I'll Never Stop Creating

I Create to Live: How 45 Years of Building Led to Backtick

My life has always felt like a continuous journey of building: ideas born, experiments launched, and lessons learned. From my early days with punch cards and mainframes to founding companies and now engaging in post-corporate adventures, my guiding philosophy has always been simple: create, learn, teach. If I'm not building, I'm not breathing.

Over the past four decades, I have worn every hat imaginable, from developer to CEO. I have experienced the exhilarating highs of massive growth and the sobering reality of shutting down projects when ideals clash with business metrics.

When I look back at the major waypoints of my career, I realize that every single company I built taught me a specific lesson that has culminated in my newest project: Backtick.

Here is how the distinct chapters of my career have combined to create the ultimate operating system for scaling startups:

1. Metamor: The Lesson of Scaling People In the 1980s, I founded a software services firm that eventually grew into Metamor. We scaled from a single employee and $100,000 in sales to over 500 professionals and$52 million in revenue before successfully selling the company.

• The Lesson: I learned the hard way that scaling people is much harder than scaling code. Culture, structure, and alignment matter just as much as technical quality.
• The Backtick Connection: Startups fail when they lack a system for alignment. Backtick addresses this by allowing founders to build private, AI-powered team playbooks—SOPs, onboarding guides, and culture documents—so their team can align and execute rapidly.

2. DialogTech: The Power of Repeatable Frameworks From 2006 to 2018, I served as founder and CEO of DialogTech, a leader in marketing automation and voice analytics. We built a rigorous culture, hiring specifically for "SWANs"—people who are Smarter than average, Working hard, Ambitious, and Nice. This repeatable framework helped us grow to nearly 200 employees, secure $60 million in VC funding, and ultimately drive a$100 million acquisition by Invoca in 2021.

• The Lesson: You don't build a $100 million company in Slack threads. You build it using rigorous, repeatable playbooks.
• The Backtick Connection: I am seeding Backtick with these exact battle-tested frameworks. When a founder joins Backtick, they don't start with a blank slate; they get my Hiring for Culture Playbook, Technical Team Scaling Playbook, and VC Fundraising Playbook.

3. MakeWithTech & Sefaria Tutor: The Power of AI and Community In retirement, I haven't stopped tinkering. I built MakeWithTech into a thriving community with nearly 80,000 YouTube subscribers, teaching 3D printing and electronics. I also launched Sefaria Tutor, exploring how large language models can brilliantly translate and parse the complex grammar of traditional Hebrew and Aramaic texts.

• The Lesson: I learned that community and authentic teaching matter more than polished perfection. I also realized firsthand how generative AI can be applied to parse massive amounts of complex information and deliver precise, contextual answers.
• The Backtick Connection: Traditional video courses are passive information dumps that employees forget by Monday. Backtick fixes this by integrating a custom AI assistant directly into your company's playbooks.

Introducing Backtick: The Founders Startup Toolkit Backtick is the synthesis of everything I have built, learned, and taught over the last 45 years. It is designed to be the bridge from a solo founder with an idea to a scaling team executing a vision.

It is not just a library of my past content, and it is not just another static wiki like Notion or Confluence. It is an AI-powered operating system for your team.

With Backtick, you can capture your team's expertise in living documents. The moment you publish a play, your team can query the Backtick AI, and it will answer their questions based strictly on your private playbooks and processes, not generic web hallucinations. Your knowledge—the founder's knowledge—becomes available to the whole team, instantly.

My journey has taught me that I am a better coach than a player, and that if we surround ourselves with great people, we can build something special. Backtick is my way of coaching the next generation of founders at scale.

If you are ready to stop guessing and start scaling, you can start building your team's playbook today at backtick.cogitations.com.