Jesse Aldridge

About Jesse

I left my job at Airbnb about a year ago to explore a few different startup ideas. You can learn more about me on my personal website: JesseAldridge.com

A few months ago I started doing freelance web development. As of today (May 4, 2019), I'm currently making about $1000/week doing that. My goal is to simply grow this number by ten percent a week. I've been able to do that for the last six weeks so far.

In order to continue hitting that goal I plan to transition from being an individual freelancer to running a web development agency. I just onboarded my first employee last week: a junior engineer named Daniel. He's doing a great job. I intend to attract and retain 10-100 well paying clients as well as a staff needed to serve them effectively. My professional experience is almost exclusively on the engineering side of software development, so my immediate need is for help with sales, marketing, and design.

Assuming I'm successful in building an agency, I think the next step will be to grow into an online marketplace for connecting people who want software written with freelancers who can build that software. An Upwork competitor basically. Either that or turn my agency's knowledge into some sort of SaaS product. My most lucrative clients have mostly been eCommerce companies, so building something along the lines of Shopify is another possibility.

Beyond that, looking maybe 5-10 years down the road, I think running a software development marketplace will put me in a position where I'll potentially be able to replace every software engineer with a computer system. Initially I would have a hybrid model where software tools radicially enhance the productivity of individual knowledge workers. We would continuously improve these systems until eventually arriving at the final vision: a fully automated AI system that writes code better than any human can today. I think this represents the biggest opportunity the world has ever seen. The market size is easily over $10 trillion.

It seems clear to me that this is where the world is heading. AI is coming and will be an unstoppable force that clearly will redefine humanity in fundamental ways. It would be prudent for everyone to position themselves for whatever is coming next.