Why I applied
I suspected the thing limiting Caracal was not the engineering. Five weeks later that was confirmed in detail, by people who had already made the mistakes I was about to.
The sessions
Weekly sessions led by founders and operators who had built billion-dollar companies, covering product strategy, fundraising, go-to-market, customer discovery and company building.
They were direct rather than inspirational, which is what made them useful.
The cohort was the real value
Product reviews and feedback sessions with founders building AI applications, developer tools, enterprise software, consumer products and hardware — a much wider range of architectures and constraints than I would have seen otherwise.
Watching how other teams validated products, prioritised engineering work and handled technical-versus-business trade-offs was more instructive than any single lecture.
An open-source security tool nobody knows how to adopt protects nobody.
What changed
That reframing rewrote how I approach documentation, naming, and what I decide to build next — and how I think about technical execution, product thinking and customer feedback as one thing rather than three.