I don’t remember the first time I wrote a line of code. I remember the feeling, though. It was the same feeling I got the first time I closed a deal, the first time I launched something people actually used, the first time I watched a system I designed start running without me. It’s the feeling of making something exist that didn’t before. That’s the whole thing. That’s why I build.
I was fourteen. Most of my friends were doing normal fourteen-year-old things. I was the youngest of eight kids in a religious family, which means I grew up watching everyone else figure out their lives before I got a chance to figure out mine. That does something to you. You either settle into the youngest-kid role, the one who gets carried, the one who benefits from everyone else’s lessons, or you decide, somewhere deep and maybe a little irrational, that you’re going to prove something.
I chose the second one.
I first fell down the crypto rabbit hole at sixteen. Not building yet. Learning. Studying blockchain, reading whitepapers, trying to understand why this technology felt like it mattered. By nineteen I was in it for real. I was Head of Media and Marketing at NFTzilla. I co-founded NFTuence. I was living in Israel, traveling across Europe and around the world, speaking at conferences. These weren’t side projects; they were real companies with real users and real revenue. I was figuring out token economics and community dynamics and go-to-market strategy while my peers were figuring out college applications. I’m not saying that to brag. I’m saying it because it shaped how I see the world. When you start building that young, you develop a certain impatience with theory. You want to see things work. You want to ship.
The crypto market crashed, as markets do. I’ll write about what that taught me another time. But the important thing is what happened next: I didn’t stop building. I just pointed the energy somewhere else. Healthcare. Specifically, ABA therapy, applied behavior analysis for kids with autism. First at Brighter Strides, then building the marketing infrastructure at what became Treetop ABA.
People find this transition confusing. Crypto to healthcare? NFTs to autism therapy? It sounds like a pivot, but it wasn’t. The thread was always the same: find a system that’s broken or inefficient, understand it deeply, then build something better. In crypto, the broken system was how creators monetized their work. In healthcare, it was how families found the therapy their kids needed. Different domains, same muscle.
Now I’m CMO at Treetop. We’re PE-backed, operating across ten states, running three brands. I’m twenty-four. I manage budgets that would have seemed absurd to me five years ago. But the title and the scale aren’t the point. The point is the building. Every day I’m designing systems, marketing systems, operational systems, measurement systems, and watching them either work or break, and then fixing them and watching again.
And on the side, because one arena is never enough, I’m building AI agent infrastructure. Chadeth. It’s a personal AI system that manages context, memory, and task execution across my life and work. I built it because the tools available weren’t good enough. They didn’t think the way I think. So I made something that does. That’s the builder’s instinct: when the tool doesn’t exist, you make the tool.
I think a lot about what separates people who build from people who talk about building. It’s not intelligence. I know plenty of brilliant people who’ve never shipped anything. It’s not resources. I started with nothing except a laptop and an internet connection. I think it’s tolerance for the feeling of not knowing what you’re doing. When you’re fourteen and trying to launch a company, you don’t know what you’re doing. When you’re twenty and building marketing infrastructure for a healthcare company scaling at speed, you don’t know what you’re doing. When you’re twenty-four and designing AI agent systems, you don’t know what you’re doing. The difference is whether that feeling stops you or fuels you.
For me, it fuels me. It always has.
Being the youngest of eight taught me something else, too. It taught me to watch. When you’re the last one, you get to observe everyone else’s mistakes and victories before you make your own. You learn pattern recognition early. You learn that most problems aren’t new, they’re variations of problems someone else already solved. The skill isn’t originality; it’s translation. Taking what worked in one context and applying it to another. That’s what I did moving from crypto to healthcare. That’s what I’m doing now moving from healthcare to AI.
I don’t have a five-year plan. I’ve never had one. Plans are for people who think the world holds still long enough to execute them. What I have is a set of principles: build things that compound, surround yourself with people who are smarter than you, move fast but measure everything, and never get so attached to one domain that you can’t see the next opportunity.
Some people find their identity in their industry. They’re a “healthcare guy” or a “crypto guy” or a “tech guy.” I’ve never been able to do that. My identity is in the act of building itself. The industry is just the material. Wood, steel, code, campaigns, it doesn’t matter. What matters is the act of taking something from nothing to something. From idea to system. From system to scale.
I’m twenty-four. I’ve already built more than most people build in a career. I say that not with arrogance but with hunger, because I know, I can feel it, that I’m just getting started. The next ten years are going to be different from the last ten. Faster. Higher stakes. More complex. And I can’t wait.
That’s why I build. Not for the money, though the money is nice. Not for the recognition, though I won’t pretend I don’t care about it. I build because the alternative, consuming instead of creating, watching instead of doing, talking instead of shipping, feels like a kind of death to me. A slow one. The kind where you wake up at forty and realize you spent your best years optimizing someone else’s spreadsheet.
No thanks. I’d rather build.
