The Pattern of Almost: Why It Took 30 Years to Get Here
The Pattern of Almost: Why It Took 30 Years to Get Here
By David, Founder & CEO of Kenektic
November 17, 2025
Created: February 14, 2026
For the last few weeks, I've been telling you about learning to code, building little apps, and discovering that AI could turn a guy with a finance background into something resembling a developer. But I realize I've skipped something important.
I haven't told you what I was doing for the thirty years before any of that happened.
So let me back up. Way up.
My First Real Job
I got a job at an investment bank right out of college. One of those firms that sounded impressive at the time and doesn't exist anymore—it didn't survive the 2008 financial crisis, but I'll get to that.
I'd never heard of mortgage-backed securities before I walked in the door. Didn't learn about them in school. Didn't know they existed. But I started working in MBS, and here's what surprised me: I was really good at it. Like, really good.
And for the first time since high school, I felt like I'd found my people. I made friends at work—real ones, the kind you go to lunch with, the kind you hang out with after hours even when you're commuting 60 miles each way. Some of those friends came to my wedding. If you've read my first post, you know how small that guest list was, so the fact that work friends made the cut tells you something.
But here's what you need to understand about mortgage-backed securities: nobody outside the industry has any idea what you're talking about.
My parents would ask what I did. I'd try to explain. Eyes glazed over. Friends would ask at a party. Eyes glazed over. I'd meet someone at a charity event, make small talk, they'd say "so what do you do?" and I'd watch their face go politely blank as I tried to explain how pools of mortgage loans get turned into tradable bonds.
Mortgage-backed securities: the world's most reliable conversation killer.
Portland
Eventually I was recruited to a smaller company in Portland, Oregon. And something happened there that hadn't happened anywhere else in my career.
I was happy. Actually, genuinely happy.
The company treated its employees like family. The people were more genuine than what I'd gotten used to in LA. Portland had seasons—real ones, not the two settings LA offers, which are "nice" and "on fire." The whole "all it does is rain" reputation isn't quite what it seems once you're actually living there. We bought our first house. Our first child was born. I could go to the local grocery store and people knew my name.
The restaurants were incredible. The beer was the best in the country. And there was this calm I found there—a kind of settled feeling I'd struggled to find anywhere else.
I worked on two IPOs for that company. I was building something. I was connected. I was, for maybe the first time, not performing happiness but actually experiencing it.
Then the dotcom bubble burst. The company struggled. And my wife and I looked at each other and asked the question every parent eventually asks: do we really want to keep hiring kids from the local high school to babysit when we have three sets of grandparents back in LA?
My parents had divorced when I was ten. Three sets of grandparents. All in Southern California. Our kid deserved to know them.
So we moved back. And I left behind the happiest I'd been at any job.
The Company I Built
Back in LA, I went to work for another investment bank. I was good at my job, the money was right, but it still felt like someone else's machine. So in 2006, I did the thing I'd been building toward my entire career: I started my own mortgage company with a couple of cofounders.
And I loved it. Not the mortgage part—the being the boss part.
Here's something that might surprise you, given everything I've told you about struggling with friendships: between me and my cofounders, I was the one the employees always came to first. Not for work questions—for everything. Personal stuff. Career advice. Problems they didn't know how to solve. They came to me because underneath all the social awkwardness and the friendship maintenance failures, I am a genuinely kind and compassionate person. I just have trouble showing that to people I don't know yet.
These people were more than employees to me. They were something close to family. Building that culture—being the person people trusted—felt more meaningful than anything I'd done with spreadsheets or securitizations.
We were doing well. The business was growing. I was finally running my own thing.
Then September 2008 happened.
Turning Off the Lights
I'm going to tell you the full 2008 story another time. It deserves its own post. But here's what you need to know for this one:
"Too Big to Fail" became a household phrase overnight. Suddenly everyone in America knew what mortgage-backed securities were. And three companies I'd worked for—three—vanished from the map. My resume read like a who's who of firms blamed for taking down the economy.
We held on for a while. Longer than most. But eventually we were sitting on too many loans with no market to sell them into, and a private equity firm came in and bought us out. For way less than we'd hoped.
