It's early 2015.

We got back home one evening and noticed a bright sticker on our door. It was an eviction notice.

The real estate agent had pulled a fast one.

This is how.

After months of living at this apartment, we didn’t have a mailbox key. If anything was placed directly in the mailbox, it was neither visible nor accessible.  

There had been an exhaustive list of problems in dealing with this agency. The debit of an incorrect & substantial amount of rent from our bank account being the worst of them.

The agent never picked up calls, and we kept getting bounced around between admin and accounting in trying to get our money reimbursed.

After screwing around back & forth via emails for weeks, we had enough. We cancelled further payments from the account in question.

We decide that unless the issue got resolved, we wouldn't pay another dime. The agent, of course, instead of reconciling the ledger, sneakily decided to evict us.

He knew we didn’t have a mailbox key — the rascal had not fixed this issue in months — yet the 'notice of hearing' was dropped into the box.

The legal hearing date came and passed (unbeknown to us), and the verdict was delivered due to non-attendance. It wasn't just an eviction, we were blacklisted from renting a home for a few years hence.

We tried to track down the owner of the apartment in the couple of weeks we had remaining here, only to find, the place was owned by some family trust. With the trust office itself being run from the premises of a faceless corp, it was all a dark web.

After speaking with a couple of lawyers, the conclusion was that a fighting the agent wouldn't compensate much. They said the system was flawed at base level.

For us it wasn’t so straight forward; our struggle was as much on principle as it was situational.

To these agencies you are just a number in the system, or better known by your technical status: Pond Scum. There is no humanity to understand that on the other side of their screw ups, people can be left with no roof over their heads.

The uncomfortable truth is that if the threat of violence wasn't just the domain of the state, people across certain professions wouldn't antagonize fellow humans this much. It allows the cowards to hide behind a wall and attack others, knowing no one can hurt them back.

But we delivered a small payback by changing the main door lock and throwing the keys in the river. The apartment board rules would prevent the agent or owners from breaking in, and they'd endure a painful process in getting a new door lock approved by the convoluted building management.

Overall we decided its best for us to move on from this dirty process and focus on the big picture: To figure out what Zen Black would bring to life.

We were, in hindsight, using positivity to cover up a tricky situation, while the ripple effects couldn't yet be foreseen.

We packed up & moved our furniture into a storage unit. This was tough. It was a brutally hot summer and I was still not in a position to lift heavy objects due to the hernia.

I had to quickly figure out how to move things without really lifting. A series of angles, weight distribution, and a skater dolly, to allow me to do things with restricted movement and without strain.

Most of my personal journey has been about ‘not letting’ extreme restriction suffocate the life out of me. There is a harsh emotional, physical and spiritual price to pay for having to constantly outdo yourself.

But on the inverse, there is a level of resourcefulness that you get to tap into, which expands you like nothing else. If one survives this long enough, the kinds of opportunity one has access to then has no limit.

Meanwhile in the story, more madness was about to ensue.

A week before we left our apartment, we crossed paths with a couple we’d known for a while.

It turned out they were in-between homes and looking for a new place to rent. With our apartment now being pretty much empty, we let them stay at our house for the final week.

A couple of days before we were all supposed to move out, they got approved for a rental. Since they knew our situation they made us an offer: To sign the contract in their name as long as we shared the rental costs with them.

The truth is, we had not wanted to share a space with anyone, but we were in a pickle here. The offer turned up at a relevant time, so we thought: Let’s see how it works out for a couple of months?

They also requested to temporarily borrow all the furniture from our storage unit, while they looked for something of their own after moving in. When we asked them how much of their own stuff there was to move in, they said just a few pieces of art work and some clothes.

We agreed about lending our furniture, as long the guy did all the heavy lifting. The girl, well, she had one prosthetic leg.

Move-in day came along and it was another hot day. While waiting for them at the storage unit, we got a late call from the dude. He said that he's unable to get his work shift covered, so he won’t be able to join us until much later.

Well, since the moving van was already paid for by-the-hour, we had to proceed with moving the furniture ourselves. Déjà vu! Something didn’t seem right, but we just wanted to get this out of the way.

When we arrived at the destination, there was no access for the van into the main carpark. They had carelessly forgotten to mention the important detail of the height-restriction.

We had to now pull over on a busy main street, and carry things into the apartment through a longer route and multiple sets of stairs, instead of the straightforward access from the apartment carpark.

The icing on the cake was when we entered the house. It was a God-awful mess! It wasn’t just clothes and so called "artwork" they'd brought with them; the house was filled to the brim with useless crap.  
 
If we brought any of our furniture in, there would be no room left to move!

Turned out they were dirty hoarders and liars! We had to make a spot decision to not move in with these idiots.

We had to run the entire process in reverse now: Move things all the way back to the storage centre in stifling heat, and reorganize it all to fit back inside our tiny unit.

Not sure how we managed this insane task, but recurring moments like these (over the years) got us tapping into some kind of beast mode, where we'd just turn relentless until the job got done.

We were fortunate to find an Airbnb that same night at extremely short notice.  
Following this, we crashed pretty hard.

Summer time was peak season for accommodation, so limited availability had us moving every few days to a different Airbnb. This was not only inconvenient for mental stability, it was costing us in extra service fees with every new booking.

But a few weeks on we finally found a proper place to rent, from folks who seemed like they were a decent family.

On the surface everything looked fine, but when we collected the keys I felt an intuitive nudge to play it safe. I told my partner that we’d only bring our furniture into the house a couple of days after moving in.

It took only one night in the house to reveal the truth about why the owner’s sister (the previous tenant) had moved out.

They had conveniently decided not to mention about the lunatic aggressive alcoholic who lived next door. His spiel was booming techno tracks, howling, and banging on walls whilst out of his mind after midnight.

It's more common than one would think across society, that people just want to push transactions across the line to get their money, despite knowing there is something seriously wrong in their offering.

There was little to do the next morning but return the keys, and demanded our money back.

The forced refund was no solace for us because this was turning into an insane loop. 3 more weird experiences followed the above incident: of things falling apart at the last moment before our move in.

