The idea came to me on a Thursday in July. I was having drinks with a woman I had gone to college with — her name is Aria — who had taken a VP role at a Series B fintech company in Austin, in a space adjacent to ours. I was complaining about Ethan. I was on my third drink. Aria said, "What if you and your whole team came over to us?" I laughed. She did not laugh. She said, "I'm serious. We need a full-stack team.

I've been trying to hire one engineer at a time for six months and it's killing me. If you brought me your six people, I could have them on payroll by Q4." I went home that night. I thought about it for three days. And then I went back to Aria, sober, on a Saturday, and I said, "Let's do it. But we have to do it right. Nobody at my company can know. We're going to interview them all in secret. We're going to offer them all. And we're going to quit on the same day." Aria said, "How long do you need?" I said, "Six months."