it's time for a change.

It's been a wild few years, guys. I had no idea any of this would happen when I first started the channel. I originally only started it because I wanted to vent about tech stuff and better understand what creators needed when I was working on my creator business, Ping. Since then, it's been wild. I never would have guessed we would have hit 100,000 subs in our first year, that my first handful of videos would blow up the way they did, and years later, I'd have a whole team helping me run this channel. It's been a wild ride. It made my 20s something truly magical. But at the same time, my 20s are now over. I just turned 30, and it's a big change for me that's making me reflect on a lot. What am I doing? How do we get here? And what's next? In many ways, I want to just keep progressing, turn things up, make better videos for more people, more of the time. But otherwise, I'm just looking at the calendar and questioning what the hell I'm doing. This is a magical experience, getting to share things I love with millions of people. But at the same time, it's not what I was put here to do. I want to build. I love building. That's always been who I am. And if you've seen how much happier I've been lately, that's because I've been building more. T3 Chat has been an incredible outlet for this urge to just ship. And that's why I kind of want to go back to the way things were. This is a hard decision to make. It really is. I'll be back in just a second. Sup nerds, been a bit. God, I'm still getting used to seeing myself in the reflection like this again. It's been a while. It's been almost like, what, five or six years since my hair was its natural color and over three years since the stash. Ah, I'll adjust. I haven't been around enough time to know the history. The stash was only grown originally because I was doing a video responding to a Primogen thing and I thought it would be funny to have a mustache and I couldn't find my pack of fake mustaches. But then my viewership went up, like legitimately. So I kind of felt like I had to do it. It was fun, but I was kind of playing a character. And slowly over time, I had to lean more into it as the content got more and more popular. And that, that wasn't great. I handled it well overall and it wasn't like I was pressured by people into doing it. It was just the obvious thing to do. You lean into what's working. But at its core, what worked on this channel was never that I was playing into the current fad. It was always that I talked about and did the things I cared about. I made the channel because I missed my lunch and dinner conversations at Twitch and the deep nerd out sessions I would do with other engineers who cared. COVID hit and that kind of disappeared for me. And this channel came out of the ashes plus my need to better understand what creators wanted when I was building Ping. And now it's my life. Now there are four people who basically full time work on this channel with me. Another three working on my business over at Ping. It's unbelievable to think this has gone to a point where I can do that and where my desire to just share things I'm excited about is now employing many people and bringing business success to my other side as well. It's so genuinely cool. But I didn't like the parts that felt fake. And it took a while to accept. But the blonde haired mustache kid isn't me. In my heart, I'm a skate rat that learned to code because he broke his arm and couldn't skateboard for a summer. And I miss that part of me. On one hand, that means I need to skateboard more. But on the other, it means I need to be honest about who I am, how I present myself and what I do going forward. I haven't had a real vacation in over five years. And I haven't taken more than a day off since I went through Y Combinator back in like January to March of 2022. If I'm fully honest, it's been great for me. I like being like this, working on things that are exciting to me constantly and getting to rant about new stuff right when it comes out and also go code and build all the stuff that we're shipping. It's been awesome. But I'm scared I'm going to burn out again. I already went through this in 2023. I'm trying my hardest to be careful. Part of that is why I've staffed up on both sides. It's why I have Julius and Mark carrying everything with Upload Thing and T3 Chat right now. And it's also why I have my channel being run by such incredible people. I miss video editing dearly, but FaZe has become a better editor than me. This is one of the two videos I edited myself this year. And as much as I love it, and believe me, I really do. I genuinely miss editing. It's so fun. It's not the right thing for me to be spending my time on. I felt similarly about thumbnails, but I've brought on Ben Davis, who you might know from the Svelte and Go side, who has been very quickly becoming the manager of this channel. And now most of the thumbnails you see aren't from me. They're from him. I'll tidy them up here and there and throw together my own every once in a while. I help with concepts a lot. But what you guys are seeing isn't my videos anymore. It's ours. It's a team of people making this all happen. And I do have to perform for them. I do need to make sure we're doing everything right. And that's part of what made the appearance change scary. This is going to hurt my numbers. It's crazy to think, but my stats will be down as a result of going back to my natural hair and shaving my mustache. I know that because I watched them go up when I first grew them in Prime 1 as far as AB testing, as crazy as that might sound. These are the things we have to optimize for as creators. We don't have to, but it helps a lot. I'm a bit tired of that, though. I just want to talk about the stuff that's exciting to