It led to that decision that it was time to stop trying so hard to secure a roof over our heads. Life was ruthlessly throwing obstacles in our way, and we were beginning to sense that these obstacles were not to be surmounted, but instead they were to be listened to.

On some level, we listened.

We picked up a rental car and took a drive down to a little beach town for a change of scenery.

In the middle of our journey the weather turned into a crazy thunderous affair.  
 
By the time we arrived into the town, everything was shut down due to the wild winds. We were left with no choice but to sleep in the car, while the weather wrecked havoc on the outside.

The next morning we woke up, and had this thought: _Insane as this sounds, could we spend the next 4 months living in a car?_

We knew deep down this was going to be extremely taxing (physically and psychologically), but no amount of effort into finding a place had worked out, and our money was bleeding away on overpriced Airbnb's.

The car rental wasn’t going to be cheap either (relative to the discomfort), but at least it was going to be on our terms — and this was important.

Our intuition was a yes on it, so we knew that we had to do it.

Feeling clear after making this decision, we drove back to the city to grab some breakfast at Ikea. Sitting on the couches, wondering what was in store for us next, in the midst of our conversation, it came to us: We were going to architect & build 3 platforms.

The logic of this approach couldn't be explained, but the feeling that one had to pursue them was sharp.

In time to come, it became evident, why.

It’s challenging building just one basic product while having stability and resources, but here we had decided to pursue 3 complex platforms from scratch, while sleeping in a car.

Of course it's insane, but when was our life ever sane? I couldn't remember the last time when we made a sane/reasonable decision, and when this led to sustenance/stability?

This was just the path that was laid in front of us, and we had to walk it.

The line that often came to mind during these times was when the Oracle says to Neo in The Matrix: “You’ve already made the choice Neo. You’re here to try to understand, why”

The question however would occasionally pop up, as to why we needed this level of intensity?

The simple answer was that the conditions of survival were so confronting, it needed an absurd focus like this to keep us from falling into the abyss.

But somewhere below the surface, there was an overwhelming urge to also delve into complexity that was worthy of our abilities. We wanted to build really refined Products.

The madness of the pursuit would also ensure we never gave up on ourselves, no matter how hard things got.

We knew the money we had remaining could last us a few months, if we lived in the car. We needed time, and this was the way to buy it. _Every single dollar_ had to therefore be pre-accounted for: Cost of renting the vehicle, fuel, food, mobile internet and online infrastructure expenses.

There was no room for anything else — not even a gym membership for showers. Gyms locked you into expensive long term contracts, so the showers would have to be done at a university about 20 k’s away.

A friend of ours (who we'd employed on the bitcoin project offered to help us code-up phase one of our 1st platform.

In his words he owed us one. He felt we'd taken a chance on him, while also paying him twice as much as any of his previous clients.

The bitcoin project had genuinely opened up opportunities for him, so he insisted that he didn't want payment from us. He just wanted to do it as a thank you.

This was an honorable 'gesture' on his part.

The only thing he requested was to have all the app (interaction) designs ready for him in 3 months time, as he would then have a solid window to do most of the work.

Our mission was now locked in.

We began by brainstorming the first 2 platforms. This split our hours up quite well, while keeping our attention spans in balance.

The 1st one was a Food Application allowing Home Cooks to connect with local buyers. The 2nd one was to refine the Startup World by deconstructing the system of sterile transactions and rebuilding for meaningful connections.

Now most of the early time was taken up by conversations about the interactions, functionality & architecture, but once of the structure became clear we began the visual design process.

Inauspiciously, however, the screen on our main laptop died just a day after starting on the designs!

We were down to using one old laptop between the 2 of us now. This would of course be training for getting used to working with broken & insufficient equipment a lot in the years to come.

But in a weird way working of a single machine made the process of collaboration more efficient.

The 3 month deadline went by in a flash. Despite the weird & harsh living conditions, we were ready with everything our coder needed to begin his work (just like we had promised).

That’s when, on the day he was supposed to begin coding, he dropped a bombshell! He said he could no longer help us anymore due to prior commitments.

The whole scenario was much more layered than the excuse he offered, but the poor show of character from him was one hell of a gut punch for us.

For the following weeks we felt like utter zombies, working away through the daily schedule (what choice was there?), but feeling completely dead on the inside.

We got to experience both, freezing cold & extremely hot weather in the car across seasons.

The nights were rough in summer because of the extreme heat. We couldn’t have the windows open because of the 2-fold issue of mosquitoes and cops being able to look right in.

We'd never get comfortable until early in the morning, when temperatures would finally drop for a sense of relief.

We parked in streets close to our storage unit because we'd be working there until midnight, leaving us too tired to drive very far.

In winter though, both, nights and mornings were brutal. Waking up in the morning and removing the bedding to expose ourselves to freezing cold was something we never looked forward to.

Our invisibility from the average society dweller was also very useful to us during this phase. People who’ve never experienced sleeping rough, can be a bit funny when they spot you packing up your car. Somehow, you’re a threat to their sanity and stability.

We didn't need the extra hassles from others, especially ones we had control over through application of discipline. We’d therefore wake up while it was still dark and pack up our entire sleeping set-up from the inside. This involved folding all the bedding, and somehow squeezing it all into half the car boot by folding in one of the back seats.

We never wanted the car to look like someone's bedroom during the day; just like a normal parked car on the street.

Every single step of our waking hours became a routine within a routine within a routine. It was a tight rope act of pressure constantly building up, whilst also keeping it under control just enough from actually blowing up.

One mis-step and things could get out of control real quick. Most processes had to therefore run smoothly in the background without a single (unnecessary) new thought. We had to just stay in the present moment and not get sucked into darkness.

But there were understandably moments when we felt so hopeless that we just wanted to fucking die.

The other half of the car boot was filled with cooking items. We had to drive to local parks everyday and cook something that we'd consume for dinner later that night.

Our lunch was just a can of tuna and some slices of bread.

Food had to be soft because I could only chew with one side of my mouth due to a cracked tooth. One accidental bite or touch on the wrong side meant excruciating pain.

I don't know how I did it, but with the hernia, tooth, and every other restriction I faced, the fact that I could tap into a consistent level of mental clarity to create products was a miracle.

