Let’s start every morning with a game of chess. An exercise in quick thinking, making small but important decisions.

July 22, 2025 is my 1-year birthday of working on River. On this week last year, I was in Montreal with Joey, in a sticky and humid office on Rue College. We were literally playing with rocks, recording intermediate waffling while thinking about things we wanted to do, faster than we could do them.

In 2019, Joey and I were introduced through a mutual friend. I remember the first time we met, we spent the afternoon walking through the city. Chinatown, St Laurent, Place des Artes - if you’ve been to Montreal, you know the different neighbourhoods quickly change and blend into each other. I distinctly remember sitting on the grass in the middle of Place des Artes talking about everything and anything we cared about at the time.

Through the years we would go on bike rides (Bixi or die), meet at Olimpico for a coffee (iykyk), hang out with friends on someone’s back patio (I still remember the sound of everyone’s footsteps climbing the back stairs and knocking on the window), meeting up at Dobe and Andy (family style, every time) and on the occasion, make a homemade meal of Korean fried chicken or jjajangbap (Joey spent months perfecting the best fried chicken).

It was hard to know at the time that we were already doing everything we wanted to do… it just looked different then.

Joey was always doing cool things and most importantly, he was always doing something he wanted to do. He was always sharing things, a link to a streaming service to watch any show I wanted to watch, a resource to learn something new, an idea he wanted to execute. Not because he wanted to be that guy, putting people on to new things. But because he was spending time connecting the dots and following different rabbit holes, naturally he shared things that were new and exciting to me.

It came as no surprise when he told me he met some guys on Twitter and was starting a company.

It’s called Lifeworld.

I remember when Joey called me to tell me he was leaving his job. He said something along the lines of...

I'll go ahead first to start doing the things we always wanted to, and you come when you're ready.

What he meant was, he was ready to do whatever needed to be done to make doing what he wanted to do possible. I was working a corporate fashion job (iykyk x100000) which wasn't exactly reflective of doing what I wanted to do. Joey was lucky, brave and maybe a little crazy - he had found three (more or less strangers) to do it with.

Joey's always been a friend who has been an example of someone around me, doing what they want to do. Through the years his pieces of advice, feedback and thoughts have a through line of the exact same things we work on together, today. Through Joey I found Salief, Max and Luis - strangers turned into a team. Friends to build everything we want to build, together.

I officially started working with River on July 22, 2024. Somewhere, somehow a year has passed and today is exactly one year of doing what I want to do.

But we're not finally doing what we want to do. We always were.

Now we just have other people that we found along the way, to do it with.