the status of all the things

The last 4-months have been a flurry of this and that. I’ve built 4 products from the ground up:

Each has gone through many iterations and some are now defunct, or just stuck in the “research phase” until I decide what to do with them.

status.health is the main business product I am now focusing all my time on. It was originally meant to be a B2C API that allowed users to verify a hookup’s STI status on a dating or sex-positive platform like Tinder, Grindr, or Sniffies. It quickly morphed to being more focused on STI testing history as it became clear verifying a person’s actual “clear or not” status would be too hard. Testing history is still valuable but from my perspective it was less so because the goal was to not get any STIs from hookups, c’est la vie.

healthprotocol.network was a response to the recent funding cuts the Trump administration posed on sexual health clinics and other LGBTQ+ health services. The idea was to create a cryptocurrency that could help fund clinics that lost funding plus reward users of status.health for verifying health actions with either tokens, or abstracted tokens I called “points.” After speaking with a couple of friends and modeling out some of the functionality for the tokenomics, it felt too much like a crypto play that wouldn’t really offer much good; something I am generally allergic to. Because I was able to secure the $HEALTH token ticker, I deployed the contract on Ethereum but went back to the drawing board.

I wrote and published a paper for a novel protocol based on earning decaying tokens for health activities. It took months, and was fun to research but due to complexity, cost to run infrastructure, and other factors like the fact most people would gawk at the idea of tokens that decay, I chose to keep it in research until I can fund it without needing any money to do so as a public good.

Which leaves us to today, when I chose to apply to Y Combinator for status.health. If you’re not familiar with YC, it’s probably the most famous incubator for startups; think a place fledgling founders can go to get their initial seed round and build in a fruitful microcosm. They offer around $500K in funding, but the real value is in the network you build, it’s apparently tantamount to Harvard for startups, and harder to get into (research indicates around 1-2%…FML) and since I didn’t graduate college maybe this is my way “in.”

why yc fits the bill

Look, I can build anything. AI agents and I shipped four products in four months and I’ve got the git commits to prove it. But here’s the thing about B2B sales to healthcare companies: they don’t give a shit about your midnight commits. They care about compliance audits, security certifications, and whether you’ve got the runway to survive their 9-month procurement process.

YC solves three problems I can’t code my way out of. First, money for an actual security audit so I can prove what I already know…that status.health is HIPAA-exempt by design because we never touch health data. Second, access to founders who’ve actually closed enterprise deals and can tell me which procurement hoops are real and which are theater. Third, the YC stamp that makes risk-averse enterprises think “oh, they’re backed by the people who backed Stripe, they probably won’t disappear next quarter.”

The irony isn’t lost on me. I built status.health to eliminate trust requirements through cryptography, but I need YC’s trust network to get customers to believe in trustless systems. Sometimes the path to the future runs through the past.

the strategy: focus, then scale

I’ve made every classic founder mistake in four months. Built five things when I should’ve built one. Chased the perfect cryptographic solution when good enough would’ve shipped faster. Spent months on a litepaper about decaying tokens that maybe twelve people will ever read (and three of them will be bots).

The strategy now is stupidly simple: make status.health work for one customer. Just one. Probably an identity verification provider who already has healthcare clients asking for this but can’t build it because touching health data means touching liability. They integrate our API, their customers get health verification without HIPAA compliance costs, we get distribution to thousands of businesses overnight.

Once that works, we expand. Dating apps want STI verification but are terrified of storing health data (rightfully so). Employers need vaccination records but don’t want to become healthcare companies. Every business that touches health data is one breach away from disaster. We’re the condom for data transmission; nobody wants to think about it, but everyone’s relieved when it’s there.

why san francisco is still home

Everyone shits on SF now, literally and figuratively (sorry for the imagery). Too expensive, too many homeless people, tech bros ruined it, the city’s dying, etc. Yeah, rent’s insane and I’ve seen things on Market Street that haunt me. But here’s what the doomers miss: this city runs on building things that shouldn’t exist and there’s nowhere else like it.

I walk fifteen minutes and pass three people arguing about Waymo, crypto, or Trump at a coffee shop. The guy at the bodega hot dog thing in front of every club on Castro knows what a TEE is because his roommate works at a privacy startup. My barber asks about my cap table. This isn’t normal anywhere else. I want work-life integration where the guy I meet at a rave at 2am introduces me to someone who solves my technical problem at brunch the next day.

SF is where you can say “I’m building HIPAA-exempt health verification using cryptographic proofs” and instead of blank stares, you get “oh shit, have you talked to the team at x and y about that?” The city’s not dying; it’s composting. All the tourists and grifters left when the dopamine ran out during COVID. What’s left are the people who sweat out the next GitHub Copilot bug fix at some ungodly hour because their API is actually in prod. Rent’s still hell and getting more hellish, but at least it’s hell with Wi-Fi, breakfast burritos, and the occasional circuit party.

the next chapter

The next six months are straightforward. Get into YC or don’t (probably don’t, statistically speaking). Either way, ship the enterprise version of status.health by end of year and look for a co-founder. Land one paying customer who validates that businesses will pay to not store health data. Use that proof to raise a real round and hire.

If YC happens, great. I’ll move faster with their money and network. If it doesn’t, I’ll keep building at 3am with lo-fi playing and proving that a college dropout who started at the Apple Store can solve problems that companies with hundreds of engineers can’t touch mostly because their legal teams have meetings about meetings about risk.

why claude thinks yc will not accept my application and why i do not care

I asked Claude to evaluate my YC application. It said I’m too early (no revenue), too technical (need a business co-founder), too focused on privacy (niche market), and competing against billion-dollar companies (Persona, Onfido, CLEAR). Claude’s probably right. The acceptance rate is 1-2% and I’m a solo founder without a CS degree building in a space VCs think is “nice to have” not “need to have.”

But here’s what Claude doesn’t get right: every interesting company starts out looking like a bad idea. Airbnb was “who wants strangers in their house?” Uber was “illegal taxi company.” Stripe was “another payments processor.” status.health is “HIPAA compliance for companies that only understand huge compliance budgets.” Sounds stupid until their next data breach costs more than our entire platform would be to buy…for now.

YC might pass because I refuse to store data in a world built on data hoarding or because it seems too complicated. They might pass because I’m solo. They might pass because privacy isn’t sexy until it’s catastrophic. That’s fine. I’ll keep building either way.

The truth is, I don’t need YC to build status.health. I need them to sell it faster. If they don’t see that opportunity, I’ll build slower but still get there. The problem’s not going away. Healthcare data breaches are accelerating and getting increasingly more costly. The solution exists, I built it.

So yeah, I applied to YC knowing they’ll probably reject me. But shots you don’t take and all that. Worst case, I keep building what I’m building. Best case, I build it faster with smarter people around me.