After waking up, we’d drive to a shopping centre to use the toilets early (when they were at their cleanest) to freshen ourselves up. Baby wipes and a few other other creative methods were immensely helpful. We couldn't drive to the university showers as often because fuel costs had risen sharply — now burning a hole in our pockets.

But we did everything in our power to never let our standards visibly drop. It was impossible for anyone who met us during these times, to tell any different from our appearance.

After refreshing ourselves we'd head off to Ikea to start work on the projects. It was always fascinating how we polarized people here that observed us in deep discussion, or working for endless hours.

At times you could feel the look of some people: ‘Not these 2 again!'. Yet there were times, when a curious person would approach us for a conversation, genuinely wanting to know what we were working on?

We always had this state of being where, even under duress, our conversations with strangers were about ideas, personal philosophies, and a better functioning society. It's how we rolled.

Did we feel like this on the inside? A lot of the time, no. But speaking to others through a state of optimism helped us to keep our darker tendencies at bay.

In the evenings, our tiny storage unit was our base to work on our 2nd project. That small, windowless, box was just big enough for the two of us to sit and work, and contain all our apartment’s belongings as well.

What was particularly rare about this unit was the fact that there was a power point right outside our door. This allowed us to plug in a monitor for our broken laptop, and use a microwave to heat up our food.

For many years we felt like we could not let go of the unit because of how things had recurrently shaped out; it remained as our insurance policy.

It was our haven and our prison. At times it was liberating living outside society’s expectations, at other times, we were utterly disconnected and invisible.

But we felt that no matter what, it was important to keep our mental and emotional focus from the pits of shame and despair. We were in the great unknown, surviving day to day on the whisper of intuition, and an infinite sense of grit & audacity.

One of the films we really felt connected to during these times was _The Pursuit of HappYness_: The story of Chris Gardner during his experience of homelessness in 1980’s San Francisco. In the book, which he wrote before the film, he talks about Reverend Cecil Williams, who often reminded Chris, "To not just talk that talk, but walk it, and go forward."

It didn't take much convincing to have this as one of our motto's.

It’s quite a distant memory now; a blur, to try and remember all the details of what happened. The spirit of day to day survival kept us on a knife’s edge, but on the project front, we made substantial progress.

There were of course more roller coaster rides to come.

After our coder friend dropped out, we didn't have the luxury to just sit and remain depressed, so we made a decision to reset our focus.

We decided that if we didn’t have access to a developer, we were instead going to complete the clickable design prototypes with full interactivity for both platforms.

It would give us the opportunity to set up them up in exactly the way we want to, without designing for constraints, which the previous coder's skills would have posed.

We had an understanding of the blueprint of our lives that we couldn’t afford to put all our chips into one platform. In the macro sense we were obviously all-in (on our pursuit), but in the micro sense our intuition was guiding us towards a multi-platform approach.

The issue with having the courage to follow intuition in society is that too many people have a false understanding of the role it plays. For them, if it doesn’t lead to a positive outcome, then one’s intuition is wrong.

But intuition doesn’t exist to lead you to positive or negative outcomes. Instead, it exists as a mechanism to lead you to uncover _hidden pathways_, which otherwise you’d happily rationalize away from.

A few days after the decision to reset, for some strange reason we didn’t feel like working at the storage unit (on this particular evening).

Since we always paid heed to these deviations of feelings from the norm, we got out of the unit and aimlessly wandered about.

As we strolled down the main street, stopping to pet one of the neighborhood cats, we bumped into an old friend we hadn't seen in a few years. The synchronicity was certainly in play because he was looking totally lost — on the verge of breaking into a million pieces.

His girlfriend had broken up with him and kicked him out of the house over jealousy issues. In a spiteful act, she had also destroyed the artwork he'd spent months working on by throwing it into a wet alleyway. She turned out to be quite a psycho.

To top it off, he had lost his best friend to a suicide a few days prior.

In the cross-hairs of depression, death and heartbreak, being out on the cold streets was a step too far. He needed an act of compassion that night to stop him from doing something regretful.

We made a spot decision to let him sleep in our car for the next fortnight; we were going to have to sleep in the storage unit as a result.

This was a very risky move because we could lose the storage unit if management found out. But having taken many chances in life, we knew if we ticked certain boxes that we’d pull it off.

The storage centre had a set up where, the lights ran to a timer switch — to deter people from attempting to stay overnight. If the timer along the corridor wasn’t reset by someone physically after it shut off, it would show up on the cameras.

It would result in one warning by the management, following which, they'd would kick you out of the centre.

We had to now sleep & wake up in shifts between 10pm and 5am. Every 2 hours one of us would wake up to our alarm and reset the lights along the corridor. Then at 5am we'd both wake up, organize the things we needed for the day, and by 6am we'd leave the unit.

A couple of weeks passed in this manner, and our friend then met some kind strangers who let him crash on their couch. But during this period of sleeping in the storage unit, we realized that we may have to return our rental car back regardless.

We calculated that we’d have 2 months of funds available if we didn’t have to pay for the car anymore. I also felt that the next phase of our journey wasn't going to open up without taking this step.

But the daily commutes after this to Ikea and cooking in parks became logistically a lot more taxing. Walking long distances dragging along trolley bags, with electronic and cooking items was very different to driving from spot to spot.

This entire set up was a circus act of a very complex order that one simply can't understand or appreciate unless one actually had to live through it. The simplest everyday tasks became a matter of acute planning & preparation, constantly eating up already scarce mental bandwidth.

About a month passed along navigating in this manner, when one evening upon arriving at the storage centre, we noticed a construction crane and protective barriers near the entry door.

A bright big sign said: “No entry. Damaged roof”.

We were a bit shocked by this development, so we just waited outside for a few minutes. Fortunately, someone who had been fixing the roof was still hovering about. He mentioned that in the process of fixing the roof, an accident had occurred causing Asbestos to fall into some units on one side of the building.

We were relieved to find out the asbestos mess was in the adjacent corridor to our unit, so we risked the ire of the centre manager and accessed our unit anyway.

