I'm Not Winding Down. I'm Just Getting Started.

A few weeks ago, a longtime colleague called to tell me he was retiring. He's a few years older than me, had a successful career in enterprise software, and he sounded genuinely content. Settled. We talked for a while, caught up on families and old war stories, and when we hung up, I closed the call and immediately opened four browser tabs on emerging AI threat vectors, a board deck I was reviewing, and a GTM strategy doc I was writing for a cybersecurity startup. It was 9 PM on a Saturday.

I didn't feel guilty about it. I felt electric.

That moment crystallized something I've been feeling for the past few years but hadn't fully articulated, that I am, without question, operating in the most engaged, energized, and purposeful phase of my entire career. And it happens to be arriving in my mid-50s, at the exact moment the conventional script says I should be slowing down.

A Career That Never Traveled in a Straight Line

Thirty-plus years across engineering, marketing, product, and sales. Every pivot was preparation.

If you'd handed me a map of my career at 25, I wouldn't have believed it. I started as a software engineer, spending a decade deep in code, architecture, and systems thinking. I loved building things. What I didn't know yet was that understanding how things were built would become a permanent competitive advantage for everything I did afterward.

Every pivot looked lateral to people on the outside. Engineers don't usually move into marketing. Product managers don't typically run sales organizations. But looking back, the through-line is obvious: each role added a layer of context that the previous role was missing. The engineer who learned to sell. The marketer who understood architecture. The product manager who ran a P&L. By the time I arrived at GTM leadership for companies operating in cybersecurity and AI, I wasn't starting from scratch. I was connecting 30 years of dots.

What the Calendar Looks Like Now

Running SCYTHE's (scythe.io) sales, marketing, product, and operations. A GTM advisory practice. Startup board work. It sounds like too much. It doesn't feel that way.

Today, I'm running sales, marketing, product, and operations at scythe.io, a company operating in one of the most technically demanding and consequential corners of cybersecurity. Simultaneously, I'm running Aterous Group, a GTM sales and marketing advisory practice focused specifically on cybersecurity and AI startups that are trying to build go-to-market from the ground up. And I'm supporting startup boards, bringing a unique GTM's perspective to companies at the stage where strategy decisions get locked in for years.

On paper, it looks like too much. In practice, the three roles reinforce each other in ways that make each one better. Operating inside a company gives me real-time signal I'd never get from purely advisory work. The advisory work forces me to articulate principles that I'd otherwise just execute on instinct. Board work keeps me anchored to the strategic altitude and financial trends that pure operational work can obscure.

The calendar runs seven days a week, typically 10 or more hours a day. I'm not telling you that to signal hustle. I'm telling you that because it's the honest picture, and because I need you to understand that every one of those hours feels chosen. Not obligated. Not ground out. Chosen.

The Markets That Lit the Fire

Cyber and AI are not just growing. They are restructuring. That is a once-in-a-career environment for a GTM operator.

If I'm being precise about what changed, it's the markets themselves. Cybersecurity and artificial intelligence are both in the middle of genuine structural transformations: not upgrade cycles, not feature releases, but full rewrites of how risk is generated, how threats operate, and how organizations must respond. The velocity of change in both markets right now is extraordinary, and it has a specific effect on people who have spent years building the kind of cross-functional context required to operate in them.

It makes the work feel urgent in a way that is hard to describe without sounding hyperbolic. But I'll try: the decisions that companies and operators are making right now about how to build, position, and go to market in cybersecurity and AI will shape those categories for the next decade. The window in which early positioning becomes durable competitive advantage is not infinite. We're in it.

That's what I wake up thinking about on Sunday mornings when my friends are making brunch plans and checking retirement account balances.

The Reading, Writing, and Thinking That Never Stops

I read more than I ever have. Threat intelligence reports, startup financials, analyst research, academic work on adversarial machine learning, board-level governance frameworks, GTM case studies from adjacent categories. Not because I have to stay current. Because I genuinely can't get enough. The information density of what's happening in these markets right now is remarkable. Every week there are developments that require re-examining assumptions I held the week before.

I write constantly. The act of writing forces clarity that reading and thinking alone don't produce. When I write a blog post or a strategic framework or a board memo, I'm not just communicating. I'm figuring out what I actually think. The writing is inseparable from the thinking.

What People Get Wrong About Career Energy at This Stage

The assumptions that get applied to mid-career professionals and why they miss the point entirely.

On Retirement, And Why It Isn't the Right Frame

Several friends have retired in the past two years. I've thought about this carefully.

I want to be precise here, because this isn't a claim that retirement is wrong or that people who pursue it have made a mistake. Several people I deeply respect have chosen it, and they are genuinely happy. I don't question that.

What I do question is the implicit model: that professional life follows a predictable arc that terminates in earned leisure. For some people, that arc is exactly right. For others, and I am clearly one of them, the arc bends differently. The most intellectually alive, consequential, and satisfying period of my career is happening right now, not 20 years ago.

I have zero interest in movies I've been meaning to watch or vacations I've been putting off. That statement used to feel like something I should apologize for. I no longer apologize for it. The set of things I want to do, learn, and be involved in is growing faster than I can act on it, and that gap between what I want to engage with and what I have time to engage with is not a source of anxiety. It's a source of energy.

The Point, Simply

I don't write this as a prescriptive model. Career trajectories are not one-size-fits-all, and the conditions that generate this kind of engagement for me, involving a specific set of markets, a specific combination of roles, and a specific moment in those markets' development, are not transferable by instruction.

What is transferable is the underlying principle: career energy is not a function of age. It is a function of fit. The fit between what you've built and what the market needs. The fit between how you think and the problems in front of you. The fit between the pace you want to operate at and the environment that demands it.

When that fit is strong, there's no off switch. There's no Sunday. There's just the next thing you're eager to understand, the next problem you want to solve, the next company you want to help build.

My friends are retiring. I feel like I'm just getting started.