to folks. Potential investors, customers, past colleagues. The loudest takeaway from all that? The silence. If I had to estimate, I’d say about 4 out of 5 messages went completely ignored. Unanswered. The full spam treatment.

Worse yet? Lip service. Some folks would take the call, meeting, or chat. Make some promise to circle back…and never follow through.

That hurts.

What is Distribution?

Distribution is part sales, part marketing, part timing, part luck. Miss any one and the whole thing collapses. Engineering has a compiler. Distribution doesn't. You ship a story into the world and find out three weeks later whether it landed. Or didn't.

Earthquake Insurance

I’ve lived in San Francisco for 16 years. For all 16, the Big One has been due any day now.

So yes, I have earthquake insurance.

And on a normal Thursday, do I feel excited about paying for it? Of course not. Nothing is shaking. The building is still standing. The risk is obvious in theory and easy to ignore in practice.

That’s a lot of AI infrastructure right now.

I pivoted Attrove this year to be infrastructure for AI products. Communication context. The plumbing under the hood. The layer that lets agents understand what was said across email, chat, and meetings before they act.

Great timing, right? Everyone is building AI.

Except the teams who need this most don’t always know it yet. They’re squinting and getting by. They wired up a barebones Gmail connector, got one demo working, and convinced themselves it’s enough.

Until the agent misses the Slack thread. Or forgets the meeting promise. Or answers with half the story because the context lived somewhere else entirely.

That’s the earthquake.

The hard part is selling the insurance before the shaking starts. The people most exposed are often the least convinced they need it.

And that loops back to distribution. Being right is not enough. You still have to make people feel the crack in the wall before the room moves.

The List

What do you do when someone doesn’t get it? Start explaining.

In the past few months I’ve held loads of customer interviews. Engineers. Business owners. Doctors. Lawyers. Teachers. Investors. Finance professionals. Real estate brokers. Insurance executives. Product designers. Founders. Consultants. Monks.

Monks.

I told myself this was all research. Understanding the market. Sharpening the pitch. Figuring out how Attrove could quietly slip under existing businesses and make them run better, faster, more AI-native.

Reality was simpler. Apple gave me distribution as a gift. Now I had to earn it for myself.

The Hardest Thing

Engineering is a closed problem: build, test, evaluate. It either passes or it fails. Something broke? Check the stack trace. You even get a friendly green checkmark when it works. How nice.

Distribution has no green checkmarks. You send off the perfectly worded email and it just sits in someone’s inbox. You publish this article and watch the open rate creep towards 50%. You take a meeting and get ghosted. Your number one priority doesn’t even make the top 10 for other people. There’s no error message for that. No simple fix.

I know how to build. I’m learning how to be heard. Some days I’m not even sure I’m getting better.

The Bet

Here's what I think is true and what I'm betting on:

AI has dramatically compressed the ability to build software. Every time Claude spits out “that will take 1-2 weeks to do” I laugh, tell it to power through, and an hour or two later it’s done. Talk about leverage. Not much moat left in building quickly. But after the build, how do people hear about it?

Distribution is the last thing AI can't do for you. You can’t prompt your way to trust. To a warm intro. To the right person, reading the right thing, on the right day. That part is still human.

That makes getting people to care, listen, and respond one of the highest leverage skills of the next decade. The build is getting cheaper. Attention is not. Distribution was always the job. I just didn’t have to feel the full weight of it until I left.

If you’ve made the leap and traded the well-known for the uncertain, I want to hear how you did it. Hit reply and let’s make the connection.

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