We had no choice but to grab a bunch of vital items: food, clothing, and most importantly, our daily backup hard drive. It was clear that we'd have no access here for a few weeks while they cleaned up the mess.

With nowhere to go, we wandered the streets that night with our luggage in tow.

The next morning, in a sleepless state, I had a feeling to look up the rental section on a classifieds website. Although rare, I felt that maybe someone was renting out some kind of cheap van to sleep in.

Campervans were not allowed as living units unless in a caravan park, but to our great surprise this is exactly what had been advertised!

We rang the number, and a quick 5-minute call later, we'd scored a very reasonable van rental. The owner said that he’d drive it up to a street that was convenient for us. He didn't want anyone else driving because the vehicle didn't have valid plates.

We scoped out a location close to our Storage unit, which was the only street not requiring a parking permit.

The van arrived that evening, but when I opened up the doors to look inside, I experienced the strangest combination of feelings.

On one hand, the camper was a dump with spiders and bugs — not to mention the holes in the walls and a leaky roof.  
 
On the other hand, it had movie projector, a large roll out screen, and a sound system connected to a second battery!

There was also sleeping room in the top cavity for one person aside from us, which was going to be useful very soon. We knew it would take a lot of work to get this dumpster up to our standards, but we not going to refuse it either.

We accepted the keys from the owner, and just like that a new phase had begun.

This was around this same period that we had to move on from working at Ikea after an altercation with some security guards.

They had started harassing us every evening when we'd finish our work day. While clearly letting everyone else just walk past, they started making us show them the contents of our bags.

On the first couple of occasions we obliged, but once we sensed they were being assholes, we refused to show our bags. In response, when the guard tried to grab the bag without permission, I told him to go fuck himself.

Not hard to guess what followed, and it was the end of us working from Ikea.

But coinciding with this, things at the storage centre started to look promising. The roof of the building was getting fixed at a good pace, and we were about to get access to our storage unit soon!

There was also a conference room at the storage centre, which had now become available after months of being hogged by another customer. Since we had a reputation of "working" at night from our storage unit, we said to the manager that we wanted to switch to day time hours and use the conference room.

He agreed. From this point, we'd be able to work uninterrupted from early morning until late at night, and then head off to sleep in the van.

We knew we were being pushed in this direction for a reason — just enough things were working out in our favor — but we were also close to running out of funds completely.

We had to buy some extra time to finish the prototypes and then figure out the next steps. We reached out to a few people we had been close to over the years, only for them to swiftly distance themselves.

On some level we knew this would happen, but we found out that when people say 'call us if you need anything' it's actually code for 'please don't fucking call us when you actually need something'.

But the sadder realization was that when you tell most people the truth about your life, you get shoved into the category of a pariah.

After we had exhausted our phone book contacts, we reluctantly decided to ring our friend Tim. For a change we experienced something different. He didn't know we had been building these platforms, and was quite excited by the ideas!

He wired us some funds to finish the prototypes, and mentioned that he'd like to come visit us soon.

By the end of 2015 we finished off all the internal renovations on the van — no more leaks, dirt or bugs. We also painted over the bright yellow on the outside with a softer white, so The Beast wouldn’t draw so much attention to itself.

It felt like we were living in an alternative universe waking up at 4am just to fix this Van for a couple of hours everyday. It was the only time we could fix it because the local businesses would start their activities after 6am. Getting used to 4am starts came in handy down the track in our life.

One out of the many weird things we experienced during this period was being greeted by the smell of urine at the van when we’d turn up to sleep every night. Some scoundrel had made it a habit of pissing right on our entry door, and it became a ritual to wash it down every night with a bottle of disinfectant before entering in to sleep.

Little stupid things which in years to come, we'd reminisce, and laugh about.

In early 2016 Tim came on down for a visit. The timing was pretty good because we had now completed major works on the clickable prototypes of our 2 platforms.

Just before Tim's arrival, my partner got hospitalized for a week with an allergic reaction. Whilst under observation, she got bored and started designing the 3rd platform (Rating App) to keep herself in good spirits.

This was essentially a FU to the real estate industry allowing rating and reviews of agents, properties and pretty much every aspect of a rental or a sale.

Designing the Rating App at this stage was completely unplanned, but it ended up being an interesting time to make a start.

After having had a chance to properly catch up with Tim, we wanted to find a way to thank him for his help.

For us _words_ were always a hollow alternative to _actions_, so we figured that if he can survive living with us in the confined setup (storage unit / van) for a little longer, we could build something for his business.

This "little longer" ended up being 3 months of him living with us in the van, while we rebuilt his entire brand and digital touch points from ground up.

It was a major undertaking, but by now, quite normal in our world.

Thinking back, we have no idea how we managed all of this. We had got our personal systems so sophisticated, everything began to run on autopilot.  
 
But all the while, we knew, one missed detail in the process somewhere, could derail it all.

It’s a strange thing to say but throughout his stay, we got the feeling that this was just a side adventure for Tim.

For us, on the other hand, the harsh reality of life stared back endlessly from the abyss. Yet we’d wake up every morning conjuring up optimism as some sort of default setting, so we could stay present in the moment.

After our rebrand, Tim's business representation, his website, and all his digital touch points were a world apart from what they used to be. With a high-quality brand in tow, it would allow him to start working with wealthier buyers that he'd otherwise felt embarrassed to approach.

He seemed quite pumped with the possibilities.

A day before his flight back home, the 3 of us were enjoying some coffee, and looking at the prototype of our Food platform. Tim was so in love with this idea that he asked what it would take to have it coded up?

He became adamant that we had to bring this one to life. My intuition was unsure about this being the first platform to code up, but I didn't want to dampen anyone's enthusiasm at this point.

This platform has always been the siren seducing everyone in its path: my partner, Tim, strangers and developers. I knew the other platform (Startup Connect) had to be done first — it posed lesser regulatory hurdles to navigate — but life has a funny way of keeping you at bay.

I also thought that based on the blueprint of our life, getting a start on something would be better than waiting for the right opportunity. I decided to see where this would lead.

In response to Tim’s original question, we gave him a figure, and he said it was quite manageable. From this point, combining exceptional resourcefulness, courage to take risks on newer technology stacks, and the quality of our projects, allowed us to attract some really good talent from small pool of relevant freelancers.

