Update, Offer, Ask

Update:

I am currently:

in San Francisco! Going to tech events & generally hanging out

headed to Buenos Aires on Sunday for some months+ extended travel.

unemployed! More on that below in 'Ask'

Offer:

I think more people should have their own websites.

To that end I'm offering a service ( https://www.jakesimonds.com/services ! Oooh!) for anyone who knows less about computers than me where over a two-hour zoom call we build you a personal website. I thought about calling it Likable (as in Lovable but not making such insane promises), but settled on Webmaster Crash Course.

If this is as good an idea as I hope it is I'm hoping to charge people $$$ for this, but since it's brand new I'll do it for free. Consider signing up. It's 2 hours slots but will do less if you want!

Ask:

I'm very frightened to be unemployed and not at all certain that I haven't made a massive, unforced error.

Not asking for your sympathy, but...

Are you thinking about starting a company? Let's chat

I am interested in:

how can companies with external-facing APIs or frankly any public web presence make themselves legible & friendly to the humans and humans-using-ClaudeCode/Codex that will find them?

Thinking less custom fine-tuning, more convert everything to markdown and then see where Claude gets stuck.

The slimy version of this will be SEO for LLMs. That phrase makes me throw up in my mouth a little but I do think it's an interesting space

protocols over platforms. To the degree that open social matures, could there be a business around helping companies migrate and own their own social stuff?

The 95% problem: when the LLM gets you 95% of the way to what you want, how intuitive is it for the person to jump in and finish the work? So many current LLM implementations it's confusing/impossible to take over from the LLM. Exa Websets and the cursor side-chat are two examples of doing it well.

I'd rather get really good at solving specific problems and be a consulting business than try to thread the needle and make something that'll scale perfectly.

Seeking Informational Interviews

Right now I am planning to return to conventional employment somewhere around March 2026.

My ideal job:

as synchronous as possible while still in software (zoom calls over DMs & hanging out IRL over zoom calls)

& not because remote-first doesn't work, it obviously does. This is more just a my-preference thing & it's a pretty strong preference for how I want to live the one life I have. I'd rather hang out than trade DMs.

open to travel. Open to software sales. I love conferences, I love being really close to the actual people with the problem we're solving. And I think I'm happiest/at my best when I'm able to be an advocate for something I really believe in

my nosey-ness and penchant for asking tons of questions is regarded as an asset.

Any of the above are negotiable. Depending on the job market in a few months maybe they'll all be negotiable.

& specifically curious in learning more about:

Software sales (wish I knew more about this world)

Developer Relations (would love to chat with someone in a role like this to ask just basic questions)

Start up investing space (again, I know so little about this world – seems an interesting intersection of building networks of people and staying technical)