In March of 2026, I made the very difficult decision to leave Monaco, a startup in San Francisco building the revenue engine of the future. I deeply enjoyed working with the people at Monaco, and I already miss them dearly. It is a great company that I believe truly has the potential to become the leader of the go-to-market space.

As much as I am sad to leave such an exciting company, I have been increasingly pulled in a new direction. I am embarking on a deliberate, focused effort to achieve my long term goals through the vehicle of a bootstrapped, family owned, mission-driven holding company. The beginning of the Johnglomerate (yes, that's the actual name of the company). Let me explain.

Johnglomerate Limited (JG) was born in 2024 (with approval from my employer, Robinhood), initially as a vehicle for my side projects. For the first couple of years, JG was little more than a Nevada LLC shell company with a bank account, a few domain names and some Github repositories.

Over the past few months, JG has slowly started to wake up. Earlier this year in 2026, JG registered to do business in California. Today, as I'm writing this, JG has several thousand dollars in a bank account, two part time employees, health insurance coverage, 120 acres of land in Nevada, and seven domain names, including generaltask.com. It's not much, but it's honest work. And it's getting a little bit better every day.

Today, it probably seems crazy that I walked away from a very successful and quickly growing startup to work on what is effectively a small consulting and software business. It probably is a little crazy. But I hope that this writing will help you understand the method to my madness, and why this is what my spirit calls me to do.

I have long admired Warren Buffet, Charlie Munger and the company they built together, Berkshire Hathaway. Over the course of more than 50 years, Buffet and Munger steadily grew a diversified conglomerate business, through the ups and downs, into one of the largest, most profitable businesses the world has ever seen.

They didn't achieve this incredible feat by being the smartest, or the fastest. They didn't have a “why now.” They didn't hire exclusively Stanford or MIT kids. They did it by sticking to their principles of value investing, buying great business at reasonable prices, managing them well, and maintaining a long term mindset. They were greedy when others were fearful, and fearful when others were greedy. Today, Berkshire Hathaway sits on nearly $400 billion of cash.

Employees at Berkshire Hathaway don't get burned out after two years to go to the next thing. They work hard, to be sure, but sustainably so. And they are based in Omaha, Nebraska, not San Francisco or New York.

In the midst of my first startup journey at General Task, I attended the 2022 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Shareholder Meeting, and was lucky enough to see in person both Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett answering questions from shareholders. It was a truly special experience, and it was eye opening as someone who has been raised in the “move fast and break things” culture of Silicon Valley. How could it be that a company that ignored so many of the commandments of the Venture Capitalists and of the broader tech ecosystem be so successful?

Coming back from that trip, I jumped back into the frantic race to grow fast or die as a pre-seed startup. We blasted as hard as we could over the following year, but ultimately General Task shut down in part because we couldn't grow fast enough to merit raising a seed round from VCs. Another big reason was that I was so burned out from working and living in an unsustainable way that it was hard at that time to see myself continuing on the startup journey.

As months passed and I rejoined Robinhood as a software engineer, I couldn't help but wonder if General Task could have been successful if we hadn't pushed the company so hard to grow fast or die. Perhaps it could have grown steadily and flourished. And I wondered: if that might be true for General Task, how many other dead startups could have grown steadily and flourished?

Over the past few years, as I've reflected on the past and what lies ahead of me, I started to get excited about building my next business in a very different way than my first. More focused on the long term. More sustainable. I am serious when I say I intend to spend the rest of my life building Johnglomerate.

That means that Johnglomerate will have beautiful offices in beautiful locations, stocked with delicious, healthy food and drink. We will invest in our people. We will be craftsmen, philosophers and good citizens. We will be thoughtful, well-read and steady. We will have ambitious, long term goals, measured in years and in some cases, decades or longer, which we work towards every day.

In a couple of months, I am completing the renovation of a small cabin by a river in the redwood forest of La Honda, just 35 minutes from Palo Alto. This will serve as the first Johnglomerate workspace: a peaceful cabin in the woods, existing in harmony with nature and with the principles of JG. Over time, we will build beautiful offices all over this country and beyond. Maybe sooner than you think.

This may sound like a lifestyle business. But I want to be clear: I am exactly as ambitious as I always have been. My primary career goal is still to build New San Francisco, a massive city on the ocean. It is precisely because I care so much about this extremely ambitious goal that I find myself called to build this business in this way.

Johnglomerate exists expressly to build New San Francisco. Today, JG exists primarily as a humble software shop. But as we grow our software business, we will use the cashflow to begin to explore hardware and deep tech opportunities. We will develop land. We will build housing. We will go into heavy industry. We will develop the resources, skills, and capabilities needed to embark on the kind of massive industrial project needed to build a metropolis on the water.

We will grow steadily, and flourish.

And we will build New San Francisco.