We were now officially in the world of code.

In April of 2016 the 1st lines of code were finally pushed to the repository.

Our projects were structured so well, it pleasantly surprised the freelancers we worked with. The clickable design prototypes & specification docs left little in doubt regarding any functionality — even of the smallest order.

We had 2 developers working on the Food Application: One for the front-end and another to build out the backend. The front end guy did a reasonable job across the time, but the back-end coder, although a capable young man, bit off more than he could chew.

He wasn’t forthcoming that he was working a full time job while tackling our project. He kept slowing things down, whilst getting burnt out at his end. A few weeks later, we had to let him go.

This was followed by another backend coder who arrived with awesome ratings on a freelancer site, but he turned out to be quite manipulative. He kept trying to get the front-end developer fired, so he could take over the entire project.

An independent code review confirmed he had spent more time criticizing than actually building out the backend.

We had also made an error in letting him change one part of the tech stack because he advocated strongly for it. It was one more lesson in not trusting our gut over someone else's exuberance.

All in all, his uncooperative behavior with the frontend coder got to the point where he had to be shown the door.

Now the frontend coder had the capacity to get the job done, but he had challenges. He’d agree to something one day, then completely deny the conversation took place a few days later. This was especially relevant when we'd enquire about any corners cut in the implementation.

But after a brief period of adjustment, we found a sweet spot between pushing back on his bullshit, and encouraging him when he'd do good work.

About 3-4 months passed in this freelancer adventure, and the front-end UI for the Food Application was finally coded up. The back-end however was still pretty empty.

This coincided with news from our payment processor that we'd be liable for fraudulent transactions, if our users (the one's receiving payouts) transacted through our processing account. The only other option then was for our users to sign up directly/separately through the processor (Stripe).

This would not only screw up our on-boarding process, it would pose a different kind of liability for our users to take on. Getting flagged by the payment processor for any reason, could lead to their accounts frozen without us knowing, or being able to do anything about it.

We did seriously consider crypto as an option for payments, but this specific aspect of the crypto dragged it's heels for a few years (besides ease of use sucked), so we had to compromise with fiat payments. But with fiat processors now being more of a hindrance than help, we had hit a major hurdle.

Of course, from inception the entire Food Platform — not just the financial processor part — would've had to swim in grey areas of regulation. This wasn't a bother for us because archaic food laws needed to be worked around, but finding a decent financial transaction solution was a must.

We had arrived at the realization that we were a bit early with this platform, and quite a lot of this landscape was going to change slowly.

Tim also dropped it on us quite abruptly that he didn't have project funds for the upcoming month. This would happen a few more times down the road, and getting him to communicate important things like this on time, let alone proactively, would prove to be a challenge.

Having to put the Food Application on freeze really sucked, but there was some solace for us, in that, we had been coding up another platform in tandem.

This had come about through pure intuition!

Before we started recruiting developers for the Food Application, we had spoken to a friend about different tech stacks. He'd been of the view that to get reasonably good coders interested at an affordable rate, we needed a point of difference.

We all felt that a challenge of implementing a new tech stack combining React & GraphQL could be an enticing proposition.

In passing however, he spoke about a framework called Meteor that he enjoyed; he specifically pointed to the pace with which he could build. He didn't endorse it for the Food Platform, but he felt it was worth experimenting on for the Rating App (This was the 3rd App, for which, we had sketched out some initial designs).

A few days after this conversation, while looking for a developer for the Food Platform, I accidentally clicked on the profile of a developer who had no ratings.

He was a Math Phd who’d moved into coding a couple of years ago, but for some reason he had started off with this Meteor framework. He had decided to go all in on it, and did not want to work with any other tech stack.

There was something intangible in the wording of his profile which I cannot explain, but I instantly knew he could pull off the Rating App.

His pricing was extremely nominal, and it would have been stupid to pass up an opportunity with low downside & a high upside.

This is how we simultaneously began coding the Rating App.

[ So as to not get confused by the timeline, Startup Connect and The Food app were designed first. Rating App only had light designs when compared to the others at this point.  
 
But when it came to working with the coders, the Food App was first, closely followed by the Rating App. Coding up Startup Connect began much later ]

We were truly in our element across the months we worked with the coders on both projects! Splitting our day up across two apps, the feeling of being stretched, a sense of utilizing the depth of our capacity, this was something we’d waited years to experience.

Despite the many challenges that came with managing people, there was never a night when we went to bed feeling unsatisfied. We genuinely looked forward to waking up every single morning!

When the Food Platform was put on ice, the absurd thing was that the project we intended to build last, was now moving ahead _on its own_ with the most reliable developer at hand.

The only dampener was that the Rating App had always been an anonymous platform. There wasn’t any leverage to be gained from its launch for Zen Black. But having overcome the disappointment of the Food Application, we decided to put our best efforts into developing the Rating App.

Slowly but surely we got ourselves to a place where we felt optimistic about what lay around the corner. We started to entertain the possibility of moving into a more stable accommodation and to begin work on our 3rd platform: Startup Connect.

Life, as always, had its own plans.

It was a public holiday; an extremely rare occasion when we could sleep-in because there were no businesses open on the street we were parked in.

We woke up well rested, walked to a nearby park to cook up some breakfast, and began walking back towards the storage unit.

But as we walked past the street our van was parked in, we experienced a moment of utter disbelief: The vehicle had disappeared!

We immediately contacted the owner enquiring if he'd picked it up for any reason? He used to occasionally drop by and take it for a short drive, to give the batteries a charge.

Turns out, he had not done so, and someone had actually stolen our beloved Beast!

We needed to act swiftly in organizing somewhere to sleep, so we rang up the old car rental company asking about any available cars? There was nothing available for the next 2 days.

We'd have to sleep in the storage unit again. A couple of uncomfortable nights passed in navigating the hide 'n' sleep set up, so we were only too happy to go pick up the rental car a couple of day later.

To our absolute surprise, while driving back from the car rental spot, we got a call from the owner saying he’d recovered the van!

