30-Minute Marriages at 9 AM

Of Mentors, Matches, and Manufacturing Weather

At 9 AM, I walked into a room overlooking the San Francisco Bay and Treasure Island, searching for a person willing to spend the next decade building the infrastructure for human connection with me.

At 7:00 PM, I left still looking.

On paper, that should have felt like a failure. Instead, it felt like the truest thing that happened to me all week.

This was Co-Founder Matching Day by Inception Studio, a room full of people circling each other, trying to answer the oldest question there is in the startup world:

Will you build with me?

It is the most romantic and most clinical thing you can do. You are interviewing for a marriage in fifteen-minute increments. Name tags written a little too neatly, coffee held like a prop, everyone scanning the room while pretending not to.

And there I was, the founder of a company about belonging, feeling the exact thing my company exists to solve: the social cost of the first move.

Since Rhode Island School of Design , I have spent fifteen years designing social infrastructure for trust, and I still feel that friction every single time. That is not a flaw in the thesis. It might be the whole point.

I met an engineer who lit up about distributed systems and went politely blank at the word “belonging.” I met someone so aligned I got excited too fast, before we both realized we wanted the same cathedral built out of completely different stone. I met a person who asked “but what’s the moat?” while I was mid-sentence about isolation, and I felt the old flinch, the urge to translate something I feel in my body into a language that gets funded.

A bell would ring, the room would exhale and reshuffle, and by noon my feet hurt and I had a stack of names and no certainty.

Amidst the intense, serious pitches, there was also a moment of pure, collaborative joy. I was paired with the incredible Azhar Askarbek , Dominic Damoah Bjoern M. and we threw out a completely out-of-the-box idea (Thanks Bjoern).

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It made the whole room erupt in laughter. It was a beautiful reminder of the magic that happens when brilliant minds just let themselves play without boundaries.

The Ultimate Founder Asset | People

The rest of the week kept handing me the same lesson in different packaging.

The next day I co-hosted Storycraft Lab with incredible Kimberley Gishler conversation called *Leadership Leap*, about the moments that choose us rather than the ones we choose. I came in ready to talk about decisions and left thinking about the decisions made for us; the pivots, the accidents, and the doors pushed open by fate. There’s a strange, grounded magic in that.

The destinations we never planned for, and could never have engineered on our own, are almost always exactly where we needed to land.

Then a Zoom with the incredible Maryam Banikarim 🗽🚕 ❤️ who built The Longest Table, civic potlucks in more than thirty cities, strangers eating at one table that runs down the middle of a street. I cannot describe the relief of hearing your own language in someone else’s mouth. We are pointed at the same north star from different doors. I walked away less alone in this work.

A huge thank you to Richard Rabbat, who, by some stroke of luck, sat next to me at the Mentors Summit. Since that day, he has opened so many doors and been such a steady, generous advocate for Mayz.

Somewhere in there, John Mattison who has turned down companies whose names we all recognize, offered to formally advise Mayz. I keep turning it over. Not the credential of it. The choosing of it. Someone with every reason to spend his attention elsewhere looked at this small, stubborn idea about people eating together and said, "yes, this, I want to be near this." The thing I’m trying to build, happening to me while I am building it.

On a more practical note, a rare pocket of ease in my week came from becoming an early adopter of Town . What Jean-Denis Greze and Tony Vincent and team have executed is truly impeccable. So much of today's tech feels designed to trap us in endless loops of optimization, but this is the first time AI has genuinely saved my time instead of consuming it. If you haven't crossed paths with their work yet, it is well worth checking out.

So here is what I’ve been sitting with.

Hunger is the Qualification

I am building for belonging and trust. Those aren’t the most sought after or common words in the current tech/VC climate, obsessed with AI, automation, and efficiency.

The irony is that I am still openly, sometimes achingly, searching for my own. In a co-founder I haven’t met, in a room I walk into hoping someone walks toward me. I used to think this searching disqualified me, that you can’t credibly build the thing you’re still hungry for. I was wrong.

You cannot design trust from the outside. The hunger is the qualification.

You have to know, in your body, the exact weight of the first move, how heavy it is, how often it goes unrewarded, how much it costs to make it anyway. I am not building Mayz from a place of having figured belonging out. I am building it from inside the longing. That’s not a weakness in the founder. That’s the founder telling the truth.

The week, another week, didn’t end with an answer. The co-founder is still unfound, the room still half-full of strangers. But I keep thinking about that table Maryam runs down the middle of a Brooklyn street, how it doesn’t ask you to belong before you sit down. It just sets a place, and trusts proximity to do the rest.

Maybe that’s all I am doing. Setting a place. Leaving the question open.

There’s a chair across from me. I have no idea yet who’s going to sit in it.

Want to explore more? Visit www.mayz.life