Serge Toarca

Startups, AI, and macroeconomics.

  1. I spent millions building a product with no revenue

    For the last decade, I've neglected my personal relationships. I was heads down working on my company, and it always felt like taking time to socialize and talk to others was "not getting any work done". That mindset was... incredibly stupid, and it became obvious in an exchange I had on Facebook. First, some context:

    My oldest son just turned 4, and I was thoroughly disappointed with the schools available. So I decided to purchase a building[1] in the US to build a charter school with an accelerated curriculum[2], starting with teaching 3-year-olds to read.

    Future best school in Michigan

    I didn't have enough money to buy it outright, so I went looking for a bank to finance the deal. The building I found was an office building with a high vacancy rate, but discounted enough that it was still cashflowing after debt - this would allow me

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  2. My adventures in entrepreneurship

    I built my business blind. Not "Ray Charles" blind, but "pilot flying in fog" blind. Except I didn't have any instruments.

    I incorporated right out of university. The business was Debuggex Inc., and the first product was a regex debugger. This was an ultra-niche (I didn't realize just how niche at the time) tool to help you understand regexes. A regex is like ctrl+F on steroids - it lets you find not just specific pieces of text, but complex patterns.

    Suppose you wanted to find all the dates in a document. You might want to match any digits that look like YYYY-MM-DD. To solve this, you can use a regex like this: \d{4}-\d{2}-\d{2}. A few squigglies, but overall, not terrible.

    Now, let's say you wanted to match an email address. It's slightly more compli...

    (?:[a-z0-9!#$%&'*+/=?^_`{|}~-]+(?:\.[a-z0-9!#$%&'*+/=?^_`{|}~-]
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