As the story goes, he was driving along a random neighborhood when he spotted our van at a gas station — leading him and the thief into a frenzied car chase.

The chase, which included jumping multiple red lights, finally ended when the thief lost control and crashed into a pole. He then quickly fled the scene! The cops got involved, and the owner had to pay a hefty fine for using expired plates.

He was still keen on making rental money on it, so he said that he’d drive it back it to us the next day. Although this was promising, I knew we had to step into the unknown again. I said to my partner we should hold on to the rental car, until we saw the condition of the van.

Well, the van was a disaster. A massive dent in the front from the crash, cracked window on the drivers side, ignition badly damaged, and a nightmare on the inside. The things we’d so carefully mended last year were all broken again.

The thief had also caused a fire in the back cabin by overheating the second battery, and then sprayed the whole area. Everything was covered in extinguisher powder.

Symbolically, this wasn’t the right way forward, so we asked the owner to take the van back. It would have been difficult to sleep in peace knowing it wasn’t safe; especially, considering how everything had gone down.

It was terribly sad parting with the Beast. She'd been such a great companion through so many months.

We spent the next month sleeping in the rental car again, while trying to find a proper room somewhere to move in. But with us being limited to private landlords, a balance between a fair price, a common sense transaction & personal values wan't to be found.

We realized that having our own room was not yet meant to be, so we decided to purchase our own van. We needed a mechanically sound van with registered plates, so we could drive it around, and not be constrained to park in a single spot like the Beast.

Buying a van wasn't as straightforward as we'd anticipated.

A common theme with our experiences from real estate all the way to purchasing vehicles was that most buyers silently put up with lies, just to get the transaction across the line — repeatedly leaving buyers to cross their fingers that they'd gotten a good deal.

The average seller just didn’t care about being dishonest regarding issues with the property or a vehicle, as long as they got their money.

After a few weeks passed without finding any deals, we decided that instead reading between the lines, we’d pay a mechanic to review vehicles we wanted to purchase. It wasn't an easy decision with a tight budget, but it had to be done.

This was quite an interesting experience, because the moment we’d mention our mechanic to the seller, many of them refused to sell to us. The ones who did let our mechanic have a look, didn't want to fix the issues, even if it was clearly pointing to a breakdown.

It was obvious they just wanted to just offload their liability.

A few more months went by with us sleeping in a car, working on the Rating App, and looking for a van.

By early 2017 Tim turned up to see us again. It obviously wasn’t possible to accommodate him, so he checked himself into a hostel. His room however, ended up being full of bed bugs!

Things around us had turned into a circus, and we absolutely needed to find a well maintained van. This is when Tim stumbled upon what he thought was a good deal.

The problem for my partner and I was that it was from used car yard (in other words, likely, shady). When we got to the yard, no sooner did the owner open his mouth, I knew he was a liar, but this was an occasion when I denied my intuition.

Tim felt otherwise. He got quite friendly with the yard owner and was confident of a good deal. My partner and I were so fed up of this entire van buying process by now, we let Tim take care of the transaction.

Afterwards we drove the van to an empty car park, and set about converting it into something suitable for us to sleep in. I must say despite everything before this, it was fun to construct a bed from scratch, and make everything fit precisely into a confined space.

It was the only tangible return on time and effort we'd been able to see in real time across the last many months.

A couple of days later Tim cut his trip short and headed back home. The day after he left, the van began to show signs of distress.

Soon enough, disaster struck.

On our way back from a mechanical check up, the vehicle completely broke down. It was timed all too well for rush hour traffic in the middle of a busy main road! The smell of burnt rubber, heat & smoke from the van was just horrid.

This was one of the toughest physically & mentally exhausting days of our lives. We had to physically push the vehicle over several hours in excruciating heat, until we found a spot where it would be no longer towed for illegal parking.

We entered a residential zone just after midnight and crashed in a heap until sunrise. Inside the van the smell felt poisonous. For all we know, we could’ve died inhaling those fumes.

The vehicle of course wasn’t worth getting fixed, so in the subsequent days we had to figure out how to move it close to our storage unit. We obviously needed to sleep in it.

We ran some small tests and figured out that once it cooled down, we'd be able to drive it for about 10 minutes. Any longer than this, and the bloody thing would smoke up and stop dead!

We chose a time late on a Sunday night, so once the engine started, we'd jump all the red lights until we'd hit our destination.

We said a little prayer, gave it a start, and some absolutely manic driving got us to the corner of the same street we used to park our old van in (The Beast). Here the van spluttered, jerked, and came to a complete halt.

We pushed the van by hand down this long street into the only parking spot available that night. This is where it would remain stuck for the next 2 years.

On the bright side of this disaster, we didn’t have to worry about the van ever being hot-wired!

Someone did however try to break-in on a couple of random occasions, while we were still asleep in there. It was scary to be stuck inside a little box with someone hovering just outside. We had a crowbar handy in case things ever got truly ugly.

It’s hard to convey in words the roller-coaster rides these situations really were, as the curve balls just kept coming our way.

On the project development front however, there was some good news: We had gotten to 90% completion on the Rating App. We also got access to some extra project funds, so we decided it was time to start coding up Startup Connect.

The next adventure had hence begun.

[We are in 2017]

An experienced developer who we’d built a relationship with over the last year, had now become available to work with us.

With the Food Platform indefinitely frozen and the Rating App getting closer to completion, it was great timing to begin coding up the 3rd platform: Startup Connect.

Everything in our life seemed to run in 3's, so this platform quite aptly was about solving a 3 dimensional problem:

1. ‍ Key components of Startup assistance (People, Services & Knowledge) spread across many poorly thought out platforms needed to be consolidated into one spot for coherence and accessibility.
   ‍‍
2. The investor led hierarchy in the Startup world was a flawed model of where things needed to be. It's the Entrepreneur who rightfully needed to be put in the center of this space.
   ‍
3. We wanted to deconstruct the system of sterile transactions run sites like Linkedin & AngelList, and rebuild the platform for meaningful connections.

‍

The new developer (Jay) came with a solid reputation having contributed a fair bit in coding forums, and also possessed a friendly temperament. His coding reputation was good enough that even Fred (who was building the Rating App) knew of him.

