Hi, I'm Travis Jungroth. Solo founders with no employees weirdly talk about their business by saying what "we're" doing. Maybe it's out of respect for all of their advisors, or maybe it's so they don't sound like they're one person on their bed with a laptop (like I am right now). But I'm going to drop that for a bit.

If you came across this because of a link I sent you directly, it means I want to talk to you about joining Highly Composite as a very early employee. And if you somehow came across this link otherwise, that's cool too.

Reading this isn't necessary before we talk, but 4 minutes of reading seems pretty worth it to decide if you want to either be hyped about or skip a 20-minute meeting.

In December of last year, I decided to leave my job at Rainforest QA because they told me I was fired. I took a few days off, went scuba diving in the jungle caverns of Mexico, and then got to work figuring out what I wanted to do next. I could go back to being a software engineer or a pilot. I could try being a podcaster or a magician. After a lot of thought and conversations, I decided that founding a startup was the the right thing for me.

After a brief bout with dengue fever (which I caught from the scuba trips) I got to work on finding the right idea. I spoke with dozens of people, wrote a lot, and made some prototypes. One of the first ideas I tried was resetting databases for QA teams. Rainforest QA does crowd testing, I had been on the sales team, and data management was a huge pain for our customers.

I made a quick prototype and then stopped. It seemed too simple. It wasn't especially exciting. I tried some other ideas for a few months.

Then I came back to it and dove deeper. I realized the base case (save and load) was simple, but the complexity increased tremendously from there. And making something that people wanted was much more exciting than making something I'd spend the next few years forcing on people.

I developed an actual MVP in Python. People seemed to like it. I felt the idea and codebase starting to solidify, and realized this was my last easy chance to change the tech stack. I thought I'd take a peek at functional programming on the way out.

Haskell and Clojure seemed like the big two. I started with Haskell because I liked the name more. Then I started watching Rich Hickey videos. Now I'm planning on rewriting everything in Clojure, so you can see how that went. This is a big deal because I'm a huge Python fan.

But I think it's going to be worth it. Functional programming will make shipping many data manipulation features without going crazy possible. Code sharing between the front and backend will lead to a better user experience with powerful features. And Datomic will make time travel possible.

There's something more general about this, too. Django and Postgres is the type of stack our customers will use. And if you use the same tech stack as your customers, that means that every feature has to be developed and delivered. But if you shift a bit, maybe it's better. Some things will be easier for you than your customers, and you'll get to focus more on delivery. The things they have that you don't won't matter. They already have them.

There's also this notion of having the higher ground. It's nice to be to off to the side of what you're trying to improve, but it's also better to be above. If you're trying to replace books with pictures of people passed around colleges, then PHP is above. When I started using Clojure, it felt like it was above and off to the side of what I was doing before. Like I had the higher ground.

Maybe you feel this way about Clojure, too. Maybe you want to work on new and interesting things. Maybe you want to have your rewards more directly tied to the value you create in the world. Maybe we should talk.