Why I made this

I grew up in Missouri.

I was born in St. Charles and raised in Foristell — a small town in the eastern part of the state, where I went to Daniel Boone Elementary and my backyard was, quite literally, a cow field. As a kid, the cows would sometimes get out and wander over to eat the grass in our yard. I have thought about that a lot since. The grass really was greener on the other side of that fence — greener enough that the cows kept breaking through the wire to get to it. Even the livestock knew.

I was the kid who did not fit. Raised in a good, church-going home by people who loved me and whom I love back — this is not one of those stories where the parents are villains. They are not. But I was curious in ways the place did not have a use for, and I doubted things you were not supposed to doubt, and I wanted to build things nobody around me had ever built, and for a long time the main thing that got me was bullied. I felt out of place in a way I could not name until much later. The name, it turns out, was simple: I was a seed in the wrong soil.

I was not a prodigy with a golden ticket, either. I won the Missouri DECA state championship in marketing — which, given that you are reading a piece of marketing I built, is either deeply on-brand or the universe having a laugh. I spent two and a half years at St. Charles Community College before I transferred to the University of Missouri and graduated. I am a Mizzou alum. I tell you all of that so you know the path I am describing is not a Stanford-legacy path or a trust-fund path. It is a cow-field, community-college, state-school path — probably a lot like yours. It works. I am the proof it works.

Before I left, I gave Missouri everything I had — I need you to know that, because I did not bail on one hard day and then go build a website about it. And twice, the place showed me exactly what it does with someone who tries.

The first time, I was still at Mizzou. I did a piece of work good enough to publish, and a professor tried to put his name on it — not to help me get it into the world, but to take credit for something he had not done. I told him to his face: write one line of the code, and I will gladly put your name next to mine. One line. He would not, because he had not built any of it; he just wanted his name on something that worked. The person whose entire job was to lift me up saw something worth having and reached for it instead.

The second time is the one I think about most, and there is no villain in it at all. I was the technical cofounder — the CTO — of TheGoodz, a delivery startup in Columbia, and the CEO was one of the first people who ever really bet on me. He handed me real control, he gave me the first place I ever got to shine as a cofounder, and when it counted, he defended me. He is a good man, and I want that on the record. And still — because I was "the technical one" — he could not quite bring himself to let me near the marketing, even though I was, on paper, a state champion at exactly that. It was not any smallness in him. It was the drought: where we come from, you are allowed to be one thing, and a place that dry genuinely cannot picture a person being two. The gatekeeping does not need a bad guy — it runs straight through the hands of the people who believe in you most. In the end the company did not survive the ecosystem around it; the investors took my cofounder, it turned into a zombie, walking but going nowhere, and the pay stopped. I did not leave Missouri because I never tried it. I left because I tried it as hard as I know how, and then I watched what happened to the things I built.

And it was not only who they let me be; sometimes it was whether I got a shot at all. One year I put together a whole team for Startup Weekend: I recruited bright, ambitious Mizzou students and even flew someone in from out of state. Then the organizers added a fresh round of gatekeeping — a vote — and the people casting it were my own cohort, the in-crowd who had already been waved through, deciding who else would be. They decided it would not be me. I got my team a pitch slot anyway, by making it very clear I would lose my mind if I didn't, which, if I am honest, was only partly an act; the same bipolar wiring that would not let me take no for an answer then kept me up the entire night running a room full of college kids I had talked into this. We were a team I had brought from outside, so we could not pick up any new players. It was just us.

And here is what I finally understood, years later: everyone was kind. The organizer bent over backwards for me. The CEO who could not picture me doing the marketing believed in me more than almost anyone ever had. Not one of them was a villain, and not one thought of themselves as a gatekeeper — that is the whole point. In a drought, gatekeeping is not a decision anybody makes; it is just the water table, the way it has always been. Kind, generous people ration without ever once noticing they are rationing, because there was never enough to go around and there never had been. They genuinely could not see that a vote over who gets a shot was a wall. You cannot really blame someone for not seeing a wall they were born behind. It is not that the people are bad. It is that the desert makes the walls invisible — even to the people standing inside them. We competed anyway. Of course we did.

There is a harder version of that lesson, too, and it is the one that actually burned: it is not always so innocent. When water is scarce enough, the little that exists gets guarded, and sometimes the people guarding it know exactly what they are doing. In a desert, predators go to any oasis. A thin ecosystem concentrates power in very few hands, and thin margins make those hands grip harder.

And under all of it runs one quiet engine: in a scarce place, the motivations of the people around you are not aligned with yours. The professor wanted the credit, not the discovery. The investors wanted control, not a company. Where a founder sees a thing to build, a desert sees a thing to divide up. The garden is not made of kinder people — it is made of people whose incentives finally point the same way yours do, because out here the pie actually grows, so helping you win is how they win too. There are predators in the garden as well; do not let anyone sell you Eden. But where there is enough water, you are not forced to walk past the same three gatekeepers every single time you need a drink.

So when I tell you the soil matters, I am not guessing. I planted myself in that soil for years, as hard as I could, and I watched what grew and what got taken. Then I bought the ticket.

I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area. And I want to be honest with you: it was hard. It was lonely, it was expensive, it homesicked me at 2 a.m., and there were stretches where going back would have been so much easier. Nobody handed me a map. I figured out the train, the cheap way to stay, the culture, the whole thing, the slow and stupid way, one mistake at a time.

But the thing that was wrong with me in Missouri turned out to be the exact thing the Bay was built to water. The curiosity, the doubt, the itch to build — here, those were not liabilities. Here, they were the entire point. I got watered. I grew.

