I need one person.

I'm building something and I need one person.

Not a co-founder. Not an employee. A collaborator. Someone who pulls threads until the thing comes apart. Who reads the footnotes. Who can't help asking why, and then why again, and then once more for good measure.

You probably already know if this is you. You keep folders of half-finished ideas on your machine. You think about a problem in the queue at the post office, in the shower, at three in the morning on a Tuesday. The phrase ‘good enough’ sits badly with you in a way you cannot quite articulate.

You build things, and you build by feel. The thing you sketched on a Tuesday afternoon is on a friend's machine by the weekend. Your tools changed three times this year and you found that thrilling rather than exhausting. The first draft is rarely yours these days, and the second is rarely the machine's. You don't write as much code as you used to. You ship more software than ever.

Your CV, what you've shipped, where you studied. I'll get to all of that, if we meet. None of it is what I'm filtering on. I'm filtering on the kind of curiosity that builds things, the sort that won't switch off.

I won't describe the project on this page. If you write to me, I'll tell you in a long conversation. A coffee if you're in London, a call if you're anywhere else. Where you live doesn't matter.

Send a note to tirthkanani{2⁴+2}@gmail.com. Put ‘the eighteenth footnote’ in the subject line, exactly like that, so it lands in the right place. Then tell me about something you cannot stop thinking about. The shape of clouds. A bug in a compiler. An autocomplete that surprised you. Why your grandmother says certain words the way she does. Anything, so long as it is true.

Look at the address twice before you send it. If it still looks broken, sit with it a little longer.

— Tirth