And then came the part I still think about.
The PE firm was in San Diego. Our offices were in LA. They had no need for employees in Los Angeles. So everyone was let go. Everyone except me.
I watched the people I'd built this company with—the people who came to me with their problems, who trusted me, who were more than employees—I watched them lose their jobs one by one. And I felt like there was nothing I could do.
I was the last person in our 25,000-square-foot office on the 18th floor. A beautiful space that had been full of people I cared about. And I literally turned off the lights, walked out, and locked the door behind me.
That moment stays with me. It always will.
The Pattern
After the mortgage company, I spent some time doing financial consulting. Then I started another company—subprime auto loans this time. We did well for a while, but the bigger players in the market started offering rates that my financial models said were too low. They were chasing volume at the expense of risk, and after living through 2008, I had zero interest in that race. I shut the company down. Not a failure, but not a success either.
And then I spent years—years—wanting to start something in fintech. I had ideas. Good ones. Apps that could transform small business finance. Platforms that could make lending more accessible.
But every single idea died on the same question: Who builds it?
Who writes the code? What if I can barely pay them? Where do I find a technical partner who believes in the same thing I do? How do I even evaluate whether someone is building what I asked for?
The barriers to entry felt insurmountable. I'd get excited about an idea, sketch it out, start to plan—and then hit that wall. Not the seventh-grade cafeteria wall. The wall between people who have ideas and people who can build them.
And that's when I started to see it. The pattern.
I almost became a programmer. Loved it as a kid, couldn't take it to the next level, walked away.
I was almost satisfied with finance. Good at it, successful, but never truly happy. Always longing for something different.
I almost maintained friendships. Made them at every job, every city, every chapter of my life—and lost them because I couldn't do the maintenance.
I almost started those fintech companies. Had the ideas, had the experience, had the desire. Didn't have the one thing I needed to make any of it real.
Almost. Almost. Almost. My entire professional life was a series of almosts.
What Changed
You already know what changed. Matt showed me a poker app. AI showed me I could build things myself. And for the first time in thirty years, "almost" became "actually."
But I want to be honest about something: Kenektic isn't just a company I'm building. It's the first thing I've done professionally that I'm passionate about. That I love. That I wake up excited to work on every single day.
The finance career let me get married, buy a house, raise a family. I'm grateful for all of that. But it never made me happy the way this does. Not once in thirty years of trading mortgage-backed securities did I feel the way I feel sitting at my computer at midnight, refining how kAI responds to someone who's lonely, knowing that the thing I'm building might actually help people.
And I'm building it myself. Me and my team of ten employees—who are all named Claude and who collectively cost me less per month than a decent dinner out. No co-founder who doesn't share my vision. No developer I can't communicate with. No partner I have to convince. Just me, the mission, and the best AI tools ever created.
For the first time, the barriers are gone. And for the first time, the thing I'm building is something I'd actually use. Something I need. Something that could have changed my life at every stage—the seventh-grade cafeteria, the University of Oregon, the office on the 18th floor where I turned off the lights and lost touch with everyone I cared about.
That's what thirty years of almost gets you: absolute clarity about what you actually want to build when the barriers finally disappear.
What Comes Next
In my next post, I'm diving into the research that turned this personal mission into something bigger. The Surgeon General's report. The statistics that made my jaw drop. The moment I realized that what I'd experienced my whole life—the loneliness, the struggle to connect, the pattern of losing people—wasn't just my story. It's 150 million Americans' story. And the data behind it is staggering.
But this post was about the long road. The thirty years of building skills I didn't know I'd need, surviving crises that taught me resilience I didn't know I had, and almost—always almost—getting to the thing I was meant to do.
I'm done with almost.
What's your "almost"? Have you spent years circling something you were meant to do? Did the barriers finally come down? Or are you still looking for your way through? I'd love to hear your story.
Kenektic is in development and will launch soon. If you want to be notified when we're ready, or if you want to share your story with me directly, reach out at hello@kenektic.com.
Coming Next: "Down the Research Rabbit Hole: What I Learned About America's Loneliness Epidemic" — The statistics that turned personal experience into a mission.