On Building From Scratch

There’s a particular kind of confidence that comes from growing up in a town that built itself. Bardstown didn’t get handed anything. The families who settled here came when Kentucky was the edge of the map. They put up churches, distilleries, schools — not because someone told them to, but because the alternative was nothing. That mentality doesn’t leave you. It gets into how you think about problems.

I didn’t understand that when I was younger. I thought the restlessness I felt was a bug — this need to take something apart and rebuild it better. College almost beat it out of me. I was ready to write off software entirely until someone showed me what it actually was: not code, but problem-solving with consequences. The code was just the medium.

That reframing changed everything. I’ve spent the years since bringing that same energy to manufacturers, distillers, and operators who build physical things. The pattern is always the same. Someone has a process that works but doesn’t scale. Someone else has a spreadsheet that’s become load-bearing infrastructure. And somewhere in the middle is a human doing something a machine could do — but nobody’s asked the right question about whether it should.

The habit of building from scratch isn’t about rejecting what exists. It’s about understanding what matters enough to keep and what’s just there because nobody thought to remove it. Bardstown taught me that. The bourbon families figured it out centuries ago — you don’t rush the barrel, but you also don’t keep a broken rick house standing out of sentiment. You tear it down and build one that works. That’s the intersection I keep coming back to. That’s the work.