A predator in the garden

The garden is not Eden, and I would be lying to you if I let you think it was. There are predators here too — and the most dangerous ones do not look like predators. They look like the dream. I know, because one of them looked like the best thing that ever happened to me.

I worked at Hasura, now PromptQL. I took it over several other offers because they promised me stability and fair, early warning before any big change — that mattered to me more than the money, because I have bipolar disorder, and having the rug pulled out with no notice is not a small thing for me; it was the one accommodation I asked for. And I loved that job. I adored the people I worked with; for the first time out here I felt like I had a family — a real one, the kind you would run through a wall for. It became my whole identity, and in my head I was the mascot, which is honestly close to what I was hired to be.

Then, the day I was supposed to be promoted, I was let go instead. No warning — so much for the one thing I had asked for. Let me be precise about who did that, because it was not the family I had found: it was the CEO, and him alone. I will keep my read of him to how it felt from where I stood — petty. My honest belief is that when someone made him feel like less than the smartest person in the room, his reflex was to get rid of them, and I am not the only sharp person it happened to — I watched it happen to others, and there were witnesses. And in a single afternoon, he took the family I had finally found.

Here is the complicated, honest part, though. This was my only Bay job, and it still hurt worse than anything the desert ever did to me — not because the Bay is crueler, but because it mattered more; I had far more to lose here, and I loved it more. And even as it broke my heart, it was still a life I could never have built back home. That is the real trap of the garden: the predator and the opportunity are so often the same thing, and the most luscious, best-looking thing in the whole valley can be the one that bites. So come — but come with your eyes open. Get what matters to you in writing, keep your guard up around the predators wearing the finest clothes, and never let any place become your entire identity, no matter how much it seems to love you back for a while.

And it will stay my only Bay job. Walking out of there, I made myself a promise: I would never work for anyone else again. Eighteen months — which, it turns out, is about the standard valley stay — had been long enough to do some of the strongest technical work of my life, and long enough to decide I was done handing my whole identity to someone who could end it in an afternoon. From here on I would build my own thing, and I would not stop until it succeeded or I did. That promise is where everything after this comes from.

The thing I built

Out here, I built a programming language. It is called LOGOS, and it lets you write real programs, formal logic, and mathematical proofs in plain English — it is deterministic, not a guessing machine, F-098 it compiles down through five different execution backends, F-100 and underneath it sits a tiny proof kernel with the same foundations the serious proof assistants use. F-094 It is real, shipping software, not a pitch deck. F-112

I am telling you this for exactly one reason, and it is not to sell you a compiler. It is proof of the only claim that matters here: a strange kid from Missouri, who did not fit, who got bullied, who felt wrong in his own hometown — came to the garden, got watered, and grew something he could never in a thousand years have grown back home. Not because Missouri is bad. Because Missouri did not have the water, and this place is nothing but water.

"Why didn't you just ask for money?"

A while after I landed, I told my whole story — Missouri, the professor, the startup, all of it — to a young guy who had just gotten into Y Combinator. He laughed, not unkindly, and asked why I hadn't just thought to ask someone for money.

Just ask someone. As if it had never once crossed my mind. As if I had not spent years doing exactly that — knocking on every door in the state that might have had a checkbook behind it.

He was not being cruel. He genuinely could not picture it: a place where money is not a phone call away, where a good idea cannot get a meeting, where "just ask" is not a plan because there is nobody in the room to ask. That laugh told me more about the distance between the two worlds than any number could. In his world, capital is oxygen — you do not thank anyone for air. In the world I came from, it is water in a drought, and you can die of thirst standing next to a locked well.

The least a place can do for the people trying to build inside it is let the money window-shop their ideas. Back home you often cannot even get someone to look. Out here, looking is the whole business — the checkbooks come to you, just to see what you're making. So if you are a founder in Missouri with something real and nobody will so much as glance at it, hear this clearly: it is not you. It is the room. And you are allowed to change the room.

Home turf

My most recent run-in with Missouri did not make me angry. It made me disappointed — and only disappointed, in the end, because of what it showed me: in a drought, the things everyone points to as water are often the very things quietly pulling it out of the ground.

For the first time in my life, the world was coming to my home turf. A conference — the Software Should Work conference — was being held in Columbia, Missouri. As far as I know, I am the only Mizzou alum out here trying to build a programming language and drag it into the mainstream, and the one I built runs about twice as fast as anything the headliners were bringing. I was not invited to speak. So two weeks out I did something I have never once had to do in the Valley: I reached out, and I begged — five minutes, a lightning slot, anything. I was told it would not be possible. There was a four-hour gap in the schedule at exactly that time.

The strangest part is that I already knew. Before the reply even landed, I knew the answer would be a wall; you learn the shape of it by heart. And that is the contrast that finally broke something loose in me: out here, strangers who have never heard of me will put a microphone in my hand. Back home, on the one patch of ground that is truly mine, on a stage built around the literal words "software should work," they would not give me five minutes.

That was the week I stopped waiting for the rooms back home to change, and started building the ones I wished existed.

Why the website

This map is one of them. I wish someone had handed me one.

So I made the map as useful as I knew how — the real train routes, the real RV parks with real rates, the reading list I had to find on my own, one mistake at a time. It is yours. I do not need anything from you for it.

If you are that kid — go read Hacker News tonight, price out the train and a camper this week, and come stand in the field where the future is being built. Or don't. Grow the life you actually want, wherever the soil suits you.

But if the reason you are staying is that nobody ever told you leaving was allowed, or possible, or survivable — consider yourself told. It is all three.

And you can always come home. Changed, carrying water. That was always the whole point.