(2025-11-07) Barnett Pilot Welcome

Olivia Barnett: Pilot! Welcome! For context, I’ve gone and done something a bit drastic. Within the last month, my boyfriend and I both quit our jobs, sold nearly all of our things, moved out of two apartments in succession, and took a red-eye flight out of New York City to Portugal. We’ve been planning this escape since the end of July.

what we’re attempting to do is to build something together — and if we are doing it right, the days will fly by as we work. We are software engineers and we’ve both been working at crypto companies big and small for a collective 12 years

People forget because it’s no longer new, but crypto is a revolutionary technology.
I feel strong personal and moral alignment with working on crypto, but for a long time now, my motivation at my job has been waning

*It wasn’t until Blaine and I began talking about it earnestly that I realized he felt the same way — and it has everything to do with skin in the game.

For the last 7 years, I’ve worked for someone else, with all the comfort and peace of mind that comes with a tech salary in New York City*

I used to feel that I needed some sort of divine inspiration to strike me in order to justify working on my “own thing”

Blaine also gets the credit for making me realize this. He described in such detail the energy he felt starting a cafe in his hometown. None of these decisions, he told me, were in and of themselves particularly interesting: deciding what pastries to have in the cafe, deciding the wall color. But because they were fully his decisions and he had it all on the line for these decisions, they were exciting. (ownership)

The last few days I spent walking around the neighborhoods in the area, figuring out the public transportation, finding a gym, buying groceries. I’m extremely happy with Portugal so far

Today I wrote code again for the first time in about three weeks. We started on an idea yesterday. The idea came to us as we sat in a bakery to which we had walked about thirty minutes. There isn’t much around where we are. I initially felt a little bummed about this — where are all the cute cafes and shops? But then I realized, we actively moved away from the epicenter of cute cafes and shops. We are literally in pursuit of boredom, because how else can we expect to come up with ideas? And just like that — a few comments here and there to each other over lattes in the little sparse bakery — we had a thread to follow. The next day we built out a proof of concept. Today we’ve got a landing page we’re looking to ship soon.