Hi, Johan here.
Recently, I managed to get myself into a pretty serious interview pipeline with a company I actually really liked. I truly envisioned myself working there. For anyone who knows me, that's saying a lot because I am usually highly skeptical of joining someone else's sandbox instead of building my own.
Things were actually going incredibly well. The company is opening up a brand new office in Canada, and I ended up going through a few rounds of interviews with their team. Every round felt like a sprint. I was locked in, running on excessive amounts of caffeine, and doing things my former self would never even imagine doing just to get out of my safe, comfortable zone. People somewhat call me a lunatic for it, lmao.
But. Drumroll please.
It didn't work out.
Maybe I could have prepared a bit differently, but long story short, we went our separate ways. I'm truly grateful for all the people who spent time to chat with me. Usually, this is the part where you brace yourself for the wave of existential dread that normally follows a career miss.
Except... the dread never came. I didn't feel bad. At all. I just moved straight into "what's next" mode.
The "Forged Failure" Mentality
This blog post isn't really about mourning a missed opportunity. Nobody wants to read 2,000 words about a guy coping. Instead, I want to talk about this weird psychological state I found myself in afterward. I call it the "forged failure mentality."
When you really throw yourself at a wall, the process of just preparing for the impact changes you. I learned a ridiculous amount during the interview prep! It forced me to articulate my thoughts, refine my mental models, and actually get off the couch and pitch myself. The final result wasn't an offer, but the byproduct of the process was a massive W. I forged a better version of my own thinking out of the attempt.
I was watching a recent podcast episode with Dwarkesh Patel and Jensen Huang. At one point, in a very funny and tense context, Jensen said one thing that stuck straight in my brain like a dart:
"I didn't wake up a loser today."
That is exactly the energy. You only wake up a loser if you let the setback dictate the rest of your day. The interview itself was just a localized event. I genuinely enjoyed the chaos of prepping for it. It reminded me that I still have the engine inside me to sprint when I need to.
Sometimes in life, you win some, and you lose some. The whole point is to bounce back from failure.
Next Up: AI & Real Estate Merchandising
Because I'm still fired up from the prep, I'm actually channeling all that leftover adrenaline into launching a new idea I've been sitting on for real estate searching. Hehe.
I'm turning it into a merchandising layer for real estate, powered entirely by a chatbot (if you've checked out my Hulohomes concept, this is it). Right now, searching for a house is miserable. You click "3 beds, 2 baths," filter by price, and scroll through endless grids of identical squares.
I think what AI really helps with — and what this next project focuses on — is connecting the dots between various distinct departments of work and gluing them together so they actually make sense. Imagine a conversational layer where instead of clicking UI filters, you just tell the system: "I'm a chef with two kids, I want a big garden, and I need a short commute downtown."
The AI handles the spatial analysis, vector embeddings, and neighborhood data underneath, pulling from different "departments" of data, to serve you exactly what you want. It's not just a search bar; it's an intelligent conversational merchandising layer.
Distribution Update (Because Why Not)
On a side note, gonna start cross posting on all channels.