Thread by @patio11

Last year, a group of geeks convened on Discord in response to a Twitter thread about California’s woes with the vaccine rollout. They very quickly found themselves running a critical piece of national public health infrastructure.

Here is our story:

worksinprogress.co/issue/the-stor…

VaccinateCA was the work of many, many people. They deserve all the credit for what we accomplished. I was the CEO.

The writeup is unavoidably personal, and includes e.g. my diagnosis of how the US found itself so flatfooted last year. I am speaking only for myself in it.

Twitter holds a very special place in my heart as an undersung vehicle for mobilizing the Internet for the good of humanity. I was musing on that when I drafted the below tweet, but did not expect where it would end up.

https://twitter.com/patio11/status/1349577791537250310

A few minutes later @chiefofstuffs had a Discord up and running, and invited his closest tech friends. I dropped in and… ended up staying. We launched about 12 hours later.

Patients started getting appointments within hours and shots within days.

The next few months were a rollercoaster. We quickly bootstrapped from “OSS-style weekend project” to being the non-profit running what was very close to the U.S.’s public/private vaccine information clearinghouse.

I believe our work saved many thousands of lives at the margin.

If you’ll allow me a brief personal reflection:

I got my start working for the Internet by writing a bit more than most people would think is reasonable about a software business that sold bingo cards to elementary schoolteachers.

This was not my planned career arc.

I eventually got decent at selling software over the Internet, but I’d credit my 6 years at Stripe, and the influence from the founders and other Stripes, in causing me to reevaluate my aspirations and my estimate of what I could reasonably (or a bit unreasonably) accomplish.

And so it seems kind of fitting to cap this chapter of my career with this piece.

At the end of the year, I’ll be transitioning out of full-time employment. I’m staying on as an advisor to Stripe.

I’m not entirely sure what comes next, but I hope to use the skills (and ambition upgrade) I picked up over the last six years in service of the Internet.