META was the name I gave to an independent period of work with early-stage teams. It came after Replit closed and after I finished my architecture thesis, when I had no psychological energy to turn Grid Housing — or anything else — into another company of my own.
Replit had not ended cleanly. Its closure was long, exhausting, and abrupt in the way these endings often are: something that has occupied every part of your life disappears, but the work of closing it keeps going. I had learned a huge amount from the process — building a team and a product, winning startup competitions, travelling through Europe and San Francisco, learning how fundraising and investor conversations work, and spending time in startup-school and Y Combinator environments. I did not want to throw that knowledge away. I just did not want to immediately carry another company alone.
So I started helping other people build theirs. META was not a conventional consultancy and it was not an accelerator. I worked as a fractional contributor: sometimes closer to a product consultant, sometimes embedded with a team as a part-time employee, sometimes simply helping a founder make an early decision less vague. The common factor was that the projects were still taking shape and needed someone comfortable wearing more than one hat.
My work could begin with the business model, the product idea, or an interface that was not yet clear enough to build. Depending on the project, I helped define what the first product should do, turn an early concept into something testable, establish a visual and interaction direction, or work directly on the frontend. I was interested in the point where a promising idea needs to become a sequence of concrete decisions.
Much of that work happened around Google Campus Madrid and the people moving through it. It was an unusually concentrated startup environment: founders, small teams, collaborators, events, and projects at the moment before their roles and product were fully defined. Working there gave me a way to stay close to the energy of early-stage companies without needing to make every project my own.
META gave me a different relationship with entrepreneurship. After Replit, I had been through the totalising version of it. This was more plural: bringing the experience forward, applying it where it was useful, and learning that good early-stage work is rarely one discipline. It is product, business, design, technology, and the ability to notice what the team needs next.
The name lasted for years, until Facebook repurposed it for its own rebrand. I was not devastated, but it did make the joke impossible to avoid.