The startup as a work of art
When I was an art student, I didn’t think of the business world as a place where creativity mattered.
Today, I see starting a company as one of the most creative things you could possibly do. What changed?
I’m writing about all the lessons I learned starting, growing, and eventually selling my company, XPLANE. There are so many lessons, some I remember fondly and some that are painful.
If you want to discover your greatest strengths, most vulnerable weaknesses, your best and worst traits, start a company.

XPLANE was a big creative project that spanned 29 years of my life, from 1993 to 2022.
I have a few questions I intend to explore here:
- What was my intention in starting XPLANE?
- What was the theory I wanted to explore, and what were my hypotheses?
- What experiments did I conduct, and what did I learn?
- How would I revise my original theory based on what I have learned?
- What happens next?
As you can imagine, 29 years’ worth of learnings and lessons will take a while to unpack.
