What a Day!

The Stars Over Medellín

Kelly handed me a framed print of the night sky.

Not a generic one. The actual configuration of the stars over Medellín on the 21st of June — the night we met. Date and place printed underneath, which turns a Tuesday from a few weeks ago into something permanent.

Kelly is my kids' new nanny. She gave it to us as a gesture of gratitude and to mark the start of what she hoped would be a good relationship with our family.

I'm good at analysing things. Give me a problem and I'll break it into parts, find the weak points, start working. A gift like that bypasses the whole apparatus. There's nothing to solve. You just stand there holding it, working out that somebody thought about your family carefully enough to go and find out what the sky looked like on a specific night.

She's part of the family now. That's not a courtesy — it's just what happened.

And that would have been enough to make the day worth remembering. It turned out to be the opening item.

Six People, Three Countries

I'm building a product with a very small team. Three in the United States, two in Belgrade, and me operating out of Medellín. Six people, three countries, no office, no overlap in some cases beyond a few hours a day — a genuinely distributed, AI-native team going after a twenty-billion-dollar industry.

I can't tell you what it is yet. What I can tell you is that after months of work we are approaching launch, and this week we cleared a milestone that matters more than it sounds: everyone signed a HIPAA Business Associate Agreement.

If you know what a BAA is, you now know roughly what we're doing — US healthcare — and you also know that signing one is not a formality. It's the point where a side project stops being a side project. You are accepting legal responsibility for other people's most sensitive data. Nobody signs that lightly, and six people in three countries all signing it in the same week means the thing is real.

Later this month one of the founders is flying to Medellín so we can work in the same room for a while. After months of squares on a screen, that's its own kind of milestone.

There is nothing better than working with people who are actually good at what they do. It removes an entire category of problem from your life.

Tomorrow, Blood

At the same time, my three-month protocol is ending and the blood draw is tomorrow morning — eight o'clock, fasted, at home.

I'm already planning the next block with my clinic: a full rewrite rather than a tweak. Higher doses on some things, a few new compounds, and the whole protocol restructured around what the panel says rather than what I assumed ninety days ago. Details once the results land.

Same observation as above, different domain: the difference between doing this well and doing it stupidly is entirely the quality of the people you do it with.

Serbia Is Coming

The same day, my two brothers from another mother — Serbia, two decades of history, the kind of friendship where you don't need to explain yourself — told me they're coming to Medellín this year.

I've built a life here that I'm proud of. Having the people who knew me before it existed come and stand in the middle of it is a specific kind of good that's hard to arrange and impossible to buy.

One More Deal

And then, in the middle of all of it, I closed a serious deal with Kelly that plays out over the next six months.

That's genuinely all I can say right now, which I realise is an annoying thing to put in an article. Ask me in six months.

Homework, Pending Business, and Two Furious Cats

Here's the part that keeps the rest of it honest, because a day isn't made of milestones — it's made of hours.

We skipped sports to finish a big block of work. Kelly stayed late to get the homeschooling homework finished with the kids. While that was happening I met my friend Juan Jose to close out some business the two of us had left pending.

And Charlie and Mango had, by their own assessment, the worst afternoon of their lives. Two cats, one shower, zero consent. There is a particular sound a wet cat makes that I'd describe as a formal complaint. They have since filed several.

Nine Hours

Then I slept for nine hours.

For someone who normally fights to reach six, that borders on suspicious. It was also, I think, simply what the day cost.

None of these things are related. A framed star map, a compliance milestone, a blood draw, two flights being booked, a deal, and some homework. They arrived on the same day by pure coincidence, and the accumulation did something that no single one of them would have done alone — it moved me from happy to grateful, which are not the same state and don't come from the same place.

This is what building actually looks like. Not the product, not the protocol, not the deal — those are outputs. The thing itself is being surrounded by people with good vibes and real skill, and then doing the work with them. Building good things and a good life at the same time, because it turns out those are the same project.

When that's what your days are made of, the direction stops being a question. You just keep going, and there is no version of this where I stop.

Everything else is noise.