I didn’t plan to spend three months interviewing. And I really didn’t expect that process to quietly become the foundation for a product.
When I decided to leave my role, it wasn’t a reaction to anything. I wasn’t burned out. I’d spent years in enterprise sales and knew that world well — long cycles, complex buyers, big decisions. I was comfortable there. I knew how to run a deal, build internal alignment, forecast without lying to myself.
But over time, I noticed a shift in what actually gave me energy.
It wasn’t the late-stage negotiation or the mechanics of comp plans and territory maps. It was the building. I liked designing the system behind the motion — tightening feedback loops, making things repeatable and measurable. I kept finding myself spending nights and weekends building small tools, automating friction, wiring things together to see if I could. At some point, that stopped feeling like a side interest and started feeling like a signal.
I realized I wanted to be closer to builders. Closer to product decisions. Closer to the architecture of how things actually work. The interview process forced that realization into the open.
Early on, I ran into a practical problem.
After each interview, I wanted to review the conversation the same way I’d review a sales call. In sales, you record, transcribe, skim for key moments, and reflect on where you could have been sharper. That’s normal. But these weren’t customer calls. I wasn’t going to upload personal interview recordings into some external tool just to get searchable notes. It felt wrong.
So I built a small local transcription tool. Nothing fancy — just a way to turn a recording into a clean transcript that stayed on my own machine. No sharing, no dashboards. Just text I could read and think about.
At first it was just convenient. I didn’t want to rely on memory or scattered notes. But once I had transcripts, I started doing what I always do in ambiguous situations: I started building systems around them.
If you’ve spent time in enterprise sales, interviewing starts to look a lot like pipeline management.
Each company is its own deal cycle. Multiple stakeholders. Different timelines. Internal dynamics you can only partially read. Some move fast. Others stall without explanation. None of them are in sync with each other.
I realized early that if I treated the search casually, my mood would follow whatever email landed most recently. A strong final round would make me mentally commit to a future that didn’t exist yet. A polite rejection would rattle me more than it should. Without structure, the whole thing felt volatile.
So I built a simple pipeline view. Not a generic spreadsheet — something structured enough to track stages, conversations, open questions, risks, and next steps across multiple processes at once. I treated each opportunity with the same discipline I’d bring to a real deal. I wrote down what I learned after each round. I noted where I felt clear and where I felt off-balance. I tracked patterns.
The transcripts made this far more useful than memory alone. Reading your own words on a page is humbling. You see where you talked around a question instead of answering it. You notice when you’re leaning on a polished story instead of explaining what you actually did and why. You start to see how you communicate under pressure, for better or worse.
That feedback loop changed the entire experience. Instead of hoping I’d improve between rounds, I could actually see where to tighten things up. The process felt less reactive. More iterative.
Somewhere in the middle of the search, it became clear that I wasn’t just preparing better for interviews. I was building infrastructure for something most people approach emotionally and informally.
Every serious candidate I know struggles with similar things — keeping track of what was said weeks ago, learning fast enough from one conversation to improve the next, maintaining perspective when outcomes feel uncertain. Most people rely on scattered notes and gut feel. I had too, in the past. But once I had transcripts, a structured pipeline view, and a way to reflect on my own performance, the whole experience felt different. It felt deliberate.
The transcription tool itself wasn’t impressive. It wasn’t a breakthrough. But it represented something about how I think: when I hit friction, my instinct is to build a small system rather than tolerate it. I’d rather create infrastructure than rely on willpower.
That instinct kept showing up.
Go Interview started there. Not as a startup plan or a pitch deck, but as personal infrastructure.
A way to bring rigor to interviewing. Clear stages. Structured notes. Post-conversation reflection. Continuous improvement. The same principles that make complex sales cycles manageable, applied to the process of finding the right place to work.
The search itself forced deeper questions too. Every opportunity represented more than a title — it represented years of time and attention. I started thinking about career decisions the way I think about capital allocation. Not just “Is this good?” but “Is this aligned with who I’m trying to become?”
For me, that increasingly meant proximity to builders. Teams that care about product. Environments where building isn’t an afterthought.
The search ended well. I’m excited about what comes next. But the systems I built along the way feel like they deserve to exist beyond my own laptop.
So I’m opening a small waitlist for Go Interview.
Not because interviewing needs to be turned into a productivity contest. Not because I want to over-engineer something that’s fundamentally human. But because I’ve felt the difference that structure creates in a process that usually feels opaque and emotional.
It started because I didn’t want to upload a recording just to get a transcript.
It turned into something that changed how I approached one of the most important decisions of my career.
Sometimes the best projects start that way — not as a grand plan, but as a workaround that quietly proves its own necessity.