From Corporate to Freedom (The Honest Version)
I left Amazon to chase business freedom, dove into e-commerce, and spent years grinding solo. After taking massive losses, the ego death from that failure taught me the most valuable lesson: I need people, and I actually want to work with people. It's so much more rewarding than trying to automate your way to being a one-man billion-dollar business.
When AI tools like Claude Code emerged in 2025, something clicked. The design reviews that took weeks at Amazon now take minutes. The Amazon engineering skills I'd built weren't gone — they were dormant, waiting for a vehicle that matched my values: speed, autonomy, building what matters.
Or so I thought. A few months in, things still took forever. Then Opus 4.5 broke through another ceiling. This isn't a "I figured it out" story — it's an active, ongoing journey. I'm the explorer sharing the map as I draw it, not the guru on the mountain selling the finished map.
iCodeMyBusiness is my personal LLC, and I'm also building Arise Group AI with three aligned teammates — Chris (storyteller), Mekaiel (PM/client activation), and Trent (technical lead). We're not trying to replace people with automation. We're using AI to create real value efficiently for real businesses.