This was quite reaffirming.

Jay was excited with the technology stack we’d chosen, and he wanted the challenge of being one of the first people to implement it on a large project.

Since the last 10% of the Rating App with Fred was going to take up only a few hours every week, we asked him if he wanted to help Jay with Startup Connect? With Jay working part-time hours (to begin with), having Fred on board seemed like a good idea to everyone.

Fred had always been honest about his back-end skills being his stronger than his front-end skills. With most of the work on the new project (Startup Connect) to happen on the front-end, it was agreed that Fred would work on the back-end.

But it didn't quite turn out to be a straight forward affair. Working on their own, they were fine, but Jay and Fred really struggled communicating with each other.

After a few weeks of collaborating, Jay was hesitant in letting Fred know that he was slowing him down, while Fred couldn’t set up the back-end the way Jay needed it done.

It got to the point where Jay said its best for him to set everything up on the front-end, as well as the back-end for a few weeks. He felt that once he’d set everything up, it would be easy to explain his logic to Fred, and then assign back-end tasks.

When we explained this to Fred, he was quite understanding about it. He saw it as an opportunity to study Jay’s work some more, without the pressure of impending tasks.

But misfortune had to have it's say.

A couple of weeks after having got the communication kinks ironed out, Fred fractured his leg in a soccer match. The break was so bad, he was going to need surgery on it. He'd now have to fly to another country (where he’s originally from) to get his medical insurance covered.

It was hard for him to cope with all this. Complications with the impending surgery, and a depressed state of mind, saw him quit a month after he flew out.

Losing Fred was really sad; he was an all-round good guy. He didn't possess any prima-donna tendencies and just quietly got his job done.

From a project development point of view, the downer was that the Rating App was left stranded at about 90%. On the plus side, Jay had more hours his schedule recently open up to focus deeper on Startup Connect.

He made pretty good progress over the next 4-5 months, getting the project to about the half way mark. We had started working on some interesting functionality like audio interactions between users, and users raising funds for smaller milestones for their ideas with crypto.

This was 2017, mind you. Features that may seem normal now were not so back then.

But this was also the period when Jays communication started to go off the boil. Too many frequent disappearing acts led us to a point where, we had to have that hard conversation with him.

After dancing around the topic, he finally spilled the beans that he had gotten his girlfriend pregnant a few months ago (unplanned). He had to now marry her, and find a higher paying job to support a new entrant into his life.

This is just a light overview of a more complex situation involving Jay's temperament, but it’s how we lost another developer.

We learnt over a period of time that once you commit to a collaboration, how little control you have, unless you find people who have their personal psychology & communication capacity in a healthy place.

Whatever's lacking in one's personality gets invariably shown up when one has to work on something (or with someone), who is a step up from their current standards.

But there’s extreme contrast where, the best — this is talent combined with good character — can obtain deserving value in a landscape of unique opportunity. We're grateful to have worked with at least 1 (and a half) such professionals.

The rest were a drain of money, emotional energy and time.

In an overall sense, good skills with healthy communication, invariably trump great skills with issues of temperament. One cannot discount the benefit of outright talent, but you need a lot of financial cushion to sustain sparse breakthroughs of genius.

I'd never say it's impossible to build high quality platforms from scratch working (remotely) with people you haven't known before; it's just improbable.

We spoke with Tim about finding a replacement for Jay. In response, he said that funds to move further with this were good.

Having learned valuable lessons from previous recruitment encounters, this time, we plugged some of the gaps that may have allowed posers to squeeze through.

We put together a solid recruiting campaign, which allowed us to narrow down some great replacements for Jay.

But towards the end of this process (annoyingly so) we lost access to the conference room at the storage centre — we had a run-in with some junkies who also stored here.

Having observed the sudden appearance of random syringes around the property in recent weeks, we knew they wanted to use the room to shoot up.

The Manager decided he didn’t want to deal with them, and asked us to negotiate booking times for the conference room directly with the junkies. Negotiating with junkies was not a priority for us, especially if the manager wasn't willing to do his job.

Since using our storage unit as a base at this point was more important than working from this conference room, we decided to find somewhere else to work from.

For once, we lucked out. We found an office in a beautiful old building by the water for a very reasonable price — way below market rates. It also had 24-hour access, a shower, and the room itself was large enough to finally unleash our 3 whiteboards.

After moving in here (and at the end of our recruitment campaign), Tim screwed up with his communication again. Once we had the dates setup for the new developers to start working, he dropped it on us that he was out of funds.

It left us confused, as to why it was so difficult to keep us posted, instead of finding out right at the end? We were out of project funds, had to let go of (potentially) really good developers, and by late 2017 everything had all come to a grinding halt.

The Food Platform on ice at 60%, the Rating App paused at 90%, and Startup Connect stopped at 50%.

If we put aside the immense expectations we had of ourselves and just consider the utter insanity of situations we navigated, getting to this point was an extraordinary achievement.

Although for us, it never felt this way.

If the work isn't launched into the public sphere, it's as good as 'it never happened'. No one gives a fuck about the lengths you've gone to, if your end product isn't in their hands being used.

One of the confronting realizations was that if you're already resourceful, then money on top provides undeniable leverage. Past a point of learning lessons, the power to make quality decisions trumps how resourceful you can be about everything else.

Due to our innate resistance to the one-dimensional narratives from Silicon Valley and Wall street — their sterile processes and lack of imagination about the real scope of how you invest in humans and their growth — traditional capital could never be part of our scenery.

As for crypto, it didn't turn into the leverage we'd have liked during this period. Diluting our positions at critical moments to keep ourselves afloat, didn't allow us a base, from which we could actually take off.

But our life's blueprint was such that with or without products, we still had to keep advancing this nameless pursuit we were on.

Having to stop work, once again, when we were so close to a positive tipping point was hard. I felt quite numb.

I couldn't do much except stare at the laptop screen, clicking though random thumbnails on youtube.

One of those mindless clicks took me to Eric Weinstein speaking with Joe Rogan. Eric’s name seemed familiar, but I didn’t know much about him, except that he was Bret Weinstein’s brother.

