The next chapter

Kitt closed in July. I wrote about what we built and what it cost. This one is about the chapter after it.

Right now I am taking a break. Sleeping at reasonable hours, eating at home more than I order in, seeing people I have not properly seen in two years. Health took the back seat for most of the last two years and I am using this window to put it back where it belongs.

I am also talking to a few different teams, mostly to work out which direction I actually want. Do I want to start another company again? Yes. Not now. The last two years took more out of me than I planned for, and my life needs something steadier for a while. That is not me giving up on the ambition. It is me picking a different kind of hard for the next stretch.

Two shapes I keep coming back to

Design engineering. At Kitt I was in Figma in the morning and in the codebase in the afternoon, and the handoff between those two things was just me walking across my own head. AI closed most of the gap between knowing what an interaction should feel like and being able to ship it. I am aware the term gets thrown around a lot more than it used to and means something slightly different at every company that uses it, but the version I want is the one I have been doing for two years already.

Product and design. I was also the PM at Kitt and I did not expect to enjoy it as much as I did. Sitting on sales calls, watching a finance team use the ledger, deciding what we were not going to build this quarter. It made the design better because I was not waiting for someone to hand me the problem. A role that keeps both is just as interesting to me.

Which of the two it ends up being is still open. What I am clearer on is the kind of team I want to be doing it with.

What I want from the team

People I can learn from. I have been the most senior person on my team for two years. I would like to work with designers and engineers who are clearly better than me at something.

A product that already works. Almost everything I have built has been 0 to 1. I am curious about 1 to 100. Something people already use, where I can go deep on one problem instead of starting over every few months. It feels like the right time to do that.

A role with loose edges. A team that treats the job description as a starting point rather than a fence, and that trusts people with real agency over what they pick up.

Dubai first. Dubai is home and I would like to stay. Remote works well for me. I would consider relocating, but it depends on the team and the product.

Speed. This one is not negotiable. I do not work well inside long approval chains and deep hierarchy. I want to be somewhere people can fix what they notice without asking three people first.

If that sounds like your team, I would like to hear from you at adarsh.panikkars@gmail.com.