How Leaving Meta Gave Me the Clarity to Build My Own Product

I didn't leave Meta because I had some grand epiphany. I left because I was splitting myself in half and both halves were suffering.

During the day, I was designing AI experiences at Meta for products used by billions of people. At night and on weekends, I was building Vora IQ. And in between, I was running on fumes, trying to convince myself that I could sustain both indefinitely.

I couldn't. And being honest about that is the real start of this story.

The Fanatics years: building through pain

Before Meta, I was at Fanatics. I was one of two product designers building the Fanatics Live mobile app end to end, what's now Fanatics Collectibles. I also built the LiveOS seller dashboard, the backend platform that powered the entire seller experience with analytics, inventory management, and livestream tools.

By any external measure, it was a great role. I was doing meaningful work at scale, shipping features that real people used every day. But internally, I was in a dark place.

I had lost my brother. The grief didn't come and go in waves like people describe. It sat on my chest every morning and followed me into every meeting, every design review, every late night at the laptop. I wrote about it more fully on Medium: the loss, the depression, the dwindling savings, and a startup I refused to quit.

Working through that kind of pain teaches you things about yourself that comfort never will. I learned that I could still ship quality work on the worst days of my life. I also learned that the work itself wasn't enough to fill the hole. I needed to build something that was mine. Something that mattered to me beyond a paycheck and a product roadmap that someone else owned.

That desire, building something personal, was already forming at Fanatics. But I wasn't ready yet.

The Amazon years: learning what scale looks like

Before Fanatics, I spent years at Amazon working on the Ring Neighbors app. I led the end-to-end design for the iOS and Android app as the lead product designer. We hit 21 million monthly active users within 60 days of launch. I was promoted to Product Design Manager and helped scale the platform to 30 million MAU.

Ring taught me what it looks like when a product actually works. Not in theory. In data. In millions of people opening an app because it solved a real problem in their daily life. It taught me how to build product roadmaps based on user research and quantitative analysis, not assumptions. It taught me that design decisions compound. Every small choice either builds trust or erodes it.

Those lessons are embedded in everything about how Vora IQ works today. The viability score exists because I learned at Ring that you validate with data before you commit resources. The phase-aware roadmap exists because I learned that what matters in month one is completely different from what matters in month six.

But Ring also showed me the ceiling of working inside someone else's vision. I was building great products for Amazon. I wasn't building what I needed to exist in the world.

Meta: the realization

Meta was the most technically impressive environment I've ever worked in. I was on the Media AI team, designing experiences for products that would reach billions of users. The scale was extraordinary. The talent around me was world-class.

But what made that experience different for me wasn't just the environment. It was the timing.

Long before ChatGPT became mainstream, I was already deep in AI. Late nights studying models, testing workflows, building early agents, figuring out how to actually use this technology beyond the hype. I wasn't just reading about AI. I was applying it.

That gave me an edge.

At Meta, I wasn't just designing AI experiences. I was pushing how we thought about building with AI. I introduced teammates to vibe coding. I showed designers and cross-functional partners how to actually leverage AI to prototype faster, think differently, and move with more speed.

Some picked it up immediately. Others were hesitant.

But I was consistent about one thing: this isn't optional.

I told people straight up, this is where things are going. At some point, companies like Meta won't just encourage this. They'll expect it. And the people who take it seriously early will have a massive advantage.

I pushed the design team to raise the bar. Not just in output, but in how we worked.

And being in that environment made something very clear to me. I was surrounded by people operating at the highest level. The bar was visible every day. And I knew I wasn't fully meeting it.

Not because I couldn't. Because I was divided.

During the day, I gave everything I had to Meta. At night, I switched contexts entirely and worked on Vora IQ. Building the agent architecture, designing interfaces, writing instruction sets, testing with users, iterating constantly.

My sleep suffered. My health suffered. My relationships suffered. I was present everywhere and fully engaged nowhere.

And that's when it hit me: you can't do exceptional work in two directions at once.

Meta didn't burn me out. It exposed the gap between what I was capable of and what I was actually doing.

The decision

The moment I decided to leave wasn't one moment. It was an accumulation.

It was another late night where I fell asleep at my desk and woke up at 3 AM with my face on the keyboard. It was looking at our early user feedback and knowing exactly what Vora IQ needed but not having the hours to build it. It was the honest realization that if I kept splitting my energy, both things would be mediocre and I'd burn out before either one succeeded.

I called Jeff. My co-founder. We've worked together for over 12 years, from Loot Crate to Amazon to Ring. I told him I was ready to go all in. He didn't hesitate.

Leaving Meta meant leaving a salary, benefits, and the prestige of designing AI products for one of the biggest companies in the world. It meant betting on a startup that had early traction but no guaranteed future.

But it also meant waking up every morning and working on one thing with full focus. And for the first time in years, that sounded like relief, not risk.

What I started building

The idea for Vora IQ came from a pattern I couldn't unsee. While at Meta, I was building custom GPTs in OpenAI's playground for my own side projects. One for marketing. One for finance. One for competitive research. One for legal questions.

Five separate AI assistants. None of them talked to each other. None of them remembered my business context. I was the human middleware, copy-pasting context between tools.

Then I noticed every founder I talked to was doing the same thing. Different tools, same fragmentation. Same feeling of being busy without being productive. Same gap between having an idea and knowing what to do about it.

Founders don't need another chatbot. They need a system. One that validates their idea, builds their roadmap, assigns specialized agents to every part of their business, and keeps everything connected as they execute.

That's what Vora IQ is. That's what I left Meta to build.

Along the way, I also started teaching. I wrote The Vibe Code Bible to help people learn how to build with AI tools properly. Teaching sharpened my understanding of where people actually get stuck. And that understanding shaped everything about how Vora IQ works.

What leaving taught me

Leaving a safe job to build a startup is terrifying. I won't pretend otherwise. There are mornings where the weight of it hits hard. Where you look at your bank account and do the math on how many months you have left.

But there's a different kind of weight that comes from staying somewhere when you know you're supposed to be building something else. That weight is quieter. It doesn't show up on a balance sheet. It shows up in your energy, your sleep, your ability to be present with the people you care about.

I chose the scary weight over the quiet one. And every day since, even the hard days, I've known it was the right call.

Try what I'm building

If you've been sitting on an idea, splitting your attention, wondering if it's worth the leap, I built Vora IQ for people exactly like you.

Not because leaving your job is the right move for everyone. But because having a system, having clarity about whether your idea has legs and what to do next, makes the decision easier either way.

Get your game plan →

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I built a real AI co-founder. Now I'm shipping the product.