me. And I've been doing that more. And what's been unbelievable to me is that focus on what I'm actually excited about seems to be helping a lot. The channel's numbers are the best they've ever been. T3Chat has been a huge gateway for me to genuinely get into AI stuff. I've been super excited with everything I've learned since, as well as incredibly frustrated with the state of the AI world and the AI bros who are influencing in it. It almost feels like the JavaScript community did on YouTube when I got started, where it was all beginners and grifters. And all of a sudden, there's this new pocket of experienced people who care and want to talk about the reality of how these things affect stuff. And I love that. That's what I'm here for. And now I get to do it in a whole new space. I'm seeing crazy growth. We're in an awesome spot. But I also need to take some time for myself. We've been on such an insane grind that I have videos recorded for the next four weeks. Some of these videos are from so long ago that I was still using ARK. Yeah, that browser I hate now. Obviously, all of these videos were recorded before I did this to my head. So you should expect to see a handful of videos coming out where my hair is still blonde and my mustache is still strong. And I hope that when you guys see those videos, the response isn't, wow, Theo is just reposting old content. Because it's not me. It's us. It's my team. And filming the video live on stream is a very different thing from phase editing it, putting it together, taking feedback from the team, from Ben getting it on the channel, descriptions, titles, thumbnails, and everything set up and ready, pairing it with a sponsor, reaching out to the sponsor, managing all of that. The new sponsor change by itself almost 4x the amount of work it takes to run this channel. It's crazy how going from working with five brands to 50 makes things harder. But it's also why I've been able to justify bringing Ben to San Francisco to work with us full time. It's crazy to think that this channel has in-person employees making it happen now. But it has to. What we do here isn't possible otherwise. I'm not upset about that. I'm so genuinely excited about that. It's incredibly cool. And I'm beyond privileged and lucky and so thankful for each and every one of you for helping make all of this happen. And I'm incredibly, incredibly thankful that we found a way to make this content that doesn't involve me charging each and every one of you a whole bunch of money in order to do it. We found a way to make a good balance between brands supporting us, you guys getting good content from us, and us making content that isn't biased, ideally, based on the brands that we work with. You're seeing me as I am. And that was always the goal. I wanted this channel to feel like a lunch or dinner conversation with other smart engineers who are excited about cool things. And I really hope that we achieved it. And I'm incredibly thankful for the people who have been helping run this channel with me now in order to make it all possible. I think I can finally take a bit of a break. Going on a trip with some friends the next few days, and I won't be around as much. Thanks to this content backlog, we'll be more than fine. There will still be videos every day, basically as far forward as I can imagine. Previously, when big news came out, I would kind of just drop everything to go film and get a video out. Probably not going to do that as much anymore. Last year, I did 15 conferences in order to meet as many of you guys as I could. I'm going to do less than five this year. I need to be realistic about what is working in my life and what I need to be working on with my life. And as much as I love doing all of this, I love building more. And the success of T3Chat has been incredible. So here we reflect deeper on that excitement and energy that I'm feeling. Half the time I'm live, I just wish I was on my laptop writing code in a corner somewhere. Trying to find more ways to bridge the gap between these things. And also, I can't spend all my time coding. There's a lot of other business stuff I have to do. I just don't like the path I'm on right now where half my time is content, half of my time is business management. I want to find a way to sneak a lot more code in there. And in general, build as much as possible. My channel is best when I'm building a lot. That's clear from the videos at the start of this year. The more I build, the better my content becomes. And I think we're finding, finally, the right balance between all of this stuff. It means that things might shift around more and change. It means I'll be leaning more on my team on both sides to make all of this happen. But hopefully in the end, what it means is more great videos for people like you and all of the others who support us making this content. I hope you guys know how much each and every one of you means to me. Even the crappy commenters who get us boosted in the algorithm. You guys are especially helpful. But seriously, the support I've gotten, the kind words I've received from people I've looked up to for decades and the reality of the life I live is not one I could have understood when I was 15. If you told a 15-year-old Theo about what I'm doing and where I am today, he would have laughed at you and said, sure. You never imagined that a skate rat from a farm town would make it here. And I wanted to take some time to reflect on that and be a bit more honest with myself and hopefully a bit more honest with you all too. Sorry for a rambly non-tech video, but I want to talk about this stuff. I hope you guys understand. Thank you all again for the support. It means more than I can possibly put into words. Can't wait to see what 40 looks like. Until next time, peace nerds.