He was casually speaking about Cephalopods, but there was just something in the way he spoke that instantly woke me from my sense of despair. As I listened more, I realized that he had a knack of putting those complex & subtle things I’d only ever felt, into a string of words that actually made sense.

If there is nothing linear about the way you explore, then listening to some of Eric's theories & frameworks was like having them connected them on the go.

My partner also listened in, and we both jumped down the rabbit hole. Not long after, we intuitively felt that we had to find a way to absorb, organize, and re-present this fascinating information (& individual) to the world.

It was to be a similar process to how we built applications: Of playing with large amounts of complex information, finding relevant patterns, and laying them out in a way that’s palatable, yet possessing an edge.

As a play on words, we called it Zenthesis.

But the depression from the Startup’s shutting down caught up with us — it hit us hard. A feeling of hollowness was now ever present for the next few months, while we continued to work our way through Eric's world.

By early 2018 the head tenant of our office floor had moved out. Before he moved on, he was kind enough to cut a deal with the owner to let us stay on for the next few months. He also gave us a heads up that the owner was a strange guy prone to abrupt changes of mind.

The owner had already begun renovations on the office level below us, and it was agreed he'd give us reasonable notice to move, before he'd start renovations on our level. His real plan however was that he wanted to get a new tenant to take over the entire level (which we were on) at an inflated price without renovating anything.

It was quite an uncertain situation for us, but we had to just go with the flow.

Around this same period we also had a scary moment in our van: Someone tried to break in (unsuccessfully) while we were still asleep in there.

We decided that the physical risk of sleeping in the van was getting higher, and since there was no one else in the office building for now, we’d sleep in our office.

Living at the office became an adventure of its own. The number of things we had to work around to get through a day unscathed, is something we look back and laugh about now.

From having to sleep at night with the lights & music on so the security guards wouldn't knock on our door, to showering in a half renovated bathroom but making sure there was no sign of us having used it, to cooking in Crockpots by running extension cables into the balcony overnight, to waking up at 4am everyday so we could workout, shower, and organize everything before the construction workers turned up, the list just went on.

The property agents & the owner would drop in randomly and unannounced, so we had to make sure nothing was ever out of place. The owner was the kind of guy who didn't need much of an excuse to have us out.

In one sense, it was constant pressure of never letting our guard down, but in another sense, it was a way to train ourselves to remain in a perennial state of readiness.

After having dealt with the hollow feeling from the shutdowns of our startups across the last few months, we decided to shift the energy further.

We recounted all our experiences year by year since 2014 on a whiteboard, with a view to finding out how many of our beliefs in certain areas had deviated since we began this journey.

This process was quite revealing, because it allowed us to peel off the layers that had silently built-up over many years of just blocking punches from life.

We felt it would be therapeutic to express a unique life as a 2-way healing process with the world.

But finding the format in which to express these experiences was proving to be impossible. It felt overwhelming and filled with friction with every attempt to do so.

It's when a moment of intuition by my partner opened the flood gates.

While looking for movies on a spare hard drive, she'd come across a copy of my old book. She copied it over to my computer but forgot to tell me about it. A few weeks passed, and while looking for some receipts, I stumbled upon my book I hadn’t looked at in years!

I flipped through it for a little bit, but then I stopped at the final chapter: It was a short story about following my intuition.

That was it. I knew what the format of our blog was going to be.

By mid 2018, my partner had transcribed all of Eric Weinstein’s videos & podcast appearances, and I had started writing the blog posts in the Intuition Series.

It’s also when we got sent a notice to move out of the office (at very short order) as the owner decided he was going to renovate the entire floor.

We had to now make a tough decision: Do we waste the little time we have left by looking for another 24-hour access office (with no guarantee we'd find anything) or do we maintain this incredible flow we are in, and crush the Eric Curation and Blog Posts?

Well, there was only one answer!

The subsequent intensity that arose was just brilliant, and within the next 2 weeks, I had completed all 7 posts from the Intuition series. My partner had put together a large collection of Eric’s topics for me to explore.

In 3 days of insane focus, I crafted the Eric Weinstein 101 thread, and my partner uploaded all the topics & transcripts online.

We also released all the Power of Intuition blog posts.

Our twitter account had less than 100 followers at this point, so we had no idea what was to come from the release of the thread or the posts.

But within minutes of tweeting the thread, Bret Weinstein messaged us and retweeted the thread; half an hour later Naval did the same; a few hours on, Joe Rogan and a bunch of bigger accounts had retweeted it as well.

And finally, Eric, who was on vacation in Europe, wrote a heartfelt message and shared the thread through his account.

The Tweetstorm gained over 2 million impressions! Combining the Eric thread with the Power of Intuition posts pushed us into a very interesting section of Twitter, and our account went a bit out of control for a while.

The general feeling for us internally, at this point, was optimistic; we felt everything would be fine. Just before the move-out date, we found another office space that was going to suit us quite well.

But life still had its twists to to play out.

After we had finalized our move-in time for the new space, we packed up our current office, organized a rental van, and loaded up all our belongings.

But an hour before we were supposed to move in, the (new) owner texted us saying the rental was no longer available — didn't care to provide a reason. Considering this kind of stupid behavior was par for the course, we decided not to give it any energy, and immediately started to looking for other 24-hr (access) office spaces.

This was us keeping the finger on the red button gently, which, if pressed, could let chaos ensue!

Luckily we found another space at short notice, but the move in was to be 3 days from now. Since today was our last day at our current place, we moved all our office furniture into the storage unit for the in-between period.

But the day after we moved our things into the storage unit, the owner of the next office space emailed saying, her business partner had given the room to another party without prior discussion.

In that moment, we knew that a period of dark transition was upon us.

Throughout the day I’d been feeling off-color, but by the time we hit sundown I was horribly ill. It was the most brutal flu I’ve ever had in my life. That night I lay pretty much dead in a tiny gap in our storage unit.

There was only enough room for us to lie down on our sides, with our legs folded in. I was absolutely burning up, body in horrid pain, violently coughing — my partner in quiet support next to me.

We didn’t know if we even existed anymore?

Maybe this was all just a bad dream.